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SCIENCE .
BRAfft' Jtectived

Accessions No. _ ^/ !rTZ-t^^L _ -57z^ j?V^. _

PHYSICAL
GEOLOGY AND GEOGEAPHY

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GREAT BRITAIN

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Wealden & P
Oolitic Strata
Liassic Strain

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GEOLOGICAL MAP OF

GREAT BRITAIN

THE PHYSICAL GEOLOGY

AND GEOGKAPHY OF

GREAT BRITAIN:

A MANUAL OF BRITISH GEOLOGY.
BY

A. C. EAMSAY, LL.D. F.E.S. &c.

DIRECTOR-GENERAL OK THE GEOLOGICAL SURVEYS OF THE UNITED KINGDOM.
WITH A GEOLOGICAL MAP, PRINTED IN COLOURS.

KUNIVK.IISITY <>F

,f . . ., , , t

LONDON :
EDWARD STANFORD, 55 CHARING CROSS.

1878.

[All rights reserved.]

EARTH

SCIENCES

LIBRARY

There rolls the deep where grew the tree.

O earth, what changes hast them seen !

There where the long street roars, hath been
The stillness of the central sea.

The hills are shadows, and they flow

From form to form, and nothing stands ;
They melt like mist, the solid lands,

Like clouds they shape themselves and go.

TENNYSON.

TO THE^ MEMORY

OF

8IK HENEY THOMAS DE LA BECHE,

C.B., F.E.S.

TO WHOSE EARLY TEACHINGS IN PHYSICAL GEOLOGY
I AM SO MUCH INDEBTED,

THIS BOOK IS AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED

PREFACE.

IN this, the fifth edition, many improvements and
additions have been made. Of these, the most im-
portant consists of an account of the British Formations,
showing the topographical range of each in succession,
their lithological characters and the general nature of
their fossils. This part of the work begins with
Chapter V., and ends with Chapter XVII., and it con-
stitutes a condensed Manual of British Stratigraphical
Geology from the Laurentian to the latest Pliocene
strata. The substance of these 227 pages was originally
written by me for Blackie's Cyclopaedia, and by the kind
permission of these gentlemen, I have, with some re-
arrangement and many additions, made much use of the
matter printed in the article.

A leading feature in this part of the book is, that
I have endeavoured to give a sketch of the Physical
Geography of each successive Geological Epoch, so as
to induce a scenic interest in the matter, beyond what
can be gathered from mere lithological descriptions and
lists of fossils, which, in the bald shape that they are

viii Preface.

sometimes presented to the reader, form merely the dry
bones of geology.

By attentively reading and remembering these
successive revolutions of ancient geographies, the reader
will more or less realise the geological history of our
country, and perceive those processes of physical evolu-
tion that, in the long lapse of time, gradually im-
pressed on Britain its present geographical phase,
which to most men seems so stable, but is, in reality, no
more lasting than those which went before. As keen-
eyed Chaucer well expounded five hundred years ago : —

( Well may men knowen, but it be a fool,
That every part deriveth from his hool ;
Of no partie ne cantle of a thing,
But of a thing that parfit is and stable,
Descending so, till it is corumpable.
And therefore of his wise purveyance
He hath so well beset his ordinance,
That speces of things and progressions
Shullen enduren by successions,
And not eterne, withouten any lie :
This maiest thou understand and seen at eye.'

Among many other matters, the subject of the Mio-
cene strata of Britain has been more largely treated of,
with special reference to the absence of recognised Mio-
cene mammalia in our country, and the subject of gla-
cial geology has, also, been treated more fully than in
previous editions, while a condensed account of all
the explored English bone-caves and their contents has
been added, with special reference to the question of
the antiquity of man.

I have to express my acknowledgment of the debt I

Preface. ix

owe to Mr. Etheridge and Mr. Sharman ; to the first
for much valuable information concerning the organic
relics of each formation, and also for the plan of each
of the sets of figures engraved as illustrative of the for-
mations, every one of which may be considered as more
or less typical of the strata or groups of strata referred
to in the text, in which, however, all of the fossils
figured are not always named. . Mr. Sharman executed
the drawings of these fossils with his accustomed skill
and accuracy.

I have also added some landscapes. One of these,
the Pass of Llanberis, fig. 86, is reduced from a coloured
crayon drawing by Mr. Gillespie Prout, and fig. 87 is
taken from a photograph. The original of fig. 88 was
drawn by the late Sir Henry De la Beche, and fig. 89,
with the dwindling ice entering the lake, is the repre-
sentation of an episode in the history of the glacier,
supposed and drawn by myself. The blocs perches of
fig. 90 was drawn by the late Professor Edward Forbes.
All of these were originally published in my paper on
'The Old Glaciers of Switzerland and North Wales.'
The Gorge of the Avon is from a photograph. All the
other landscapes, excepting one from my 6 Geology of
Arran,' have been engraved directly from drawings, as
they were roughly done in sepia and pencil in my geo-
logical note books, and, together with the sections and
other illustrations, many of them new, they are intended
to bring before the eye the meaning of various theories
propounded in this work, by help of which, anyone,
by a moderate exertion of thought, may realise the

x Preface.

geological origin and meaning of the physical geo-
graphy and scenery of our country, and thus, as he
travels to and fro, add a new pleasure to those pos-
sessed before. The colours on geological maps will
then no longer seem mysterious, but become easy to
comprehend when associated with the geographical
contours of our island.

ANDREW 0. RAMSAY.

KENSINGTON : May 16, 1878.

CONTENTS.

CHAPTEK I.

PAGE

Modes of Formation and General Classification of Eocks,
Aqueous and Igneous . . . . . . . .1

CHAPTER II.

The different Ages of Stratified Formations — Their successive
Depositions .23

CHAPTER III.

Denudation, Synclinal and Anticlinal Curves, unconformable
Stratification, and Waste produced by Chemical action . 31

CHAPTER IV.

Igneous Rocks, Metamorphism, Shrinkage and Disturbance of
the Earth's crust 38

CHAPTER V.
Laurent ian, Cambrian, and Lower Silurian Rocks . . .55

CHAPTER VI.
Arenig, Llandeilo, and Bala Beds . . . . . .61)

CHAPTER VII.
Upper Silurian Series .... 88

xii Contents.

CHAPTER VIII.

PAGR

Devonian and Old Red Sandstone Rocks , , 99

CHAPTER IX.

Carboniferous Series . . . . . . . . .119

CHAPTER X.
Permian Strata 139

CHAPTER XL
New Red Sandstone and Marl, and Rhastic Beds . . . 152

CHAPTER XII.
Liassic and Oolitic, or Jurassic Strata ..... H>6

CHAPTER XIII.
Purbeck and Wealden Strata . . . . . . .201

CHAPTER XIV.
Cretaceous Series 212

CHAPTER XV.
Eocene Formations . 236

CHAPTER XVI.
Miocene Epoch 259

CHAPTER XVII.
Pliocene Strata . .270

CHAPTER XVIII.

The Physical Structure of Scotland — The Highlands — The great
Valleys of'the Forth and Clyde — The Lammermuir, Moor-
foot, and Carrick Hills . .283

Contents. xiii

CHAPTER XIX.

PAGE

Recapitulation of the General Arrangement of the Stratified
Formations of England . 302

CHAPTER XX.

The Mountains of Devon, Wales, and the West of England —
The Valley of the Severn, and the Oolitic and Chalk Escarp-
ments—The Hilly Carboniferous ground of the North of
England, and its bordering plains and valleys— The Physical
Relation of these to the Mountains of Wales and Cumber-
land 315

CHAPTER XXI.

The Origin of Escarpments, and the Denudation of the Weald —
Grey Wethers and the Denudation of the Eocene Strata . 336

CHAPTER XXII.
The Miocene and Pliocene Formations ..... 352

CHAPTER XXIII.
The Glacial Epoch — Existing Glacial Regions . . . .361

CHAPTER XXIV.
Old British Glaciers 372

CHAPTER XXV.
Old British Glaciers (continued} 398

CHAPTER XXVI.

Glacial Epoch (contimied} — Submergence and Re-elevation of
Land, and Final Disappearance of British Glaciers . . 412

CHAPTER XXVII.
Glacial Epoch (continued) — Origin of certain lakes . . . 432

xiv Contents.

CHAPTEE XXVIII.

PAGE

Newer Pliocene Epoch (continued} — Bone-caves and Traces of
Man— Migration of Terrestrial Animals into Britain across
the Drift Plains — Subsequent Separation of Britain from the
Continent — Denudation of the Coasts of Britain . . 456

CHAPTEE XXIX.

British Climates and their Causes — Eainfall in different areas
— Areas of Eiver Drainage . .... *: ,. . . 490

CHAPTEE XXX.

Origin of Eiver- valleys — Their Eelationto Tablelands — Escarp-
ments cut through by Eivers— Geological Dates of different
Eiver-valleys — The Severn, the Avon, the Thames, the
Frome, and the Solent — Tributaries of the Wash and the
Humber — The Eden and the Western-flowing Eivers — Scot-
land . 496

CHAPTEE XXXI.

Eelation of Eiver-valleys and Gravels to the Glacial Drifts —
Eiver-terraces — Bones of Extinct Mammals and Human
Eemains found in them — Eaised Beaches, &c. . . 530

CHAPTEE XXXII.

Qualities of Eiver-waters — Dissolving of Limestone Eocks by
Solution . . 552

CHAPTEE XXXIII.
Soils 563

CHAPTEE XXXIV.

Eelation of the different Eaces of Men in Britain to the Geology
of the Country 579

Contents. xv

CHAPTER XXXV.

PAGB

Industrial Products of the Geological Formations — Origin of
Lodes — Quantities of available Coal in the Coalfields — Origin
of their Basin-shaped Forms — Concealed Coalfields beneath
Permian, New Red, and other Strata — Summary . . . 590

INDEX . 621

DIRK A

•

Ij-TJNlV Kl-

CHAPTER I.

MODES OF FORMATION AND GENERAL CLASSIFICATION OF
ROCKS, AQUEOUS AND IGNEOUS.

IN old days, those who thought upon the subject at all
were content to accept the world as it is, believing that
from the beginning to the present day it had always
been much as we now find it, and that, till the end of
all things shall arrive, it will, with but slight modifica-
tions, remain the same.

But, by and by, when Geology began to arrive at
the dignity of a science, it was found that the world had
passed through many changes ; that the time was when
the present continents and islands were not, for the
strata and volcanic products of which both are formed
were themselves sediments derived from the waste of
yet older lands now partly lost to our knowledge, or
of newer accretions of volcanic matter erupted from
below. Thus it happens that what is now land has
often been sea, and where the sea now rolls has often
been land ; and that there was a time before existing
continents and islands had their places on the earth,
before our present rivers began to flow, and before all
the lakes of the world, as we now know them, had begun
to be.

Geology may therefore be defined as the science
which investigates the history of the earth, or the
successive changes which have taken place in the in-

B

2 Definition of Geology.

organic and organic kingdoms of nature, together with
the causes of these changes, as far as they can be traced
by observations on the structure and mode of occurrence
of the mineral and organic bodies that form or are
found in and upon the crust of the earth.

