32 
W. Pengelly on the Red Sandstones, 
though composed of a quartzite so hard as to have been largely 
and preferentially used as a road stone for several years, the 
pebbles are so well rounded and so finely polished as to indicate not 
only long and distant travel, but, as has been stated, that further 
abrasion would fail to change them in these particulars. Again, 
had the Old Lower Silurian beds been at all near to what is now 
South Devon, it is difficult to understand why not even a fragment 
of them has ever been detected in the voluminous Triassic beds 
between which the layer of pebbles lies like a mere film. 
It was hinted in a previous paragraph that possibly similar 
fossils exist near the Dodman, one of the prominent headlands on 
the south coast of Cornwall. The rocks in the district here 
referred to, like the pebbles and the Normandy beds, are quartzites, 
and were first announced to be fossiliferous in 1837 by Mr. Peach.* 
In 1846, Sir R. I. Murchison, having inspected the fossils and 
visited the chief localities, pronounced the rocks to be Lower 
Silurianf , and this decision was confirmed by Professors Sedgwick 
and M'Coy, who visited the district in 1851. | 
Having learned that Mr. Peach had lodged in the Penzance 
and Truro Museums such of the fossils, just mentioned, as he had 
collected, Mr. Vicary, Dr. Scott, and I went into Cornwall 
early in July last (1864) for the purpose of examining them and 
the rocks in which they were found. The fossils are in many cases 
so fragmentary or indistinct that identification is by no means 
easy, nevertheless we succeeded in detecting among them several 
specimens of one of the Budleigh Salterton species of Brachiopoda. 
Having been furnished by Mr. Peach with all needful information, 
we were so fortunate as to secure the assistance of one of his old 
collectors, who conducted us to the fossiliferous beds of the Great 
Cairn and Great Peraver near Goran Haven. In the Peraver we 
succeeded in finding fossils having the same general facies as those 
• Trans. Eoyal Geol. Soc, Cornwall, vol. vi., p. 12, &c. 
t Ihid, vol. vi., p. 317, &c. 
X Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc, vol. viii., p. 13. 
