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 
(he lower carboniferous limestone and " calp series ; " and here I had 
another opportunity of observing the great difference in the thickness 
of strata of equivalent deposits, even within the limited area of Great 
Britain and Ireland. The " tilestoncs " of the Dingle beds are a very 
different group of rocks from the tilestoncs of Herefordshire and Shrop- 
shire ; yet we must consider them the absolute historical equivalents. 
Of the Upper and Lower Silurian rocks of Northern Europe, Sir R. 
Murchison tells us that "thousands of feet of diversified British 
Silurian rocks, whether slates, schists, shales, conglomerates, sandstones, 
quartij-rocks, limestones, ov 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 Forest, and at the Clee 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 conglomcrato 
succeeded by a great thickness of dark shales passing upward into 
slates ; a lower limestone, a middle series, with thin beds of impure 
»^Quart. Jour. Geol. Soc, Feb. 1, 1858, p. 52. 
2 F 2 