To place the events of this complicated history in
clear chronological succession is the chief business of
the geologist; and in doing so he unites the present
with past geological epochs, and discovers that the
physical world, as it now exists, is the result of all the
past changes that have taken place in it. If, therefore,
our knowledge were sufficient to admit of the construc-
tion of a complete system of physical geography, it
would be but a full description of a geological epoch —
namely, that of to-day ; and a complete account of any
old geological epoch, would be a perfect description of
the physical geography of the world at that time.

To us, the chief dwellers on the Earth, the whole
subject is of the greatest interest, and it is therefore
my intention to endeavour to show in a simple manner
— taking our own island as an example — whence the
materials that form the present surface of the earth
have been derived, why one part of a country consists
of rugged mountains, and another part of high table-
lands or of low plains ; why the rivers run in their pre-
sent channels ; how the lakes that diversify the surface
first came into being. In the course of this inquiry I
shall have occasion to show that Britain has been joined
to and severed again and again from the continent,
and how some of the animals that inhabited, or still
inhabit it, including its human races, came to occupy
the areas where they live.

Assuming that I am partly addressing those who
have not previously studied geological subjects in detail,

Classification of Rocks. 3

it is needful that I should first enter on some rudimen-
tary points, so as to make the remainder intelligible to
all. Therefore I begin with an account of the nature
of rocks; because it is impossible to understand the
causes that produced the various kinds of scenery of
our country, and to account for the classification of its
mountains and plains, without first explaining the na-
ture of the rocks which compose them.

To this will be added a concise account of the British
strata in serial order, that the reader may understand
something of the nature and history of the various
stratified formations which, together with igneous rocks,
form our island.

In doing this I will endeavour to get and to give
some idea of the scenery of our region during the
successive geological epochs, so as to give the reader
some glimpses of those older stages of physical geo-
graphy, each of which in its time, had man been there
to see it, would have seemed as enduring as that passing
phase of the Earth's history in the midst of which we
live.

All rocks, in the broadest sense, are divided into
two great classes — AQUEOUS and IGNEOUS ; and there ih
a sub-class, which mostly consists of aqueous, but
sometimes of igneous rocks that have been altered,
and which in their characters often approach and even
by insensible gradations pass into some of those rocks
that are termed igneous, though in many respects very
different from ordinary volcanic products such as lavas.
In this chapter I shall, however, confine myself to a
general description of the two great classes of rocks,
those of aqueous or watery origin, and to those easily
recognised as of igneous origin, which are products of
subterranean heat.

B 2

4 Constitution of Rocks.

By far the larger proportion of the surface rocks
of the world have been formed by the agency of water,
chiefly as a fluid, but partly as ice. Such rocks are
made of sediments, and these sediments have been, and
still are, chiefly the result of the action of atmospheric
agencies, aided by chemical solutions, and of gravita-
tion, aided by moving water. But by what special pro-
cesses were they formed ?

Air and water, but especially the latter, act both
chemically and mechanically on the crust of the earth.
Many minerals in rocks, such as felspars, hornblendic
minerals, mica, &c., are composed of silicates of alum-
ina and soda, potash, lime and magnesia. These are
often associated with free silica. This is especially the
case with some igneous rocks ; and many of the strati-
fied rocks consist in great part of substances of the same
nature variously intermixed. Others consist of carbon-
ate and sulphate of lime, &c., more or less pure. 01
these, the carbonate of lime rocks, or common lime-
stones, by far predominate ; and they are sometimes
nearly pure, forming immense areas of country, and
sometimes mechanically intermingling, in every per-
centage, with other substances. All rain as it falls
absorbs part of the carbonic acid in the air ; and the
water percolating through the rocks unites with and
carries away in solution portions of the soda, potash,
lime, or magnesia that enter into the composition of
the minerals in rocks, and this promotes their disinte-
gration. They crumble, and are in a condition to be
borne to lower levels, and finally to the sea, by the me-
chanical agency of running water, or partly in solution.

Frost is also a powerful disintegrator. Water per-
colates into hollows, joints, and cracks ; it freezes and
expands, and thus helps to rend and break up the rocky

Disintegration of Rocks. 5

and earthy masses. Some of its most obviously power-
ful effects are seen in the regions of glaciers and drift
ice. In warm latitudes glaciers are found only at those
great elevations on mountain ranges that rise above the
limits of perpetual snow. On the Himalaya, the loftiest
peaks of which are about 31,000 feet high, the greater
glaciers descend to the level of about 14,000 feet; in
the Alps, in the lower glacier of Grrindelwald, to about
3,300; and in the Grlacier du Bois to 3,350 feet above
the sea. In the north of Norway, Greenland, and the
southern part of South America, and in the Antarctic
continent of Victoria Land, the large glaciers descend
to the sea-level. In the two last-named regions, towards
the poles, surfaces of vast extent are covered by ice in
the form of universally diffused glaciers.

A glacier in temperate regions is chiefly supplied by
the drainage of the snow that falls on those parts of
the mountains which rise above the limits of perpetual
snow ; and its size is commensurate to the height of the
mountains and the extent of area drained. Pressure of
the yearly accumulating snow, and in less degree the
summers heat and the winter's cold, or, indeed, the
summer day's thaw and the nightly frost, gradually
change snow into ice, which experience proves, acts
as a whole, like a plastic body, and glaciers progress
down valleys at slow rates, proportionate to the steep-
ness of their inclination, the volume of ice, and the
season of the year — moving faster in summer and au-
tumn, and slower in winter. The effect of this motion
in these icy masses is to grind, polish, scratch, and
groove the rocky valleys over which the glaciers pass,
removing asperities, and giving portions of the rocky
floor rounded and mammillated forms, termed roches
moutonnees. A necessary result of this action is the

6 Transportation of Sediments.

production of much fine floury sediment. Ice-filled
valleys are thus deepened and widened, and much sedi-
ment is formed, and brought within reach of the trans-
porting power of rivers. Great blocks of stone and finer
debris that fall from the hills on the surfaces of glaciers,
are carried steadily onward in long lines till they reach
the ends of these ice-rivers, where they form terminal
moraines, and often, as fast as the mounds accumulate,
these are proportionally wasted by the streams that flow
from the ends of the glaciers.

In cold climates, where special glaciers descend to
the sea, bergs break off often laden with blocks and
finer sediments, and floating seaward they deposit their
freights where they chance to melt. The breaking up
of the ice-foot on sea-coasts, and of river ice, also trans-
ports large quantities of matter and scatters it abroad.

The quantity of material degraded and spread in
the sea by these united means is immense, and consists
of mud, sand, gravel, and rounded, subangular, and
angular blocks, often polished, grooved, and scratched ;
and from the irregular mode of its accumulation, and
the frequent grounding and scraping of icebergs along
the sea-bottom, the whole of this matter, if exposed,
would present one of the rudest forms of stratification.

But the chief agent in the transportation of sedi-
ments from higher to lower levels is running water.
Great thunderstorms, water-spouts, and sudden thaws
in snow-covered lands, frequently produce startling
effects, stripping large areas bare of soil, and hurrying
to lower levels vast masses of earth, shingle, and
boulders.

Every one who has looked at large rivers knows that
they are rarely pure and clear. The cause of this is
obvious. All rain, especially if long continued, exercises

Rivers. 7

a powerful mechanical effect on the surface of the
earth, carrying much sediment into water-courses,
which unite to form brooks, rivulets, and finally, if the
country be large, great rivers. Soft surface soil is thus
easily carried away even in low countries, and in hilly
and mountainous regions sands, coarse rounded gravels,
and boulders, won from the adjoining rocks, are hurried
onward ; and thus it happens, that great valleys and
ravines have often been formed in all parts of the world
by running water, and by the long-continued attrition
of stones driven onward by torrents over rocky surfaces.
As the accumulated waters of rivers reach low lands,
their power of transporting coarse sediment decreases,
and finally, in great rivers, like the Rhine, the Nile, the
Amazons, the Mississippi, and the mighty rivers of
China, India, and Northern Asia, all but the finest sedi-
ment is deposited long before they reach the sea.

On a smaller scale the same kind of phenomena
are obvious in such English rivers as the Thames, the
Severn, the Ouse that flows through York, and the
Clyde and the Tay, in Scotland. Every river, in fact,
carries sediment and impurities of various kinds in sus-
pension or held in solution, and this matter, having
been derived from the waste of the lands through which
rivers flow, is carried to lower levels. Thus it happens
that when rivers empty themselves into lakes — or, what
is far more frequently the case, into the sea — the sedi-
ments which they hold in suspension are deposited at
the bottom, and, constantly increasing, they gradually
form accumulations of more or less thickness, gene-
rally arranged in beds, or, as geologists usually term
them, in strata. Suppose a river flowing into the sea.
It carries sediment in suspension, and a layer will fall
over a part of the sea-bottom, the coarser and heavier

8 Waste of Sea Cliffs.

particles near the shore, while the finer and lighter
matter will often be carried out by the current and de-
posited further off. Then another layer of sediment
may be deposited on the top, and another, and another,
until, in the course of time, a vast accumulation of
strata may be produced.

In this manner deltas are formed, and wide bays and
arms of the sea have been thus filled up. As they fill,
the marshes spread further and further, and, by over-
flows of the river bearing sediment, the alluvial flats
rise higher and higher, till, as in cases like those of the
Granges and the Nile, kingdoms have been founded on
mere loose detritus. A little reflection, too, will show
that all lakes, be they ever so large, may, with sufficient
time, get filled by this process with debris and become
plains. Some of the old rocks of Britain are formed of
sediments originally deposited in estuaries by rivers as
large as the Mississippi or the Granges, others were
formed in lakes fresh or salt, bearing witness to ancient
extinct physical geographies ; and many a modern flat
surface in Britain and in Switzerland, often covered by
peat and traversed by a brook or a river, is only a lake-
hollow filled with river-borne gravel, sand, and mud,
overgrown by a marshy or peaty vegetation.

Again, if we examine sea-cliffs that rise direct from
the shore, we find that the disintegrating effect of
the weather produces frequent debacles great or small on
the faces of the cliffs, thus supplying material for the
formation of shingle, which in gales the strong breakers
driving against the cliff forms a ' powerful artillery
with which the ocean assails the bulwarks of the land,'
and aids in the work of destruction. On the east and
south of England, where the strata largely consist of
boulder-clay, Eocene clays, chalk, and oolitic sands,

Pebbles and Sand. 9

clays, and limestones, the waste of the softer strata has
been in many places calculated at about two yards a
year. Where the strata are harder, as on the west
coast in Devon, Cornwall, and Wales, the waste is often
so slow as to be generally ignored by ordinary observers.
But the form of the coast proves it. Hard rocks resist-
ing waste because of their hardness are apt to form
headlands, while softer or more friable strata, wasting
more rapidly, often occupy the recesses of coves and
bays. The removal of the fallen detritus by the restless
waters makes room for further slips of debris from
above, and thus it happens that all sea-cliffs are in a
state of constant recession, comparatively quick when
made of clay or other soft strata, and when the rocks
are harder, perhaps very slowly, but still sensibly to the
observant eye, so that in time, be they ever so hard,
they get worn more and more backwards. The material
derived from this waste when sea-cliffs are truly rocky,
generally forms, in the first instance, shingle at tbeir
bases, as, for example, with the pebbles of flint formed
by waste of the chalk which contains them. These,
being attacked by the waves, are rolled incessantly
backwards and forwards, as everyone who has walked
much by the sea must have noticed ; for, when a large
wave breaks upon the shore, it carries the shingle for-
ward, rolling the fragments one over the other, and in
the same way they recede with the retreating wave with
a rattling sound. As in the running water of torrents,
so this long-continued marine action has the effect of
grinding angular fragments into rounded pebbles ; and,
in the course of time, large quantities of loose gravel
have thus been formed. Such material when con-
solidated becomes a conglomerate.

