of the township also. Pop. (1890) 6813, (1900) 7341, (1788 being foreign-born and 185 negroes), (1903, state census) 8381, (1910) 8696. Area, about 31 sq. m. Westerly is served by the New York, New Haven & Hartford railway, and by interurban electric lines connecting with Norwich and New London, Conn. The township includes several small villages, connected by electric railways, the best known being Watch Hill, which has fine sea-bathing. Larger villages are Westerly, in the western part of the township and at the head of navigation (for small vessels) on the Pawcatuck river, and Niantic, in the north-eastern part of the township. In Westerly there is a public library (1894), with 23,323 volumes in 1909. Beyond Watch Hill Point on the S.W. point of an L-shaped peninsula, running first W. and then N., is Napatree Point, on which is Fort !Mansfield, commanding the N.E. entrance to Long Island Sound. The township is the centre of the granite industry of the state; the quarries are near the villages of Westerly and Niantic. The granite is of three kinds: white statuary granite, a quartz monzonite, with a fine even-grained texture, used extensively for monuments; blue granite, also a quartz monzonite and also much used for monuments; and red granite, a biotite granite, reddish grey in colour and rather coarse in texture, used for buildings.[1] Among the manufactures are cotton and woollen goods, thread and printing presses. The water supply is from artesian wells. The first settlement here was made in 1661, and the township was organized in 1669, when the present name was adopted instead of the Indian Misquamicut (meaning “salmon”) by which it had been called. In 1686 the name was changed to Haversham, but in 1689 the present name was restored.
See Frederic Denison, Westerly and its Witnesses, for Two Hundred and Fifty Years, 1626–1876 (Providence, R. I., 1878).
WESTERMANN, FRANCOIS JOSEPH (d. 1794), French
general, was born at Molsheim in Alsace. At an early age he
entered a cavalry regiment, but soon left the service and went to
Paris. He embraced enthusiastically the ideas of the Revolution,
and in 1790 became greffier of the municipality of Haguenau.
After a short imprisonment on a charge of inciting emeutes at
Haguenau, he returned to Paris, where he joined Danton and
played an important part in the attack on the Tuileries on the
10th of August 1792. He accompanied Dumouriez on his campaigns
and assisted him in his negotiations with the Austrians,
being arrested as an accomplice after the general's defection.
He succeeded, however, in proving his innocence, and was sent
with the rank of general of brigade into La Vendee, where he
distinguished himself by his extraordinary courage, by the
audacity of his manoeuvres, and by his severe treatment of the
insurgents. After suffering a defeat at Chatillon, he vanquished
the Vendeans at Beaupreau, Laval, Granville and Bauge, and
in December 1793 annihilated their army at Le Mans and
Savenay. He was then summoned to Paris, where he was proscribed
with the Dantonist party and executed on the 5th of
April 1794.
See P. Roll, Nos généraux alsaciens Westermann (Strassburg, 1900).
WESTERN AUSTRALIA, a British colonial state, forming part of the Commonwealth of Australia.
(For Map, see Australia.) This portion of Australia lies to the west of 129° E. long., forming considerably more than one-third of the whole; it has an area of 1,060,000 sq. m., is 1400 m. in length and 830 in breadth, and has a coast-line of 3500 m. It is divided into five districts—Central, Central Eastern, South-Eastern, North and Kimberley. The Central or settled district, in the south-west, is divided into twenty-six counties. Apart from the coast lands, the map presents almost a blank, as the major portion is practically a dry waste of stone and sand, relieved by a few shallow salt lakes. The rivers of the south are small—the Blackwood being the most considerable. To the north of this are the Murray, the well-known Swan, the Moore, the Greenough and the Murchison. The last is 400 m. long. Shark’s Bay receives the Gascoyne (200 m. long), with us tributary the Lyons. Still farther north, where the coast trends eastward, the principal
rivers are the Ashburton, the Fortescue and the De Grey.
Kimberley district to the north-east has some fine streams—the
Fitzroy and Ord and their tributaries, on some of which (the
Mary, Elvira, &c.) are the goldfields, 230 m. south of Cambridge
Gulf. The Darling mountain range is in the south-west. Mount
William reaching 3000 ft.; in the same quarter are Toolbrunup
(3341 ft.), Ellen's Peak (3420), and the Stirling and Victoria
ranges. Gardner and Moresby are flat-topped ranges. Mount
Elizabeth rises behind Perth. Hampton tableland overlooks the
Bight. In the north-west are Mount Bruce (4000 ft.), Augustus
(3580), Dalgaranger (2100), Barlee, Pyrton and the Capricorn
range. Kimberley has the King Leopold, M‘Clintock, Albert
Edward, Hardman, Geikie, Napier, Lubbock, Oscar, Mueller
and St George ranges. The lake district of the interior is in the
Gibson and Victoria deserts from 24° to 32° S. The lakes receive
the trifling drainage of that low region. Almost all of them are
salt from the presence of saline marl.
