509 
Ojiartz Rock of the Lickey Hill, &c. 
from the summit to its base by four transverse vallies, which con- 
tribute to give the camel-back’d appearance to the intermediate 
eminences, and on the side of the high road which passes through 
a winding defile formed by the most easterly of these vallies, are 
quarries that afford the best and almost only sections in the whole 
ridge. 
The surface of these hills is barren and scantily clothed with 
heath, through which the rock occasionally protrudes in a state of 
perfect nudity and sterility. Their interior is composed principally 
of semi-transparent quartz, having disseminated, and as it were 
floating throughout its substance, small crystals of red and yellowish 
felspar, which is usually in a state of decomposition. The quartz 
is stratified in beds varying from an inch to many feet in thickness ; 
and where thickest, often losing all traces of the minor laminae 
which generally pervade it. In great part of the rock, however, 
the planes of the strata are distinctly visible ; they are separated 
by thin laminae of soft argillaceous slate, highly micaceous, and of 
a reddish colour. Mica is rarely found disseminated with the fel- 
spar crystals through the quartz, but angular flakes and irregular 
lumps of decomposed yellow felspar abound wherever the slaty 
laminae enlarge themselves to any degree of thickness exceeding a 
quarter of an inch. Similar felspar is also found in most of the 
larger interstices, and occasionally in minute fissures, that divide the 
quartzose strata in lines parallel with their planes, and split them into 
millions of small angular fragments of irregular form, so that it is 
scarcely possible to find a solid block of one foot in diameter, except 
in those cases where the felspar is sufficiently tenacious to hold to- 
gether the quartzose fragments in a kind of breccia. Most fre- 
quently these interstices are entirely empty, and the rock, in con- 
sequence, falls immediately into small pieces on being moved from 