If, also, we examine with a lens the sand of the sea-

jo Distribution of Sediments.

shore, we shall find that it is formed of innumerable
grains of quartz, and these grains are generally not
angular, but more or less rounded : their edges having
been worn off by the action of waves and tides moving
them backwards and forwards upon each other, till they
became grains, like water-worn pebbles in shape, only
much smaller. Such material when consolidated forms
sandstone.

Finer-grained and more muddy deposits, in like
manner, are generally formed of the minutest grains of
sand, mixed with aluminous substances originally de-
rived from the waste perhaps of felspathic rocks. Such
material, when soft, forms clay ; when consolidated,
marl shale and slate.

In this manner very large amounts of mechanical
sediments are forming and have been formed. The
daily sifting action of breakers, intensified during long-
continued heavy gales, the forcible ejection of muddy
waters, sometimes hundreds of miles out to sea, from
the mouths of great rivers like the Amazons, the power
of tidal and great ocean currents such as the Grulf
Stream, all contribute to scatter sediments abroad, and
by their rapid or more gradual subsidence, the bottoms
of vast submarine areas are being covered by mechanical
sediments, which must of necessity often be of great
thickness, and in which various kinds of strata may
alternate with each other.

With sufficient time all land would, by these pro-
cesses of waste, be eventually degraded beneath the sea
(as was suggested by the naturalist Ray), were it not
that the loss is compensated by disturbance and eleva-
tion of land, always slowly taking place over portions of
the continents and islands of the world. Large areas
are also slowly depressed beneath the sea; but to

Elevation and Depression of Land. 1 1

maintain the average balance of sea and continent,
the amount of land elevated must exceed that de-
pressed, or be equal to the amount of that depressed by
gradual submergence, added to that destroyed by de-
gradation.

The evidences of past elevation and depression are
simple. 1st. A large proportion of the rocks in many
mountain ranges, however high above the sea, contain
marine fossils, generally of extinct species. Such strata
are in great part highly disturbed, broken, contorted,
often pierced by igneous intrusions, and largely denuded.
2nd. On all continents and on many large islands raised
beaches occur, and also superficial accumulations of
loose strata, lying on the older rocks, and yielding shells,
in great part, or altogether identical with those that
now inhabit neighbouring seas ; and these organic re-
mains occur in such a manner, that it is plain they
lived and died on the spots where they lie, ere those
parts of the sea-bottom were elevated. In Britain,
such beds are found more than 1,000 feet above the sea ;
and in South America, 1,300 feet on the western side
of the Andes. 3rd. Experience shows that certain
volcanic regions subject to earthquakes are often areas
of elevation. The earthquake of 1835 in Chili is an
instance when a large tract of the coast of South America
was suddenly raised from four to twelve feet, and part
of the sea-bottom converted into land ; and it is prob-
able that similar causes have conduced to raise by
degrees the shelly strata above alluded to, to the height
of 1,300 feet above the level of the sea. The chain
of the Andes is volcanic, and the elevating forces and
earthquakes of South- Western America are connected
with this circumstance. The Mediterranean volcanic
region (though marked by many oscillatory movements)

1 2 Consolidation of Strata.

is also as a whole one of elevation. The same is true
of the volcanic islands of the Pacific, and also of Java,
which contains many active volcanoes, and around the
shores of which there are old coral reefs 140 feet above
the level of the sea. Under other circumstances a
great number of coral reefs of the kind called atolls
and barrier reefs, yield, according to Darwin, perfect
evidence of depression of land. In the Pacific an area
more than 4,000 miles in length is now undergoing this
kind of submergence. The same takes place in the
Laccadive and Maldive archipelagos in the Indian Ocean.
All these islands are non-volcanic. Where volcanoes
occur the land is generally rising.

During such depressions strata may accumulate to
an immense thickness under favourable conditions of
supply, and time being also allowed for consolidation,
when these are again unheaved they will, both as regards
quantity and structure, be more apt to resist destruction
than smaller masses of (probably) softer strata that were
formed during periods of minor oscillations of sea and
land.

Strata are consolidated (petrified) chiefly by pres-
sure and chemical decomposition and recomposition.
Some formations are many thousands of feet in thick-
ness. In a set of strata 10,000 feet thick, the super-
incumbent weight on the lowest bed would be about
12,333 Ibs. per square inch; but beside this, more
intense pressures have taken place throughout all but the
very latest geological epochs. This kind of pressure has
been brought about by contraction of the crust of
the earth due to radiation of the proper heat of our
globe into space, the result being, that over broad areas
rocky masses have been much contorted and compressed,
and thus mountain ranges have been upheaved. In some

Stratified Rocks. 1 3

rocks the particles are partly cemented by oxides of iron,
in others by carbonate of lime. Minor beds of limestone
are often formed on land from calcareous springs. Marine
strata, formed of limestone, in the Adriatic, were found
by Marsilli to be consolidated a foot beneath the surface.
A great many rocks contain more or less carbonate of
lime, and .along with this, or alone, many others
contain silicates of soda or potash. These are soluble
in carbonic acid, and entering into new combinations
the whole becomes petrified. During these processes
shells, echini, corals, bones, teeth, and scales of fish and
of marine mammals, &c., are imbedded and cased in
stone, and in a less degree terrestrial plants and animals
are floated into lakes and estuaries, and occasionally
out to sea, where those parts that escape decay and pre-
daceous fish may become fossilised.

If we examine the stratified rocks that form the
land, we very soon discover that a large proportion of
them are arranged in thin layers or thicker bands or
beds of shale, sandstone, conglomerate, and limestone,
more or less pure ; for shales are sometimes sandy, sand-
stones sometimes shaly, and most conglomerates have a
sandy and sometimes a shaly or marly base in which the
FIG. i.

pebbles are embedded, while limestones occur of every
degree of impurity. These must have been formed in
a manner analogous to that which I have just described,
proving that such beds have been deposited as sedi-
ments from water. Take, for instance, a possible cliff

1 4 Stra lifted Rocks.

by the sea-shore, and we shall perhaps find that it is
made of strata, which may be horizontal, as in fig. 1,

FIG. 2.

or inclined, as in fig. 2, or even bent and contorted into
every conceivable variety of form, as in fig. 3. If,
as in the diagram, fig. 1, we take a particular bed,
No. 1, we may find that it consists of strata of lime-

FIG. 3.

stone lying one upon the top of another. Bed No. 2
may be of shale, arranged in thin layers, more regu-
larly than in No. 1. No. 3 may consist of pebbly
materials, arranged in ruder layers, for, the material
being coarse, the bedding may be irregular, or even
quite indistinct. Then in No. 4, the next and highest
deposit, we may have a mass of sandstone, arranged in
definite beds. The whole of these various strata in the
aggregate form one cliff. Eocks, more or less of these
kinds, compose the bulk of the strata of the British
Islands ; and it must be remembered that these were
originally loose stratified sediments, piled on each other
often to enormous thicknesses, and subsequently con-
solidated by pressure and chemical actioja. In some

Strata and Fossils. \ 5

cases after consolidation, they have been so much al-
tered by heat and other agents of metamorphism, as to
have lost almost all signs of their original stratification,
while sometimes they are almost undisturbed, except by
mere upheaval above the sea : in other cases the beds
have been violently contorted, in the manner shown in
diagram No. 3.

Next comes the question : Under what special con-
ditions were given areas of these rocks formed ?

Some formations, such as great part of the Silurian
rocks of Wales and its neighbourhood, consist essentially
of deposits that were originally marine mud and sand,
accumulated bed upon bed, intercalated here and there
with strata of limestone, the whole being many thou-
sands of feet in thickness. These have since been
hardened into rock. Others, like the Old Red Sand-
stone, were originally spread out in alternating beds of
mud, sand, and stony banks, all coloured red by pre-
cipitation of peroxide of iron. Others, like the Liassic
and Oolitic deposits, were formed of alternating strata
of clay, sand, and limestone ; while others, like the
greater masses of the Carboniferous Limestone and the
Chalk, were formed almost wholly of carbonate of
lime.

When we examine such rocks in detail, we often
find that they contain fossils of various kinds — shells,
corals, sea-urchins, crustaceans, such as crabs and
trilobites, the bones, teeth, and scales of fishes, &c.,
land plants, and more rarely the bones of terrestrial
animals. For instance, in the bed of sandstone. No. 4
(fig. 1), we might find that there are remains of sea-
shells ; occasionally — but more rarely — similar bodies
might occur in the conglomerate, No. 3 ; frequently
they might lie between the thin layers of shale in

1 6 Limestones.

No. 2 ; and it is equally common to find large quantities
of shells, corals, sea-urchins, encrinites, and various
other forms of life in such limestones as No. 1, which,
in many cases, are almost wholly composed of entire
or broken shells and other marine organic remains.

Marine and lake sediments form soils on and in
which the creatures live that inhabit the bottom of the
waters, and it is easy to understand how numerous
shells and other organic bodies happen thus to have
been buried in muddy, sandy, or conglomeratic
mechanical sediments, the component grains of which,
large or small, have been borne from the land into
water, there by force of gravitation to arrange them-
selves as strata. By the life and death of shells in
these fossilised sediments, it is also easy to understand
why they are so often more or less calcareous. The
question, however, arises, how it happens that strata
of pure or nearly pure carbonate of lime or limestone
have been formed.

Though the materials of shale (once mud), sand-
stone (once loose sand), and conglomerate (once loose
pebbles), have been carried from the land into the sea,
and there arranged as strata, and though limestones
have, in great part, been also mechanically arranged,
yet it comparatively rarely happens that quantities of
fine unmixed calcareous sediment have been carried in
a tangible form by rivers to the sea, though it has some-
times been directly derived from the waste of sea-cliffs,
and mixed with other marine sediments. When, there-
fore, it so happens that we get a mass of limestone
consisting entirely of shells, corals, and other remains,
which are the skeletons of creatures that lived in the
sea, in estuaries, or in lakes, the conclusion is forced
upon US' that, be the limestone ever so thick, it has been

Limestones Organic. 17

formed entirely by the life and death of animals that
lived in water. In many a formation — for instance, in
some of the masses great and small of the Carboniferous
Limestone — the eye tells us that they are formed
perhaps entirely of rings of encrinites or stone-lilies, or
of shells and corals, of various kinds, or of all these
mixed together ; and in many other cases where the
limestone is homogeneous, the microscope reveals that
it is made of foraminifera, or of exceedingly small
particles of other organic remains. Even when these
fragments are indistinguishable to the naked eye,
reflection tells us that such marine limestone deposits
must have been built up from the debris of life, for
there is no reason to believe that vast formations of
limestone, extending over hundreds of square miles,
are now, or ever have been precipitated in the open
ocean by inorganic chemical processes acting on mere
chemical solutions. It sometimes happens, indeed, that
gradual accumulations of such beds of limestone have
attained thousands of feet of vertical thickness in what
belongs to recent times in a geological sense, as for
example in the great coral reefs of the Pacific Ocean,
and, in less known degree, in the calcareous and fora-
miniferous mud of that ocean and of the Atlantic.

