478 



THE GEOLOGIST. 



with very little deviation, to the path which I have chosen through 

 the village of Hotham, nearly at right angles to the direction of the 

 strata. The Oolites along my route commence at Hotham Quarry 

 with what I believe to be the lower portion of the Inferior Oolite ; for 

 it answers, with considerable exactness, lithologically as well as 

 zoologically, to the "Pisolite" or ^'Eoestone" of the neighbourhood 

 of Cheltenham, which has been hitherto affirmed to be a local formation 

 limited to that special vicinity. They end, after a breadth of about 

 three-quarters of a mile, where the Kelloway Eock is succeeded by 

 the Eed Chalk under the edge of the wold at Drewton, — both of 

 these deposits being very rich in their distinguishing forms of organic 

 remains, and corresponding to their equivalents in Wiltshire and 

 IsTorfolk. I shall confine myself, therefore, in this paper to the geology of 

 Hotham, and to stating, as summarily as possible, my reasons for 

 thinking that Hotham Quarry is in the Inferior Oolite — a formation 

 which, therefore, is not wanting in this long uncertain district of 

 Cave, though its appearance here is somewhat strange and degenerated, 

 and implies a peculiarity in its deposit. 



The Hotham Oolite, in the Upper part, is a white-coloured, thin- 

 bedded rock, coarse and fissile, and of a decided " roe-stone " aspect, 

 which, somewhat lower, becomes largely intercalated with layers of 

 sand, and is seen at the base of the section, which is probably nowhere 

 twenty feet deep, to have become altered into a thick-bedded sandy 

 freestone. Its fossils cannot be said to be plentiful. Most frequently 

 we find broken remains of Echinodermata, such as occur in the 



Pisolite " of the Cheltenham Inferior Oolite ; and, so far as I am a 

 judge of the associated mollusca, they go to confirm the testimony of 

 the urchins, and the evidence from pisolitic " appearances. I subjoin 

 a list which I have succeeded in collecting, not without a good deal of 

 attention and perseverance ; and, like all other fossils recorded in this 

 paper, they were obtained (with the exception of one) with my own 

 hands. Undoubted specimens, generally in bad preservation, of Fygaster 

 semisulcatus, which is perhaps the most common form of all ; a large 

 flat Clypeus, so like at first sight to Hyhochjpiis agariciformis as to 

 deceive an experienced eye, but distinguished upon close inspection by 

 the character of the ambulacra and poriferous zones — I consider it to 

 be the Clypeus Miclielmi of Wright, but I have never found a good and 

 sound example of it, although bits of its test are not rare ; a cast of (?) 

 Acrosalenia ; a species of Fseudodiadema, (not depressum,) only known at 

 present in a mould with a small remnant of the test upon it ; slabs 

 plates and spines of urchins, Fentacrinites, and 3Iillepores ; Hinnites 



