SYMONDS— NOTES OF A GEOLOGIST IN IRELAND. 379 



through which "we passed, and the history and legends of every place. 

 To an English eye the slovenly husbandry and the paucity of timber 

 was unpleasant ; yet here and there the crops were fine, waiting to 

 be gathered in. The harvest was come, but the labourers were not 

 ready. 



We would willingly have halted at Drogheda to visit the field of the 

 Battle of the Boyne, which is distant about two miles from that place, 

 but were obliged to content ourselves with humming The crossing of 

 the water," or we should have missed the Enniskillen coach at 

 Newbliss. 



The route from Dublin to Dundalk would have been uninteresting 

 but for occasional views of the sea, and the history attached to many 

 places by which we passed. The first part of the journey lay through 

 the lower carboniferous limestone and " calp series ; " and here I had 

 another opportunity of observing the great diff'erence in the thickness 

 of strata of equivalent deposits, even within the limited area of Great 

 Britain and Ireland. The tilestones " of the Dingle beds are a very 

 different group of rocks from the tilestones of Herefordshire and Shrop- 

 shire ; yet we must consider them the absolute historical equivalents. 

 Of the Upper and Lower Silurian rocks of ISTorthern Europe, Sir E. 

 Murchison tells us that ''thousands of feet of diversified British 

 Silurian rocks, whether slates, schists, shales, conglomerates, sandstones, 

 quartz-rocks, limestones, or mudstones, with vast sheets of interstratified 

 igneous rocks, are presented in the Baltic provinces of Russia by little 

 more than one lithological character only." ''The united Lower and 

 Upper Silurians constitute but a single volume of limestone, of small 

 capacity and thickness, capable of division into leaves by that person 

 only who is acquainted with their included fossils."'^' 



In the same manner groups of strata of carboniferous age are much 

 more expanded in Ireland than in the West of England. In the South 

 Welsh coal-field, at Dean Eorest, and at the Glee Hills in Shropshire, 

 the red and yellow sandstones above the conglomerate are succeeded by 

 the limestone- shale, and this by the carboniferous limestone and mill- 

 stone-grit, all of which underlie the true coal-measures. In Ireland 

 we find the yellow, and grey, and red sandstones above the conglomerate 

 succeeded by a great thickness of dark shales passing upward into 

 slates J a lower limestone, a middle series, with thin beds of impure 

 ^"^Quart. Jour. Geol. Soc, Feb. 1, 1858, p. 52. 



2 F 2 