But where does the carbonate of lime come from by
which these animals make their skeletons? If we
analyse the waters of springs and rivers, we discover
that many of them consist of water that is more or less
hard — that is to say, not pure, like rain-water, but
containing various salts in a state of chemical solution,
the most important of which is generally bicarbonate
of lime ; for the rain-water that falls upon the land
percolates the rocks, and, rising again in springs, carries
with it salts of soda, potash, &c., and, if the rocks be

c

1 8 Igneous Rocks.

calcareous, large percentages of bicarbonate of lime in
solution. The reason of this is, that all rain in descend-
ing through the air takes up a certain amount of
carbonic acid — one of the constituents, accidental or
otherwise, of the air ; and this carbonic acid has the
power of dissolving the carbonate of lime which enters
into the composition of a large proportion of stratified
rocks, which sometimes as pure limestone, form great
tracts of country. In this way it happens that springs
are often charged with lime, in the form of a soluble
bicarbonate, which is carried by rivers into lakes and
estuaries, and, finding its way to the sea, affords
material to shell-fish and other marine animals, through
their nutriment, to make their shells and bones. Thus
it happens that, by little and little, lime is abstracted
from sea-water to form parts of animals, which, dying
in deep clear water, frequently produce by their skele-
tons and shells immense masses of strata of nearly pure
limestone, which is consolidated into rock almost as
fast as it is formed.

What is going on now has been going on throughout
all known geological time, from that of the deposition
of the Laurentian rocks down to the present day.

Igneous rocks form a much smaller proportion of
the surface rocks of most parts of the world, though in
given areas, such as Iceland and the Faroe Islands, they
largely predominate. To take Britain as an example :
in North Wales, a considerable proportion, perhaps a
twentieth part, of the rocks of Lower Silurian age are
formed of igneous masses. The whole of the rest of
Wales, till we come to Pembrokeshire, contains almost
none whatever. In Cumberland a very large part of
the Lower Silurian rocks are igneous, while a com-
paratively small proportion of igneous rocks is found

Igneous Rocks. 19

among the Silurian rocks of the mainland of Scotland.
Even the large masses of granite there, occupy but
small areas when compared with the great extent of
ordinary stratified and metamorphic rocks amid which
they lie. It is chiefly in the Inner Hebrides that great
masses of tertiary basalts occur. Igneous rocks exist
even in much smaller proportions in Derbyshire, North-
umberland, Devon, and Cornwall, excepting the occa-
sional occurrence of large -bosses of granite in the two
last-named counties, as for example on Dartmoor, and
at Land's End. If, however, we examine all the mid-
land, southern, and eastern parts of England, we shall
find hardly any igneous rocks whatever.

I have now briefly to indicate how we are able to dis-
tinguish igneous from aqueous rocks, in countries where
there are neither active nor obvious craters of extinct
volcanoes, such as those of Auvergne and the Eifel.
To do this in detail would occupy a volume.

In a general way we can distinguish them from
strata formed by aqueous deposition because many of
them are unstratified, and have other external and
internal structures different from those of aqueous
deposits. To take examples : If we examine the lavas
that flowed from any existing volcano, and have after-
wards consolidated, we find that they are frequently
vesicular. This vesicular structure is largely due to
watery vapour, and partly to gases ejected along with
the melted matter, which, expanding in their efforts
to escape from the melted lava, form a number of
vesicles, just as yeast does in bread, or as we see in
some of the slags of iron furnaces, which, indeed, are
simply artificial lavas. This peculiar vesicular structure
is never found in the case of unaltered stratified rocks.
Here, then, experience tells that modern rocks with this

c 2

2O Igneous Rocks.

structure were formed by igneous agency, and this in
ancient cases is not the less certain though the vesicles-
have since been filled by the infiltration and deposition of
mineral matters in solution, such as carbonate of
lime, zeolites and silica. Such igneous rocks are called
amygdaloids, and it has not infrequently happened that
on the surfaces of old masses of rock, the amygdaloidal
kernels, say of carbonate of lime, have been dissolved
out by the influence of rain-water bearing carbonic
acid, and the surface has regained its original vesicular
appearance.

Experience also tells us that some modern lavas are
crystalline — that is to say, in cooling, their constituents,
according to their chemical affinities, have crystallised
in distinct minerals such as augite, various felspars, &c.
When we meet with similar, even though not identical
crystalline rocks, such as felspar— porphyries, trachytes,
diorites and dolorites, associated with old strata, we are
therefore entitled to consider them as having had an
igneous origin.

In modern volcanic regions, such as Iceland, and in
tertiary regions dotted with extinct volcanoes of Mio-
cene or later age, where the forms of the craters still
remain, the lavas are often columnar; and when we
meet with columnar and crystalline rock-masses of
Silurian, Carboniferous, or of any other geological age,
we may fairly assume that such rocks are of igneous
origin. Modern lavas have often a vitreous structure
(glassy) such as obsidian, which its ancient analogue
pitchstone closely resembles. Others possess a slaggy
structure, and are sometimes formed of wavy ribboned
layers that indicate a state of viscous flowing, similar
to the contorted ribbon-like structure common in iron
and other slags. Iron slag in fact is nothing but arti-

Igneous Rocks.

21

ficial lava, formed of the silica and alumina of the iron
ore and its flux of lime, melted together and still re-
taining a percentage of iron. Ancient lavas, such as
those of Snowdon, of Lower Silurian age, often still
possess a slaggy and ribboned structure. Further,
igneous rocks are apt to alter any strata through which
they are ejected or over which they flow. Accordingly,
in rocks of all ages, and of various composition, fels-
pathic, doloritic (hornblende and felspar), dioritic

FIG. 4.

(augite and felspar), and various others, as in fig. 4,
we frequently find veins (2) that have been injected
among the strata, from dykes, as they are termed (1),
rising vertically or nearly vertically through the beds
from the end of which sometimes an overflow of lava
(3) proceeded, that may or may not be columnar. In
such cases the stratified rocks are apt to be altered for a
few inches or even for several feet at their junction
with the igneous rocks. If shales, they may be hard-
ened or baked into a kind of porcellanic substance ; if
sandstones, turned into quartz-rock, something like the
sandstone floor of an iron-furnace that has long been
exposed to intense heat. Occasionally the strata have
been actually softened by heat, and a semi-crystalline
structure has been developed.

From these and many other circumstances, a skilled
geologist finds no difficulty in deciding that such and
such rocks are of igneous origin, or have been melted

22 Igneous Rocks.

by heat. The crystalline structure identical with or
similar to some modern lavas, the occasional columnar
structure, the amorphous earthy look, also common in
certain lavas, the slaggy, ribboned, and vesicular struc-
tures, the penetration of strata by dykes and veins,
and the alteration of the stratified rocks at the lines
of contact, all prove the point.

Modern volcanic ashes are simply fragments, small
and large, of lava ground often to powder in the crater
by the rise and fall of the steam-driven rocky material.
This is finally ejected by the expansive force of steam,
and with the liberated vapour, volcanic dust, lapilli and
blocks of stone, are sometimes shot thousands of feet
into the air mingled with watery vapour, which con-
densing in the higher atmosphere, falls with the ashes
on the sides of the volcanic cone in heavy showers of
rain. By the study of modern volcanic ashes, it is, after
practice, not difficult to distinguish those of ancient
date, even though they have become consolidated into
hard stratified rocks. Their occasional tufaceous char-
acter, the broken crystals, the imbedded slaggy-looking
fragment of rocks and bombs, and sometimes the
occurrence of coarse volcanic conglomerates, every frag-
ment of which consists of broken lava, all help in the
decision. In fact, tracing back, from modern to
ancient volcanoes, step by step through the various
formations, the origin of ancient volcanic rocks is clear ;
and further, it leads to similar conclusions with respect
to the igneous origin of bosses of crystalline rocks, such
as some granites, syenites, and dioritic masses which,
having been melted and cooled deep in the earth, were
not ejected, and never saw the light till they were ex-
posed by denudation.

CHAPTER II.

THE DIFFERENT AGES OF STRATIFIED FORMATIONS.
THEIR SUCCESSIVE DEPOSITIONS.

THE next point to be considered is — Are stratified
rocks of different ages ? They are, and the diagram,
fig. 1, p. 13, will help to make this clear. There the
bed No. 1 must be the oldest, because it was deposited
in the sea (or other water) before bed No. 2 was
laid above it as layers of mud, and so on to 3 and 4
— taking the strata in order of succession. But that
is not enough to know. We are anxious to under-
stand what is the actual history of the different stages
which such minor beds represent, Now, if we had
never found any fossil remains imbedded in the rocks,
we should lose half the interest of this investigation,
and our discovery, that rocks are of different ages, would
have only a minor value. Turn again to the diagram.
We find at the base, beds of limestone, No. 1, perhaps com-
posed of corals and shells. The organic remains in the
upper part of these beds lie above those in the lower part,
and therefore the latter were dead and buried, before the
once living shells which lie in the upper part inhabited
the area. Above the limestone lie beds of shale, No.
2, succeeded by No. 3, a conglomerate, and then comes
the bed of sandstone, No. 4 ; therefore the shells (if
any) in the bed of shale, No. 2, are of younger date

24 Strata of Different Ages.

than those in the bed of limestone, No. 1 ; the organic
forms, plants or animals as the case may be, in the
conglomerate, No. 3, were buried among the pebbles at
a later date than the shells in the shale, and the re-
mains of life in the sandstone, No. 4, were latest of
all ; and in each bed, each particular form found there,
lived and died before the sediment began to be
deposited that forms the bed above. All these beds,
therefore, contain relics of ancient life of different
dates, each bed being younger or older than the others,
according as we read the record from above or from
below. It is evident that the same kind of reasoning
is equally applicable to the inclined strata of fig. 2, or
to the contorted beds of fig. 3.

But if we leave a petty quarry or sea cliff, and ex-
amine strata on a larger scale, what do we find ? On
many a coast, where the cliffs consist of stratified rocks,
a lesson may easily lie learnt on the method of under-
standing the order, or comparative dates of deposition
of geological formations. The Liassic, Oolitic, and
Cretaceous cliffs of Yorkshire, from the Tees to Flam-
borough Head, form excellent examples ; or the coast
of Devonshire and Dorsetshire, from Torquay to Port-
land Bill. I take part of the latter as an example,
from Lyme Regis to the eastern end of the Chesil
Bank.

