KOBERTS — GEOLOGY OF THE SEVEKN VAEl.EY IIAIEWAY. 
435 
along the line of old quarries that runs parallel with the flow of the 
river beneath. Everywhere through these quarries lie spoil-banks 
of debris and fragTOcntalia, heaps of rubbish to practical eyes, but 
treasure-houses of much value to geological ones, for 1 have but to 
stoop over them— putting on my best eyes for the work — and I can 
pick up shells, and corals, and zoophytes, aye, and shelled insects 
too, (Trilobitcs) sea-woodlico, whose hard enduring shields, protect- 
ing them in life, have been mineralized into panoply of stone, that 
shall tell me a certain and reliable story of their habits and position, 
when each was tenanted by a living, moving, feeding creature. Let 
those of your party who choose look after the thousand and one de- 
tached fossils which are strewn over the gTound ; but the lover of 
antiquities shall come with me, and study a slab whose surface shall 
be al relievo with life-remains : in truth, a very old page of earthly 
liistory, wa-it in strange, uncouth, almost undecypherable characters. 
To this a Persepolitan cylinder, graven with arrow-headed glyphs, is 
a record of yesterday ; to this the tablets of Seth, on which were 
■WTitten the wisdom of the pre-delugian age, are of modern date. No 
" Open Sesame !" of Professor Fehretmout or Dr. Dryasdust will open 
to the day and reveal the secrets of these times, for here is a chron- 
icle of Nature, writ so long ago that 
'• Mountains have ai-isen since, 
Witli cities on their flanks." 
No mere poetical saying, but a sober scientific fact. 
The great outcrop of these Silui'ian beds at Benthall is continued 
westward to Wenlock, and there, in the "Edge," developed to an ex- 
tent which has caused this division of Silurian strata to be known 
eveiywhere as the Wenlock series. Some of its layers are little else 
than a mass of life-remains, corals especially, of which about forty 
species may be found with very little search. There is no other ex- 
posui'e of this old rock elsewhere along the course of the line : more 
modem deposits everywhere cover it up. 
Next above the sediment of the Silurian ocean lie the sandy and 
brasliy beds of the Old Red Sandstone lagoons ; dark-red rocks, 
with bands of compacted fragmentalia, locally known as cornstones. 
There is an open cutting through a dome-shaped protrusion of these, 
a mile south of the Victoria-bridge, but the line hugs the Severn too 
closely to permit a further acquaintance with this, the typical rock 
of Herefordshire. The Old Red, however, approaches Bridgnorth as 
nearly on the west as the Leasowes, Old Hay, and Harpswood, from 
which places it has the surface all to itself westward through Corve 
Dale to Wenlock Edge. And a very fertile land that surface is, for 
the comstone makes notably good wheat-land. In our local deve- 
lopment of this red rock, so distinct in appearance from the blue 
limestone, there are no traces of shells or coral, though doubtless both 
were abundant in the seas of the age. We prove, however, the ex- 
istence of fish in that water, for both in cornstone and sandstone we 