Geology.—The main mass of Westralia consists of a vast block of Archean rocks, which forms the whole of the western half of the Australian continent. The rocks form a plateau, which faces the coast, in a series of scarps, usually a short distance inland. The edge of this plateau is separated from the Southern Ocean by the Nullarbor limestones, at the head of the Great Australian Bight; but they gradually become narrower to the west; and the Archean rocks reach the coast at Port Dempster and to the east of Esperance Bay. Thence the southern boundary of the Archean rocks extends due west, while the coast trends southward, and is separated by a belt of Lower Palaeozoic and Mesozoic deposits; but the reappearance of the granitic rocks at King George Sound and Albany may be due to an outlier of the Archean tableland. Along the western coast, the scarp of the Archean plateau forms the Darling Range behind Perth. Further north, behind Shark's Bay, the plateau recedes from the coast, and trends north-westward through the Hamrfiersley Mountains and the highlands of Pilbarra.
The Archean rocks underlie the Kimberley Goldfield; but they are separated from the main Archean plateau to the south by the Lower Palaeozoic rocks, which extend up the basin of the Fitzroy river and form the King Leopold and Oscar Ranges. The Archean rocks are of most interest from the auriferous lodes which occur in them. The Archean rocks of the area between the Darling Range and the goldfield of Coolgardie were classified by H. P. Woodward into six parallel belts, running northward and southward, but with a slight trend to the west. The westernmost belt consists of clay slates, quartzite's and schists, and is traversed by dykes of diorite and felstone; the belt forms the western foot of the Archean plateau, along the edge of the coastal plain. The second belt consists of gneisses and schists, and forms the western part of the Archean plateau. Its chief mineral deposit is tin, in the Green-bushes tin-field, and various other minerals, such as graphite and asbestos. Then follows a wide belt of granitic rocks; it has no permanent surface water and is bare of minerals, and, therefore, formed for a long time an effective barrier to the settlement or prospecting of the country to the east. This granitic band ends to the east in the first auriferous belt, which extends from the Phillips river, on the southern coast, to Southern Cross, on the Perth to Kalgoorlie railway; thence it goes through Mount Magnet, Lake Austin and the Murchison Goldfield at Nannine, and through the Peak Goldfield to the heads of the Gascoyne and Ashburton rivers. To the east of this belt is a barren band of granites and gneisses, succeeded again eastward by the second auriferous belt, including the chief goldfields of Westralia. They begin on the south with the Dundas Goldfield, and the mining centre of Norseman; then to the north follow the goldfields of Kalgoorlie, with its Golden Mile at Boulder, and the now less important field of Coolgardie. This line continues thence through the goldfields of Leonora and Mount Margaret, and reappears behind the western coast in the Pilbarra Goldfield. The rocks of the goldfields consist of amp hobo lite-schists and other basic schists, traversed by dykes of granite, diorite and porphyrite, with some peridotites. Some of the amphibolites have been crushed and then silicified into jasperoids, so that they much resemble altered sedimentary slates.
The Palaeozoic group is represented by the Cambrian rocks of the Kimberley Goldfield, which have yielded Olenellus forresti. There appear to be no certain representatives of the Ordovician system; while the Silurian is represented in the King Leopold Range of Kimberley, and, according to H. P. Woodward, in the contorted, unfossillifcrous quartzites and shales of the Stirling Range, north of Albany. The Upper Palaeozoic is well represented by an area of some 2000 sq. m. of Devonian sedimentary and volcanic rocks in the Kimberley district, and by the Carboniferous system, including both a lower, marine type, and an upper, terrestrial type. The Lower Carboniferous limestones occur in the Napier, Oscar and Geikie Ranges of Kimberley, and in the basin of the Gascoyne river, where they contain the glacial deposits discovered by Gibb-Maitland,- ↑ See T. N. Dale, The Chief Commercial Granites of Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Rhode Island (Washington, 1908), Bulletin 354 of the United States Geological Survey.