If we eliminate those accidents called faults, we
there find a succession of formations arranged some-
what in the manner shown in diagram No. 5.

The horizontal line at the base represents the shore
line. On the west (1) represents red marly strata,
known as the New red or Keuper marls. These pass
under thin beds of white fossiliferous limestone (2),
known as the Rhsetic beds. These in their turn pass

Succession of Formations. 25

or dip under beds of blue limestone and clay, called
Lower Lias (3), which are seen to dip under the Marl-
stone or Middle Lias (4), overlaid by the
Upper Lias (5), on which rests the Inferior
Oolite sand and limestone (6), followed by the
Fuller's Earth clay (7). Next comes a series
of strata (8), which for present purposes I
have massed together, and which are known
when they are all present as Great Oolite,
Forest Marble, and Cornbrash. These dip
under the Oxford Clay (9), which dips under
a limestone called the Coral Eag (10), and
still going eastward this dips beneath the
Kimeridge Clay (11), which, in its turn,
passes under the Cretaceous Series of this
district, consisting of Gault (12), Upper
Greensand (13), and Chalk (14) which in a
bold escarpment overlooks the plain of
Kimeridge Clay.1

Here, then, we see a marked succession
of strata of different kinds, or having dif-
ferent lithologiccd characters, formed, that
is to say, of marls, clays, sands, and lime-
stones, succeeding and alternating with each
other. They are all sediments originally
deposited in the sea, (if we except the New
Red Marl, which was deposited in a Salt
lake), for the forms of old life found in &
them prove this. Some are only forty or
fifty feet thick, some are more than five or
six hundred feet in thickness.

If we leave the coast cliffs and turn to the middle of

J The Portland beds being only occasionally present, are in this
diagram purposely omitted, and this does not affect the general

26 Succession of Formations.

England — from the borders of South Staffordshire and
Warwickshire to the neighbourhood of London — we
discover that the whole series is made of strata, arranged
in successive stages more or less in the manner which
I have already described, and they consist of similar
materials. Thus, through Warwickshire and South
Staffordshire, we have rocks formed of New Eed Sand-
stone. The red sandstone dips to the east, and is over-
laid by New Eed Marl ; the red marl dips also to the
east, under beds of blue clay, limestone, and brown
marl, forming the various divisions of the Rhsetic beds
and Lias ; these pass under a great succession of forma-
tions of limestones, clays, and sands, &c., known as the
Oolites ; these, in their turn, are overlaid by beds of
sand, clay, and chalk, named the Cretaceous series ;
which again, in their turn, pass under the Tertiary
clays and sands of the London Basin. All these pass
fairly under each other in the order thus enumerated.
Experience has proved this, for though there are occa-
sional interruptions in the completeness of the series,
some of the formations being absent in places, yet the
order of succession is never inverted, except where, by
what may be called geological accidents, in some parts
of the world, such as the Alps, great disturbances have
locally produced forcible inversions of some of the strata.
The Oolites, for example, in England, never lie under
the Lias, nor the Cretaceous rocks under the Oolites.

Observation of the surface in cliffs, railway cuttings,
and quarries, therefore proves this general succession of
formations, and so does experience in sinking deep wells
and mine shafts. If, for example, in parts of the mid-
land counties we sink through the Lower Lias, we pass

question. Some minor formations known further inland are added
to make the series more complete.

Strata Fossiliferoiis. 27

into the New Eed Marl ; if we pierce the red marl, we
reach the water-bearing strata of the New Red Sand-
stone. If in certain districts we penetrate the Creta-
ceous strata, we are sure to reach the Upper Oolites,
and under London many deep wells have been sunk
through the Eocene beds, in the certainty of reaching
the chalk and finding water.

It is, therefore, not that the mere surface of the
land is formed of various rocks, but the several forma-
tions that form the land dip or pass under each other
in regular succession, being, in fact, vast beds placed
much in the same way as a set of sheets of variously-
coloured pasteboard, placed flat on each other, and then
slightly tilted up at one end, may slope in one direction,
one edge of each sheet being exposed at the surface.

Vertical sinkings, therefore, in horizontal or slightly
inclined strata, often prove practically what we know
theoretically, viz. the underground continuity in certain
areas of strata one beneath the other. Accurate but
more difficult observation and reasoning has done the
same for more disturbed strata, so that our island and
other countries have been proved to be formed of a series
of beds of rock, some many hundreds and some many
thousands of feet in thickness, arranged in succession,
the lowest stratified formation being of older and the
uppermost of younger age.

Most of these strata are fossiliferous, that is to say
they contain shells, bones, and other relics of the crea-
tures that lived and died in the waters or water-laid
sediments of each special period-, or as sometimes
happens, the remains of land plants and terrestrial
animals that have been washed into the sea or into
lakes. What is the more special evidence on this subject
afforded by the rocks ? As we proceed, we shall suppose.

28 Succession

from west to east across the Secondary and Tertiary
strata, and examine the fossils found in successive forma-
tions, we discover that they are not the same in all, and
that most of them contain marine organic remains,
which are in each formation of species and sometimes of
genera more or less distinct from those in the forma-
tions immediately above or below.1

Thus turning again to fig. 5, p. 25, the Ked Marly
series No. 1, is rarely fossiliferous, and such fossils as
these beds may contain are chiefly land plants, footprints
of Amphibia, and small bivalve crustaceans. The
Khaetic beds 2, contain sea-shells of a few genera and
species, the latter somewhat distinct from those found
in the Lower Lias No. 3, the fossils of which are again
partly, but not altogether, of different species from those
buried in the Marlstone No. 4, which again partly
differ from the forms in the Upper Lias clay No. 5, and
so on, stage by stage, through the remaining strata of
the Oolitic rocks, up to the Kimeridge Clay No. 11.
Throughout the whole series from the Ehaetic beds (2),
upwards to the Kimeridge Clay (11), there is an inti-
mate relation, for in all the Liassic and Oolitic forma-
tions the general facies, that is to say, the grouping of
genera (Ammonites, Belemnites, Terebratulse, Phola-
domyas, Oysters, &c.) is the same, and some species
generally pass from each formation into the next above
it; and not only so, but sometimes through several
formations. There is, however, generally enough of
difference in the species found in the different forma-
tions to enable anyone with sufficient knowledge to tell
by fossils alone, if he found enough of them, what
formation he may chance to be examining. When,

1 There are also a few freshwater deposits, but the discussion of
these is not essential to the present argument.

of Life. 29

still ascending in the series, we come to the Cretaceous
formations represented by 12, 13, and 14. a wonderful
change takes place. None of the Oolitic species pass
into these formations, and some of the genera, especially
of chambered shells ( Cephalopoda) are new. There are
no marine passage beds in England sufficiently
developed clearly to unite the tiuo series. They were,
in fact, separated in their deposition by a long period
of time during which our territory generally formed
land, and which is therefore unrepresented in the
British area by marked marine stratified deposits of
dates between Oolitic and Cretaceous times.

I have selected the above instances, as affording a
good type of the kind of phenomena that occur again
and again throughout the whole series of our geological
formations. After a minute examination, therefore, of
the stratigraphical structure of our island, the result is,
that geologists are able to recognise and place all the
rocks in serial order, so as to show which were formed
first and which were formed latest ; and the following
is the result of this tabulation, omitting minor details.

It is a necessary part of the plan of this work to
give some account of the range, structure, and fossils
of the formations enumerated in the following table,
and I shall therefore in succeeding chapters give a brief
account of each formation or set of formations, be-
ginning with the oldest, so as in some degree to show
their general relations to each other, and, as far as I
can, to give a description of the physical geography of
each prominent geological epoch.

Table of British Formations.

f CRETACEOUS

WEALDEN
SERIES

^ j OOLITIC
°, l SERIES

and
LIAS

LTRIASSIC . .

f PERMIAN . .

CARBONIFE-
ROUS

OLD RED

.5 J | SANDSTONE, &
p., « DEVONIAN

SILURIAN . .
i LAURENTIAN

Post-tertiary

( Newer Pliocene

< Older Pliocene

Miocene . .

Upper Eocene

•< Middle Eocene
\ Lower Eocene

TABLE OF THE BRITISH FORMATIONS.

Recent. . . . Alluvia, peat, and estuarine beds now forming, &o.
River and estuarine alluvia, and some peats, with
human remains and works of art ; whales,
seals, &c., bones of Mammoth, and other land
mammalia ; flint implements, raised beaches,
-j and bone caves, &c., in part. Latest traces of

British glaciers.

I Great glacier moraines, and boulder clays with
| marine and freshwater interstratifications.
L Forest bed of Norfolk, Chillesford beds, and

Norwich Crag, with land mammalia, &c.
J Red Crag.
t Coralline Crag.

Bovey Tracey and Mull beds, with igneous rocks.
/ Hempstead beds \

I Bembridge beds f Freshwater river beds, with
1 Osborne beds . | marine interstratification.
I Headon beds . )
] Bracklesham and ) -».-.„
t Bagshot beds f Jvli
I London Clay. Marine.

4 Woolwich and Reading beds and Thanet sand.
(. Freshwater, estuarine, and marine.
Chalk . . . ,\
Upper Greensand
Gault .... }• Marine.
Lower Greenland
Atherfield Clay . ,

SShies^ands d I Freshwater river beds, estuarine and lagoon beds.
Purbeck beds ' ) with marine interstratifications.

Portland Oolite

Upper .

Middle

Lower

and sand .

Kimeridge Clay

Coral Rag . .

Oxford Clay .
j Cornbrash
1 Forest Marble

Bath or Great
! Oolite . . .
j Stonesfleld Slate
: Inferior Oolite I
t and Sand . . '

/ Upper Lias Clay

J Marlstone (Middle Lias) . .

1 Lower Lias Clay and Limestone

I Rhsetic beds. Passage beds J

( Upper. New Red Marl (Keuper). Salt LaVe.

4 Lower. New Red Sandstone (Bunter). Lake deposits, probably

( salt, but perhaps partly fresh or bz-ackish.

Marine in middle and south of
England. Between the Inferior
Oolite and Great Oolite, partly
freshwater and terrestrial, in
Northamptonshire, Lincolnshire,
and Yorkshire.

( Coal-measures and Millstone grit. Partly terrestzial, freshwater,

and marine.

j Carboniferous limestone and shales. Chiefly marine, and in north
\ of England, and Scotland, partly terrestrial and freshwater.

' ] Lower } Freshwater lakes. Devonian marine.

Marine.

[Upper Silurian
Lower Silurian
and Cambrian. Probably marine and freshwater beds interstratified.
Marine.

CHAPTEK III.

DENUDATION, SYNCLINAL AND ANTICLINAL CURVES, UNCON-
FORMABLE STRATIFICATION, AND WASTE PRODUCED BY
CHEMICAL ACTION.

I MUST now more precisely explain the meaning of a
few terms which I have already employed, and shall have
occasion to use very frequently.

Denudation, in the geological sense of the word,
means the stripping away of rocks from the surface,
so as to expose other rocks that lay concealed beneath
them.

