Conglomerates, and Marls of Devonshire. 
35 
ments which as certainly define the position of the geologist as do 
trustworthy observations of latitude and longitude that of the 
geographer. This pkte is, in fact, the " bone-bed ;" a breccia 
composed of animal debris, especially the remains of fish and 
saurians ; and which, in an adjoining county, has yielded the 
relics of the earliest mammals with which palaeontologists are at 
present acquainted. 
Amongst the thoughts which this immediate cliff suggests, 
three stand out in bold relief. First, the cliff, though by no 
means very lofty, represents a considerable number of formations. 
On its Triassic base reposes the " bone-bed," which belongs to the 
RhcBtic series ; and this is succeeded by the Lowe? Lias. Still 
higher we meet the Greensand (probably of Gault age) and Chalk — 
two members of the Upper Cretaceous system. Lastly the cliff is 
crowned with Gravel, filling " pipes" and inverted conical spaces 
in the chalk, and probably of Quaternary age. Secondly, unusually 
varied and eventful as is the history recorded here, the cliff also 
shows how v^y imperfect, in even the richest locality, is the 
geological record. The hiatuses are numerous and wide. The 
Middle and Upper Lias, the Oolite with its numerous and im- 
portant divisions and sub-divisions, the Neocomian or Lower 
Cretaceous system, the Eocene, the Miocene, and the Lower and 
Upper Pliocene formations are entirely wanting. Thirdly, whilst 
each step from Torbay to the mouth of the Axe has brought under 
inspection newer and still newer beds, not one of them has yielded 
a fragment of any contemporary organism. Even when the strata 
had begun slowly and gradually to put on new colours, they 
remained to the last entirely silent respecting the life-history of 
their era. Suddenly, however, and as if by a vast leap, we are in 
the presence, not of a mere mausoleum, not of a rock simply 
containing fossils, but of a stratum almost entirely composed of 
them. A bed spreading over large areas, characteristically thin 
everywhere, and yet so extremely rich in organic remains that one 
geologist states that, though he rejected all but the most perfect 
