barrels of powder, 500 muskets, 500 pair of bandaleers, 28 pair of pistols and holsters, 40 barrels of musket shot, 8 dry fats, one bundle and one fardel of match, 30 drum heads, 20 drum cords, 10 pair of guards.

As the accounts only give us actual monies received on the one hand, and actual payments on the other, and there is ample evidence that the pay of the army was not the only thing that fell into arrears, we can merely approximate the cost of the defence. The total paid out from the 15th February to the 3rd of March, when the first balance was struck, was £2135 4s. 2d.; and the monthly expenditure early in the year was a little under £3000-in round numbers, £2950 in March, £2830 in April, £2850 in May. But subsequently it was much heavier, and the December payments were only a few pounds short of £5000. This was partly accounted for by the increased cost of the soldiery. A week's billet for the officers and troopers, and a week's pay for the soldiers, which was £549 in the beginning of February, gradually advanced, until in January it reached its highest point in £736. In addition, the guards of the outworks, &c., cost £60 to £70 a week, and there was a further charge for the defence of the fort and island, in the latter part of the period.

We cannot therefore with these facts before us put the cost of the defence during 1645 at less than £1000 or thereabouts per week. What the attack cost we can less readily estimate; but when Sir Richard Grenville undertook the conduct of the siege in the autumn of 1644, he had allotted to him half of the Royalist contributions of Devon-£1100 weekly, the whole of those of Cornwall, £700 weekly, and arrears of £6000. It is quite clear therefore that the attack cannot have cost less than the defence; and that £2000 a week for the full expenditure during the last months of the siege would have been under the mark. And as the siege operations altogether extended over three years and a half, we cannot put the total cost of the operations at Plymouth at less than a quarter of a million in the money of that time, and probably three times that sum in present value. We learn from other sources that the deaths due to the siege exceeded 8000-a number greater than that of the total population of the town.

GEOLOGICAL NOTES UPON THE HONITON

DISTRICT.

BY THE REV. W. DOWNES, B.A., F.G.S.

(Read at Seaton, July, 1885.)

THE subjects dealt with in the following paper are: (1) The supposition that Gault occurs near Honiton is an erroneous one; (2) the valley of the Otter throws much light upon the recent denudation and superficial deposits of Devonshire.

Since last we met at Newton Abbot I have changed my place of residence from the neighbourhood of Collumpton to that of Honiton, but my geological habitat is the same. I am still in a Greensand district, and my house is still upon Trias. As to the latter point, I had great doubts when first I arrived at Combe Raleigh, although the Ordnance map distinctly colours the site as Red Marl. One reason for doubting it was this: In that particular area (if I may be permitted to use an Hibernicism) the "RED Marl" is for the most part black, and the soil is a stiff black clay, differing from the brownish-red clay into which the Red Marl usually weathers.

This fact in itself perhaps ought not to have weighed with me much. But it so happens that last year I was engaged in examining the cretaceous deposits at Lyme Regis, and that I presented the results of my researches in a short paper read before the Geological Society last November. Beneath the Greensand at Lyme Regis, and separating it from the Lias beneath, there occurs about twenty-five feet of Gault, and I have (since my work at Lyme Regis) been a good deal exercised as to the whereabouts of the westward vanishing-point of this Gault bed. Like the Lower Greensand beneath it, and the Upper Greensand above it, it thins out to the westward. I had stated in my paper that it thinned out somewhere to the east of Sidmouth. I might

have said more than this; for it thins out to the east of Seaton. Whether it crosses the Dorsetshire border at all is extremely doubtful. But I had Gault upon the brain; and having come upon an abnormal occurrence of black clay near the debateable area, I could not resist taking up the idea that the Gault boundary might have a projection in the Honiton direction. True there were no fossils, and at Lyme there are plenty; but the latter are not such as to stand exposure on a weathering soil, being mere loamy casts covered with a fragile pyritous film, and their absence about Combe Raleigh and Honiton could thus be accounted for.

I had moreover another excuse for my hypothesis. It is mentioned by Mr. Horace Woodward, in his Geology of England and Wales, p. 237, that, according to Mr. Ussher, "in the railway cutting at Wilmington, near Honiton," there are certain "clayey beds at the base of the Greensand which seem to be referable to the Gault."

A very little work in the field, however, sufficed to dispose of this Gault hypothesis. I found from sections that in the Honiton district there are often alternate beds of Black and Red Marl of Triassic age, and that in some cases the black beds preponderated. I was not satisfied of this until I had seen the Red Marl above as well as below the Black Marl, both dipping so as to make the cretaceous beds unconformable to them. The Black Clay is therefore clearly Triassic, and owes none of its exceptional colour in any way to cretaceous geology, except in so far as peaty deposits, due to springs at the base of the Greensand, and to heather growth on the summit, might have helped to blacken that which was black before.

I further found that Mr. Ussher's conjecture in regard to the Wilmington cutting was erroneous. About a mile east of Honiton a railway tunnel pierces the Red Marl not far below the junction with the Greensand. Being further east than Honiton, this Red Marl (in this case really red) is necessarily higher in the Triassic series than that at Honiton itself. The tunnel, which is nearly a mile long, comes out at its eastern end at a level thirty feet lower than its western end, in black marls and sands. These are apparently the beds which Mr. Ussher conjectures to be Gault; but through the kindness of Mr. Fisher, the district engineer of the railway, I am able to show a diagram of the section, in which these black beds are found to be conformable to the Red Marl beneath, and unconformable to the Greensand above. Of