Eunning water wears away the ground over which it
passes, and carries away detrital matter, such as pebbles,
sand, and mud ; and if this goes on long enough over
large areas, there is no reason why any amount of
matter should not in time be removed. For instance,
we have a notable case in North America of a consider-
able result from denudation, now being effected by
the river Niagara, where, below the Falls, the river
has cut a deep channel through the rocks, about seven
miles in length. The proofs are perfect that the Falls
originally began at the great escarpment at the lower
end of what is now this gorge : that the river, falling
over this ancient cliff, by degrees wore for itself a
channel backwards, from two hundred to a hundred
and sixty feet deep, through strata that on either side
of the gorge once formed a continuous plateau.

32 Denudation.

I merely give this instance to show what I mean by
denudation produced by running water. At one time
the channel did not exist. The river has cut it out,
and in doing so, strata — some of them formerly one
hundred and sixty feet beneath the surface — have been
exposed by denudation. Possible, but very uncertain
calculations, show that to form this gorge a period at
the least of something like thirty-five thousand years
has been required. This is an important instance, and
it is similar to many other cases constantly before our
eyes, on a smaller scale, which rarely strike the ordi-
nary observer.

Eefer to fig. 6, and suppose that we have differ-
ent strata, 1, 2, 3, and 4, lying horizontally one above
the other, together forming a mass several hundreds
of feet in thickness. The running water of a brook

FIG. 6.

4
3

2 a
1 _

or river by degrees wore away the rocks more in
one place than another, so that the strata 3, 2, and 1,
were successively cut into and exposed at the surface,
and a valley in time is formed. This is the result
of denudation.

Or to take a much larger instance. The strata that
form the outer part of the crust of the Earth have, in
many places, by the contraction of that crust due to
cooling of the mass, been thrown into anticlinal and
synclinal curves. A synclinal curve means that the
curved strata are bent downwards as in 1, Fig. 7, an
anticlinal curve that they bend upwards as in 2.
The whole were originally deposited horizontally, con-

Denudation. 33

solidated into rock, and afterwards bent and contorted.
The strata marked x may perfectly correspond in all
respects in their structure and fossils, and in hundreds

FIG. 7.

22 i

1. Synclinal curves. 2. Anticlinal curve,

of similar cases it is certain that they were once joined
as horizontal strata, and afterwards thrown into anti-
clinal and synclinal curves. The strata indicated by
dotted lines (and all above) have been removed by
denudation, and the present surface is the result.

Chemical action is another agent that promotes waste
or denudation. Thus rain water, always charged with
carbonic acid, falling on limestone rocks such as the
Carboniferous Limestone, or the Chalk, not only wears
away part of these rocks by mechanical action, but
also dissolves the carbonate of lime and carries it off in
solution as a bicarbonate. This fact is often proved by
numbers of unworn flints sometimes several feet in
thickness scattered on the surface of the table-land
of chalk in Wilts and Dorsetshire. The flints now
lying loose on the surface once formed interrupted beds
often separated by many feet of chalk. The chalk has
been dissolved and carried away in solution chiefly by
moving water, and the insoluble flints remain.

Degradation of the rocks of many regions is also
powerfully affected by occasional landslips. The waste
thus produced is seen on a large scale in many of the
Yorkshire valleys, where Carboniferous sandstones and
shales are interstratified, and vast shattered ruins of

D

34 Denudation.

sandstones cumber the sides of the hills and the bottoms
of the valleys in wild confusion (fig. 66, p. 329). In
Switzerland the relics of old landslips are often seen on
a magnificent scale ; and some of these, such as those of
the Eossberg, and St. Nicholas in the valley of Zermatt,
have taken place in the memory of living men.

The constant atmospheric disintegration of cliffs,
and the beating of the waves on the shore, often aided
by landslips, is another mode by which watery action
denudes and cuts back rocks. This has been already
mentioned. Caverns, bays, and other indentations of
the coast, needle-shaped rocks standing out in the sea
from the main mass of a cliff, are all caused or aided
by the long-continued wasting power of the sea, which
first helps to destroy the land and then spreads the
ruins in new strata over its bottom.

It requires a long process of geological education to
enable anyone thoroughly to realise the conception of
the vast amount of old denudations ; but when we con-
sider that, over and over again, strata thousands of
square miles in extent, and thousands of feet in thick-
ness, have been formed by the waste of older rocks,
equal in extent and bulk to the strata formed by their
waste, we begin to get an idea of the greatness of this
power. The mind is then more likely to realise the
vast amount of matter that has been swept away from
the surface of any country, in times comparatively
quite recent, before it has assumed its present form.
Without much forestalling the subject of a subsequent
chapter, I may now state that a notable example on a
grand scale may be seen, in the coal-fields of South
Wales, of Bristol, and of the Forest of Dean. These
three coal-fields were once united, but those of South
Wales and Dean Forest are now about twenty-five miles

Unconformity. 35

apart, while the Bristol and Somersetshire coal-field is
separated from both by the estuary of the Severn.
These separations have been brought about by the
agency of long-continued denudations, which have
swept away thousands of feet of strata bent into
anticlinal and synclinal curves in the manner shown
at x in fig. 7, p. 33, and fig. 115, p. 601. The coal-field
of the Forest of Dean has thus become an outlier of the
great South Wales coal-field ; and the Bristol or Somerset-
shire coal-field forms another outlier of a great area, of
which even the South Wales coal-field is a mere frag-
ment. Such denudations have been common over large
areas in Wales and the adjacent counties, and in many
another county besides.

Observation and argument alike tell us that we need
have no hesitation in applying this reasoning to all
hilly regions, whether formed of stratified rocks alone
or intercalated with igneous rocks, and thus we come
to the conclusion that the greater portion of the rocky
masses of our island have been arranged and re-arranged
under slow processes of the denudation of old, and the
reconstruction of newer strata, extending over periods
that seem to our finite minds almost to stretch into
infinity.

Unconformable stratification, when its significance
has been realised by the student, cannot fail at once to
impress on the mind a sense of the degradation of
strata in some old epoch similar to that which is now
going on, and I know of few objects that speak more
eloquently of geological time.

In the following diagram No. 1 represents an old land
surface, in which perhaps beds of sandstone and slate
or shale have been upheaved at a high angle. Let us
then suppose that, by the wasting power of weather and

D 2

36 Unconformity.

the sea, the strata No. 2 have been won from that old
land and deposited on the upturned and denuded edges
of the strata No. 1. This constitutes a case of uncon-
formable stratification, and this alone marks the lapse

FIG. 8.

1. Old disturbed strata,

2. Later beds lying unconformably upon them.

of immense periods of geological time, first by the
deposition, consolidation, and upheaval of the strata
No. 1, and secondly in the deposition of the strata
No. 2, which were made from the waste of No. 1.

There are many cases of this kind of unconformity
extending through all geological time from the
Laurentian epochs onwards. If, in addition to this, we
consider the meaning of the progressive changes of
genera and species of animals and plants, as we proceed
from the older to the newer formations (as expressed
in Chapter II.), it soon becomes obvious, that as yet
we have no means of even attempting to form any
clear idea of the time that has elapsed since life first
appeared on the surface of the world, whether we adopt
the original view of a distinct creative act for each
individual species, or prefer the later one of evolution
and progressive development.

To explain in some detail the anatomical structure
or existing Physical Geography of our island, as de-
pendent on the nature of its strata and the alterations
and denudations they have undergone is the main
object of this book. In making this attempt I shall

Object of Book. 37

first describe in some detail and in chronological order
all the rocky formations that constitute Great Britain,
with reference, where it can be done, to the Physical
Geology and Geography of each large special epoch,
for only in this way may we hope to get an idea of how
our island at length got into that phase of its history
in which we happen to live. If the reader has been
able to follow me in what I have already written, I
think he will understand what I shall have to say in
the remaining chapters.

CHAPTER IV.

IGNEOUS EOCKS, METAMORPHISM, SHRINKAGE AND DIS-
TURBANCE OF THE EARTH'S CRUST.

I HAVE already explained that all rocks are divided into
two great classes, those of aqueous and those of igneous
origin; and I have shown how aqueous rocks may generally
be known by their stratification and by the circumstance
that a great many of them contain relics of marine and
freshwater life, in the shape of fossil shells, fish-bones,
and other kinds of organic remains. The materials
also of which these beds are composed generally show
signs of having been in water, being rounded by the
action of the waves of the sea, or by the running waters
of rivers.

The other kinds of rocks, termed igneous, occasion-
allv are associated in different localities with the form-
ations named in the foregoing table. For instance,
there are no volcanic rocks in Wales associated with
the Carboniferous and Old Eed Sandstone strata, while
there are in Scotland, and true contemporaneous vol-
canic rocks are intercalated with the Lower Silurian
rocks of Wales and Cumberland, while there are none
associated with the equivalent strata in Scotland.
Some of these contemporaneous igneous rocks consist of
beds of volcanic ashes, others of old lavas, others of
masses of matter which were intruded among the strata
from below. Rocks that have been melted are known

Igneous Rocks. 39

to be igneous by their crystalline, slaggy, scoriaceous,
vesicular, or columnar structures, and also by the effects
they have produced on the strata
with which they are associated.
Shales, sandstones, &c., are often
hardened, bleached, and even
vitrified at the points of junc-
tion with greenstone, basaltic, i. Dyke with veins.
and felspathic dykes, or old lava 2- Overflow of basaltic lava.
• j //• n> j XT i • j 3- Altered strata at junction,

beds (fag. 9), and the same kind 4. Unaltered sandstone and

of alteration takes place on a shale-

greater scale when large masses of igneous rocks have

been intruded among the strata.

Then by comparing volcanic rocks of old date with
those of modern origin, we are able to decide with
perfect truth, that rocks which were melted long before
the human race appeared upon the world are yet of
truly igneous origin.

Changes of a more general character are especially
marked in cases where granite, syenite, felspar and
other porphyries and their allies, are associated with
stratified deposits. Their igneous affinities are known
by their crystalline structure, their modes of occurrence,
and the effects they produce on the strata. Granite is
composed of crystals of quartz, felspar, and mica ; and
syenite, according to old nomenclatures, of quartz,
felspar, and hornblende. They often send veins or dykes
into stratified rocks with which they are in contact,
as in figs. 10 and 11, and frequently all along the
line of junction, and often at great distances from it,
alterations of the strata of an extreme character (meta-
morphism) are common. One marked distinction be-
tween granitic and volcanic and ordinary trap rocks is,
that though injected veins of granite are common, granitic

4O Granite.

rocks never rose to the surface in a melted state, and
overflowed like lava streams. This and their frequently

FIG. 10.

A, vein of granite ; B, gneissic contorted mica-schist. The ramify-
ing white spaces are white quartz. Milldam Goatfell, Brodick,
Arran.

largely crystalline structure, together with peculiarities
of crystallisation showing the presence of moisture, and

FIG. 11.

1. Granitic mass with injected veins among gneissic rocks.

2. Gneiss, metamorphosed strata.

also the transformations effected on the adjoining strata,
prove the granitic rocks to have cooled and consolidated
deep beneath the surface.

