436 
THE GEOLOGIST. 
find tlic hard cliina-looking defensive shields of some curious species. 
Those wlio care to know wliat these are, and to searcli for them in 
Okl Ked quarries at Chetton, Glazely, and Overton, will find them 
described in my "Rocks of Worcestershire" (London: Masters; 1860). 
Upon the Old Red Sandstone lie the Carboniferous beds — the next 
accumulation of time. The line near Linley cvits through some 
fresh-water (?) deposits of this age, in which are bands of hard 
cream-coloured limestone, containing estuarine bivalve-shelled Crus- 
tacea (Cijpn's or Gi/theruhe), and very tiny teeth, hard, black, and 
shining, of small predatoi'y fishes. The outcrop of rock crossed here 
by the line extends as a belt of surface varying in width from two 
hundred yards to a mile, due south, but does not again approach the 
river-channel until we reach Hampton's Load, where low hills, 
shutting in the channel westward, introduce us again to the poor, 
dii'ty clays that lie above the coal. 
From the ferry to the Victoria bridge the line has its course through 
deposits of this age, though in some places — chiefly on the banks 
opposite Upper Arley — a thickness of twenty to thirty feet of Severn 
Strait gravel and sand obscures the Carboniferous measures. Here, 
however, the line is carried by a cutting deep into the underlying 
yellow sandstone rock, and a very instructive section of that important 
member of the coal-rock group is obtained. Beyond the crossing of 
the river there is an extension of these coal-beds into EymoorWood, 
in fact the pictui'esque chff of Seckley Rock points clearly to related 
measures in the hills eastward of the river. 
A mile south of the bridge we run into Old Red, aforesaid, at the 
HOI Wood. Half a mile of cutting through this and then coal- 
measure rock shuts in the hne, resting on natural position against the 
dome. For two miles this, once again along the course of the Severn 
Valley Railway, forms its surface, very greatly to the pleasure of the 
geologist, for here is a notable exposure — thanks to the railway- Avork 
— of its fossUiferous measures. Several layers of sandstone and shale 
with plant-remains, may be noticed in the banks on each side ; but at 
a point parallel with Northwood Cottage, a pretty w^hite house front- 
ing the river, we run through a cutting of gi'ey shales, with brown- 
black seams of fern-coal, every layer of which contains fossil plants, 
in greater or less abundance. Indeed, if a braken bed had suddenly 
been overwhelmed by a flood, and the ferns buried beneath the muddy 
sediment just as they grew, no richer deposit of plants could have 
been got together. Ferns chiefly, belonging to the genera Fecopteris, 
Neuropteris, Sx^heyiopteris, and JJictyopteris, of which latter genus, (a 
noticeable one among the group for having reticulated venation), a 
species recently discovered in a continuation of these measures a mile 
north of this spot, is here very plentiful. This has been described 
by Prof. Morris, under the provisional name of Woodivardites (?) 
llohertsi * but it must be identical Avith a Dictijopterls of the Dresden 
coal-field. 
* Geol. Soc. Joimi., vol. xv., p. 82. 
