20 
W. Peogelly on the Red Sandstones, 
almost within the same area, suggest the probability of a wide 
separation in time. 
The following are amongst the questions which the geologist 
desires to put respecting these remarkable pebbles : — 
1st. — Whence came thej ? 
2nd. — To what period in the earth's history do the rocks of 
w^hich they are remnants belong ? 
3rd. — What information can they give respecting the local 
distribution of land and water, when they travelled to what is now 
south-eastern Devonshire, and also during the earlier period when 
the parent rocks were formed ? 
4th. — Why was their transportation confined to so limited a 
portion of the Triassic era that, in the many miles of red cliff 
between Torbay and Dorsetshire, they are restricted to a bed of no 
more than about one hundred feet in thickness ? 
5 th. — ^Why had they the monopoly of the zone they occupy ? 
The attention of the scientific world was first called to these 
pebbles by Mr. Vicary of Exeter, who, for some years, has indus- 
triously collected the fossils they contain, and who, jointly with 
Mr. Salter, the eminent palaeontologist, read a paper on them 
before the Geological Society of London, in December, 1863.* 
From this communication it appears that answers to some of the 
foregoing queries have been satisfactorily made out : thus Mr. 
Salter states that amongst the fossils, he has already detected up- 
wards of thirty species, including plants, annelids, crustaceans, 
and moUusks ; that, with the doubtful exception of the Dodman 
district in Cornwall, no rock within the British area could have 
supplied them ; that not a shade of difference can be detected 
between these fossils and those from May and Jurques, near Caen 
in Normandy ; that whilst their exact horizon cannot be deter- 
mined at present, they are certainly of lower Silurian age ; that 
when co-ordinated with the British Silurian deposits, they may 
* Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc, vol. xx., p. 283, &c., (1864). 