A third division, or sub-class, is known as meta-
morphic rocks. All strata as they assume a solid form
become to a certain extent altered ; for originally they
were loose sediments of mud, sand, gravel, carbonate of
lime, or mixtures of these. When these were accumulated,
bed upon bed, till thousands of feet were piled one upon

Metamorphic Rocks. 41

the other, then, by intense and long-continued pressure,
heat, and chemical changes that took place in conse-
quence of infiltrations among the strata themselves, by
degrees they became changed into hard masses, consisting
of shale, sandstone, conglomerate, or limestone, as the
case may be. But these have not always remained in
the condition in which they were originally consoli-
dated, for it has often happened that disturbances of a
powerful kind took place, and strata originally flat have
been bent into every possible curve.

For long it was the fashion to attribute most of the
disturbances that the outer part of the earth has under-
gone to the intrusion of igneous rocks. The inclined
positions of beds, the contortions of stratified formations
in mountain chains, and even the existence of impor-
tant faults — in fact, disturbance of strata generally —
were apt to be referred to direct igneous action opera-
ting from below. Granite and its allies, from the time
of Hutton, were always, without exception, included in
the ordinary list of igneous rocks, and some writers of
deserved reputation still do so. In connection with
this subject, gneiss, and other kinds of metamorphic
rocks were, and by some are still, supposed to be exclu-
sively the effect of the direct intrusion of granite among
previously unaltered strata.

As a general rule highly metamorphosed rocks
occur in regions where the strata have been greatly
disturbed. Such rocks, when the metamorphism is
extreme, consist of gneiss, which may be micaceous,
hornblendic, or chloritic ; and of mica-schist, chlorite-
slate, talc-slate, hornblende-rock, crystalline limestone ,
quartz-rock, and a number of others, which it is not
necessary for my present purpose to name. In Scotland,
Irelaod, Norway, Canada, &c., limestones, calcareous

42 Granite and

sandstones, and sandstones, as they approach granites,
lose their (sometimes fossiliferous) characters, and become
changed into crystalline limestones, serpentine, &c., and
quartz rock. In other cases gradual changes of a differ-
ent kind are observed in slaty and schistose rocks as they
approach granites. Clay-slates are simply clays con-
solidated by pressure, often affected by cleavage, and
sometimes chemically altered. Approaching granites
ordinary slates often assume a foliated structure by the
development of distinct mineral layers of quartz, felspar,
and mica. This is gneiss. Analyse some kinds of mica-
slate, gneiss, and common sandy clay, and their average
composition will not differ more than three clays, three
pieces of gneiss, and three bits of granite often do from
each other.

Granite, is sometimes merely gneiss still further
metamorphosed by heat in the presence of moisture ;
and, though this is not the popular notion, I have long
held it, and some other geologists share this opinion.
When slate is changed to gneiss, there is no develop-
ment of materials which were previously absent, but
simply a re-arrangement of its constituents, according
to their chemical affinities, in rudely crystalline layers,
which seem in gneiss to have found facilities for their
development in pre-existing planes, whether of bedding
or of cleavage ; or, in other words, if the rocks be
uncleaved when metamorphism occurs, the foliated
planes show a tendency to coincide with those of bed-
ding ; but if intense cleavage has preceded, the foliation
will generally tend to follow the planes of cleavage.
Furthermore, in gneissic rocks, garnets, schorl, stauro-
lite and staurotide, hornblende, and other minerals are
frequent in some localities, especially near and in con-
tact with granite. All the chief materials of these are

Gneiss. 43

such as occur in the unaltered rock, and the chemical
action (brought into activity by heat and moisture)
which induced their development, may perhaps in some
cases have been assisted by sublimations proceeding
from melted matter below. The intensity in many
countries of these metamorphisms, extending over many
thousands of square miles (as in Scotland, Norway and
Sweden, and Canada), and through rocks thousands of feet
in thickness, proves that it was the result of a long-con-
tinued process, taking place probably in all cases at
considerable depths. The whole has then been up-
heaved and disturbed, often many times, and after de-
nudation the gneissic and the more thoroughly meta-
morphosed and sometimes intrusive granitic rocks were
at length exposed at the surface.

Some of the metamorphic rocks, which I have to
explain, have been highly disturbed, and in the north
occupy about one-half of Scotland. Most of this area
includes, and lies north-west of, the Grampian moun-
tains ; and I must endeavour to explain by what
processes metamorphism of rocks has taken place, not
in detail, but simply in such a mariner as to give a general
idea of the subject.

I have already said that typical gneiss consists of
irregular laminae of mica, quartz, and felspar, and it
frequently happens that they are bent, or rather
minutely folded, in a great number of convolutions, so
small, that in a few yards of gneiss they may sometimes
be counted by the hundred. All these metamorphic
rocks and granite, were by the old geologists called
Primary or Primitive strata, and were considered to
have been formed in the earliest stages of the world's
history, because in those countries that were first
geologically described, they were supposed to lie always

44 Gneiss, Old Theory.

at the base of all the ordinary strata. From the pecu-
liarity of the minute contortions in the gneissic rocks, a
theory now known to be erroneous was developed, which
was this :

It is frequently found that granite and granitic rocks
are intimately associated with gneiss. Thus we often
find masses and veins of granite, with gneiss upon their
flanks bent in a number of small wavy folds or contor-
tions. Granite is a crystalline rock, composed of fel-
spar, quartz, and mica, and the old theory (so far true)
was that the world at one time was in a state of perfect
igneous fusion ; but by and by, when it began to cool,
the materials arranged themselves as distinct minerals,
according to their different chemical affinities, and
consolidated as granite. The great globe was thus
composed entirely of granite at the surface ; and by and
by, as cooling still progressed, and water, by condensation,
attempted to settle on the surface which still remained
intensely heated, the water could not lie upon it, for
it was constantly being evaporated into the atmosphere ;
but when the cooling became more decided, and con-
solidation had fairly been established, then water was
able to settle on the surface of the heated granite. But
as yet it could not settle quietly like the present sea :
for by reason of strong radiating heat, all the sea was
supposed to be kept in a boiling state, playiag upon the
granite hills that rose above its surface. The detritus
thus worn from the granite by the waves of this primi-
tive sea was spread over its bottom; and because the
sea was boiling, the sediment did not settle down in the
form of regular layers, but became twisted and contorted
in the manner common in gneiss. All gneiss, therefore,
was conceived to be the original primitive stratified
rock of the world.

Contortion and Metamorphism. 45

Subsequent research has shown that this theory will
not hold ; for this, among other reasons, that we now
know gneissic rocks of almost all ages in the geological
scale. Thus in Scotland the gneissic rocks are of
Laurentian and Silurian age ; in Devon and Cornwall
we have gneiss both of so-called Devonian and Carboni-
ferous ages. In the Andes there are gneissic rocks of
the age of the Chalk, and in the Alps of the New Eed,
Liassic, Oolitic, and Cretaceous series; and in 1862 I
saw in the Alps an imperfect gneiss of Eocene date
pierced by granite veins, these strata being of the age
of some of the soft and often almost horizontal strata of
the London and Hampshire basins. It is therefore now
perfectly well known to geologists that the term Pri-
mitive, as applied to gneiss, is no longer tenable ;
and the old theory has been abandoned.

I have stated that regions occupied by meta-
morphic rocks are apt to be much contorted. There
seems, in fact, to be an intimate connection between
excessive disturbance of strata and metamorphism.
But by what means were masses of strata many thou-
sands of feet thick bent and contorted, and often raised
high into the air, so as to produce existing scenic
results by affording matter for air and water to work
upon ? Not by igneous pressure from below raising the
rocks, for that would stretch instead of crumpling
strata, in the manner in which we find them in the Alps,
Norway and the Highlands, or in less degree in Wales
and Cumberland ; but rather because of the radiation
from the earth of heat into space, gradually producing a
shrinkage of the earth's crust, which, here and there
giving way, became crumpled along lines more or less
irregular, producing partial upheavals, even though the
absolute bulk of the globe was diminishing by cooling

46 Shrinkage and

(figs. 3, 12, and 57). This, according to the theory long
ago proposed by Elie de Beaumont, and adopted by
De la Beche in his ' Eesearches in Theoretical Geology,'
is the origin of mountain chains. After water took its
place on the earth, by such processes land was again and
again raised within the influence of atmospheric disin-
tegration, and rain, rivers, and the sea, acting on it,
were enabled to distribute the materials of sedimentary
strata. Such disturbances of strata have been going
on through all known geological time, and I firmly
believe are still in progress.

Such shrinkage and crumpling, where it has been
most intense and on the greatest scale, is often (where
I know it) accompanied by the appearance of gneissic
or other metamorphic rocks, and often of granite or its
allies.

The oldest rock in the British Islands is gneiss,
but that originally was doubtless a common stratified
formation of some kind or other. In fact, as far as the
history told by the rocks themselves informs us, we
cannot get at their beginning, for all strata have been
made from the waste of rocks that existed before ; and
therefore the oldest stratified rocks, whether metamor-
phosed or not, have a derivative origin.

I must now briefly endeavour to give an idea of the
theory of metamorphism. The simplest kind is of that
nature mentioned in Chapter I. namely, when melted
matter has been forced through or overflows a stratified
rock, and remaining for a time in a melted state, an
alteration of the stratified rock in immediate contact
with it takes place. Thus sandstone may, by that
process, become converted into quartz-rock, which is
no longer hewable, like ordinary sandstone, but breaks
with a hard and splintery fracture. Here then rocks

Metamorphism. 47

have been changed in character for a short distance
from the agent that has been employed in effecting
that minor kind of metamorphism (figs. 4 and 9).

On a much larger scale, the phenomena we meet
with in a truly metamorphic region are as follows. In
the midst of a tract of mica-schist, gneiss, or other
altered rocks, a boss of granite (or one of its allies)
rises, like those for instance of Dartmoor and Cornwall
or of the north end of the Island of Arran. At a dis-
tance from the granite the beds may consist, perhaps,
of unaltered shale, or of slate, sandstone, and limestone.
As we approach the granite, the limestones become
crystalline, and often lose all traces of their fossils ;
the sandstones harden and pass into quartz-rocks, and
the shales or slates, or sandy beds and shales, lose their
ordinary bedded texture, and pass by degrees into mica-
schist, or perhaps gneiss, in which we find rudely
alternating laminae of quartz, felspar, and mica, often
arranged in gnarled or wavy lines (foliation, figs. 1 0 and
11). As we approach the granite still more closely, we
find possibly that, in addition to the layers of mica,
quartz, and felspar, distinct crystals^ such as garnets,
staurolites, schorl, &c., are developed near the points
of contact, both in the gneissic rock and in the granite
itself.

It is not necessary for my argument that I should
describe these minerals. It is sufficient at present to
state the fact that such minerals are developed under
these circumstances, and this is due to the influence of
metamorphism.

