The sandstone of Byam Martin's Island is of two kinds—one red, finely stratified, passing into purple slate, and very like the red sandstone of Cape Bunny, North Somerset, and some varieties of the red sandstone and slate found between Wolstenholme Sound and Whale Sound, West Greenland, lat. 77° N. The other sandstone of Byam Martin's Island is fine, pale-greenish, or rather greyish-yellow, and not distinguishable in hand specimens from the sandstone of Cape Hamilton, Baring Island. It contains numerous shells and casts of a terebratuliform brachiopod, closely allied to the Terebratula primipilaris of Von Buch, found abundantly at Gerolstein in the Eifel. On the whole, I incline to the opinion that the sandstones, limestone, and coal of Byam Martin's Island, are the corresponding rocks of Melville Island, Baring Island, and Bathurst Island, are low down in the Carboniferous System, and that there is in these northern coal-fields no subdivision into red sandstone, limestone, and coal-measures, such as prevails in the west of Europe. If the different points where coal was found be laid down on a map, we have in order, proceeding from the south-west—Cape Hamilton, Baring Island; Cape Dundas, Melville Island, south; Bridport Inlet and Skene Bay, Melville Island; Schomberg Point, Graham Moore Bay, Bathurst Island; a line joining all these points is the outcrop of the coal-beds of the south of Melville Island, and runs E.N.E. At all the localities above mentioned, and, indeed, in every place where coal was found, it was accompanied by the greyish-yellow and yellow sandstone already described, and by nodules of clay ironstone, passing into brown hematite, sometimes nodular and sometimes pisolitic in structure.
No. XIV. GRAHAM MOORE'S BAY, Bathurst Island (Lat. 75° 30' N.; Long. 102° W.).
Coal of the usual quality.
At Cape Lady Franklin, and at many other localities along the north shore of Bathurst Island, carboniferous fossils in limestone, clay ironstone balls passing into brown hematite, cherty limestone, and earthy fossiliferous limestone, with the same species of Atrypa as at Byam Martin's Island, were found in abundance by Sherard Osborn, Esq., Commander of H.M.S. 'Pioneer,' in whose journal the following note respecting them may be found:—
"The above collection was delivered over to Captain Sir Edward Belcher, C.B., by Commander Richards, at 2 P.M., on 7th Nov. 1853."[35]
It is to be hoped that they may soon be made available for the elucidation of the geology of this most interesting portion of the Arctic discoveries.
No. XV. BATHURST ISLAND, Bedford Bay (Lat. 75° N.; Long. 95° 50' W.).
In this locality abundance of vesicular scoriaceous trap rocks were found by Captain M'Clintock; they appear to me to be the representatives of the volcanic rocks found everywhere at the commencement of the carboniferous period.