If the reader will follow this soft soapy shale, as we did, higher up into the coppice, he will find large masses of rock which have been toppled over through the shale giving way. A slip on the side of the narrow path discloses a bed of it, and immediately above it, consequent upon a former slip, we come upon a sandstone rock from twelve to fourteen feet thick, with quartz pebbles, representing the millstone-grit. Then a bed of black shale occurs, about six inches thick, which is chiefly made up of coal-plants, some of which are converted into charcoal. These plants do not appear to have grown on the spot, but to have been drifted into their present position. They were evidently in a soft and yielding state, some of them being pressed quite flat. {318} One good sized slab opened with a cast of a Lepidodendron, and we met with another cast, clearly of the same tree, a short distance west of it. Another, a Sigillaria, was much more distinct, the leaf scars being quite sharp, and the fibres of the inner bark very clear. This interesting band of coal shale is succeeded by another of yellowish clay, of about equal thickness; and these are followed by a second and a third band of black shale, with alternate ones of yellowish clay. Above these are thick sandstone rocks, some white, and some coloured red by iron, which here and there occurs in the form of hematite. [Picture: Fossil tree?] The whole of these rocks, from the surface to the soft Lower Ludlow shale here described would better represent the series of connecting links conducting us down from the Crawstone Crust at the Black Rock Quarry than any shaft section we could find described, and the whole may properly be classified as Millstone grit, which is known to attain a thickness of 80 feet in this locality, and to increase to 120 and 150 at a short distance from here, whilst in Derbyshire it thickens to 350 feet, and elsewhere to a maximum of 1,000 feet, and includes, as here, shales and thin coals. Colliers recognise the ironstone which crops out here as the Poor Robin of the Dawley Deep field pit, which occurs 60 feet below the Little Flint Coal; which affords another key to the series of measures which underlie the same coal at the Black Rock Quarry. The Poor Robin however here described must not be confounded with the one of the same name in south Staffordshire, which occurs higher up in the series.