Furthermore in some cases, as in the Laurentian
rocks of Canada, great thicknesses of interstratifted
gneiss are so crystalline that, when a hand specimen
or even a small part of the country is examined, they

48 Analyses of Rocks.

might seem to be truly granitic ; but when the detailed
geology of the country has been worked out, they are
found to follow all the great anticlinal and synclinal
folds of metamorphosed strata that have also in a minor
way been intensely contorted. The same is the case
in parts of the Alps.

I have already stated that if we chemically analyse
a series of specimens of clays, shales, and slates, often
more or less sandy, together with various gneissic rocks
and granites, it is remarkable how closely the quantities
of their ultimate constituents, in many cases, approach
to each other. They are never identical, while yet the
resemblance is close, as close indeed as it may be in
two specimens of the same kind of sandy shale or slate.
In all of them silica would form by far the largest
proportion, say from 60 to 70 per cent. ; alumina would
come next, and then other substances, such as lime,
soda, potash, iron, &c., would be found in smaller
varying proportions ; and what I now wish to express
is, that the distinct minerals developed in the gneiss,
such as felspar, mica, garnets, &c., were not new sub-
stances introduced into the rock, by contact with
granite, or by any other process, but were all developed
under the influence of metamorphism from materials
that previously existed in the strata before their meta-
morphism began, aided by hydrothermal action due
to the presence of heated alkaline waters deep beneath
the surface of the earth. Through some process, in
which heat played a large part, the rock having been
softened, and water — present in most rocks underground
— having been diffused throughout the mass and heated,
chemical action was set up, and the substances that
composed the shale or slate, often mingled with silicious
sandy material, were enabled more or less to re-arrange

Mountain Chains. 49

themselves according to their chemical affinities, and
distinct mineral materials were developed in layers from
elements that were in the original rock.

I have stated that to produce this kind of meta-
morphism, heat aided by water is necessary, so as to allow
of internal movements in the rocks by the softening
of their materials, without which I do not see how
complete re-arrangement of matter accompanied by
crystallisation could take place ; and though it has
always been easy to form theories on the subject, yet
so little is known with precision about the interior of
the earth beyond a few thousand feet in depth, that
how to obtain the required heat is a difficulty.

From astronomical considerations it is believed by
many persons that the earth has been condensed from a
nebulous fluid, and passing into an intensely heated
melted condition, by radiation into space at length
cooled so far, that consolidation commenced at the
surface, and by degrees that surface has gradually been
thickening and overlies a melted nucleus within.

As the earth cooled and consequently gradually
shrunk in size, the hardened crust, in its efforts to
accommodate itself to the diminishing bulk of the
cooling mass within, became in places crumpled again
and again. Hence the upheaval of mountain chains and
disturbances of different dates, which have affected
strata of almost all geological ages.1

Reasoning on these disturbances, we know that strata
which were originally deposited horizontally have often

1 This theory is not universally received, and has been variously
developed by different authors, but it would be quite beyond my
present purpose to discuss the subject in detail, and, as far as I know,
the hypothesis proposed by Elie de Beaumont seems best to explain
the phenomena exhibited by the outside of the earth.

E

50 Internal Heat of the Earth

descended thousands of feet towards the centre of the
earth, by gradual sinking of the sea-bottom, and the
simultaneous piling up of newer strata upon them. The
layer that is formed to-day beneath the water forms the
actual sea-bottom ; but neither the land nor the sea-
bottom are steady. The land is in places slowly de-
scending beneath the sea, and sea-bottoms are them-
selves descending also. It has frequently happened,
therefore, that for a long period a steady descent over
a given area has taken place, and simultaneously with
this many thousands of feet of strata have by degrees
accumulated bed upon bed, as for example in the Pacific
Ocean in the region of modern atolls and barrier coral
reefs.

As we descend into the earth the temperature rises,
whence, in the main, the theory of central heat has been
derived. In our latitude heat increases about 1° for
every sixty feet, and the temperature therefore, at so
great a depth as 30,000 feet, to which it could be
shown some strata have sunk, may at present be about
500°. Furthermore, strata that were deposited hori-
zontally have been frequently disturbed and thrown
into rapid contortions, or into great sweeping curves ;
and by this means especially, strata which once were at
the surface have often been thrown twenty, thirty, or
forty thousand feet downwards, and therefore more
within the influence of internal heat, as, for instance,
in the bed marked * fig. 12, which may be supposed to
represent a large tract of country. I do not wish it to
be understood that the globe is entirely filled with
melted matter — that is a question still in doubt ; but
were this book specially devoted to general questions of
theoretical geology, I think I could prove, that the heat
in the interior of the globe in places sometimes appar-

and Metamorphism. 5 1

ently capriciously eats its way towards the surface by
the hydrOthermal fusion or alteration of parts of the
earth's crust, in a manner not immediately connected
with the more superficial phenomena of volcanic action

FIG. 12.

— and for this, among other reasons, it may happen
that strata which are contorted, have in places been
brought within the direct and powerful influence of
great internal heat. Under some such circumstances,
we can easily understand how stratified rocks may have
been so highly heated that they were actually softened ;
and most rocks being moist (because water that falls
upon the surface often percolates to unknown depths),
chemical actions were set going, resulting in a re-
arrangement of the substances which composed the
sedimentary rock. Thus certain strata, essentially
composed of silica and silicates of alumina, and alkalies
such as soda and potash, may have become changed into
crystalline gneiss.

This theory of re-arrangement leads me to another
question— connected with, but not quite essential to
my argument, as far as relates to physical geography
—viz., What is the origin of granite, which in most
manuals is only classed as an igneous rock ? For my
part, with some other geologists, I believe that in one
sense it is an igneous rock — that is to say, much of it
has often been completely fused. But in another sense

» 2

5 2 Origin of Granite.

it is often a metamorphic rock, because it is some-
times impossible to draw any definite line between
gneiss and granite, for they pass into each other by in-
sensible gradations. About half-way up the Matter-
horn in the Alps, among the largely-contorted beds, a
thick stratum occurs, one end of which is true gneiss,
on the western side of the mountain, which striking
towards the eastern cliff, gradually gets more and more
crystalline till at length it passes into true granite. On
the largest scale, both in Canada and in the Alps, I have
frequently seen varieties of gneissic rocks regularly inter-
bedded with less altered strata, the gneiss being so crys-
talline, that in a hand specimen it is impossible to
distinguish it from some granitic rocks, and even on a
large scale the uneducated eye will constantly mistake
them for granites. Another very important circumstance
is that granite and its allies frequently occupy the
spaces that ought to be filled with gneiss or other rocks,
were it not that they have been entirely fused and
changed into granite. I therefore believe that many of
the granite rocks I have seen, are simply the result of the
extreme of metamorphism brought about by great heat
with presence of water.

One reason why it has been inferred that granite is
not a common igneous rock is that, enveloping the
crystals of felspar and mica, there is generally a quan-
tity of free silica, not always crystallised in definite
forms like the two other materials. Silica being far
less easily fusible than felspar, it seems clear that had
all the substances that form granite been merely fused
like common lavas, the silica ought on partial cooling
to have crystallised first, whereas the felspar and mica
htave crystallised first, and the silica not used in the
formation of these minerals wraps them round often in

Fluid Cavities in Qiiartz. 53

an amorphous form. Therefore it is said that it was
probably held in partial solution in hot water, even after
crystallisation by segregation of the other minerals had
begun. This theory, now held by several distinguished
physical and chemical geologists, seems to me to be
sound, especially as it agrees exceedingly well with the
metamorphic theory as applied to gneiss — granite being
sometimes simply the result of the extreme of meta-
morphism. In other words, when the metamorphism
has been so great that all traces of the semi-crystalline
laminated structure has disappeared, a more perfect
crystallisation has taken place, and the result is a
granitic mass without any minor lamination in it. Even
then, however, certain planes often remain, strongly
suggestive of original stratification, and even of planes
of oblique stratification or false-bedding.

These general results are not founded on mere conjec-
tures. In a memoir by Mr. H. C. Sorby, 'On the Micro-
scopical Structure of Crystals, indicating the Origin of
Minerals and Rocks,' among other important points, he
describes numerous small cavities in the quartz of granites,
which are partly filled with water ' holding in solution
the chlorides of potassium and sodium, the sulphates
of potash, soda, and lime, sometimes one and sometimes
the other salt predominating.' These ' fluid cavities '
sometimes make up about five per cent, of the volume
of the quartz, and he concludes that 'the fluid was not
an accidental ingredient due to the percolation of water
to a fused mass naturally containing none, but & genuine
constituent of the rock when melted.' Reasoning on the
underground temperatures necessary to expand the
liquid so as to fill the cavities, by an elaborate process
of argument he arrives at the approximate result, that
' the pressures under which granites were most probably

54 Granite.

formed' indicate depths from the surface varying from
15,100 to 65,500 feet. From certain passages it is
evident that Mr. Sorby considers that gneiss and granite
were formed approximately under similar circumstances.
I quote this thoroughly philosophical memoir, that the
reader may be less startled with the statement, that
gneiss and some granites were formed by the metamor-
phosis of strata at depths counted by many thousands of
feet, and also to give strength to athe assertion, that
under such circumstances water was present.1

If the above views be correct, though many granites
having been completely fused have been injected among
strata, and are thus to be classed as intrusive rocks, yet
in the main, so far from the intrusion of granite having
produced many mountains by mere upheaval, both
gneiss and granite would rather seem to be often the
results of the forces that formed certain mountain
chains. Possibly this result was connected with the
contraction of the earth's crust and the heat produced
by the intense lateral pressure that, with much move-
ment of parts, produced the contortion of vast masses
of strata, parts of which, now exposed by denudation,
were then deep underground, and already acted on by
the internal heat of the earth in a degree proportionate
to their depth.2

1 See 'Journal of the Geological Society,' vol. xiv., 1858. Sorby.

2 See Report, Brit. Assoc. 1866, p. 47 : < Address to the Geological
Section,' Ramsay. Also an elaborate memoir by Mr. Robert Mallet,
' On Volcanic Energy, &c.,' Trans. Royal Soc., vol. clxiii. p. 147.

55

\

CHAPTER V.

LAURENTIAN, CAMBRIAN, AND LOWER SILURIAN
ROCKS.

THE LAURENTIAN ROCKS are the oldest formations at
present known in the world. They are metamorphic
and mostly gneissic in character, and were for long
classed as granitic and igneous rocks till their true
nature was shown by the late Sir William Logan.
They occupy vast tracts of country in Labrador and
Canada, and are well seen on the north of the river
Ottawa. They consist of two divisions, Lower and
Upper Laurentian^ the upper, according to Logan,
lying quite unconformably on the lower strata. The
gneiss of the lower division is chiefly orthoclase gneiss
of great thickness, and it is inter stratified with several
thick bands of crystalline limestone, sometimes ser-
pentinous, in one of which a remarkable foraminifer
called Eozoon Canadense was found. This is the
oldest known fossil. The upper Laurentian rocks,
which also contain beds of limestone, are to a great
extent formed of Labrador felspar, and in these no
fossils are known.

In the Outer Hebrides and on the west coast of the
Highlands between Cape Wrath and Tiree, Laurentian
rocks occur of highly metamorphic gneiss, interpene-

56 Laurentian Rocks.

trated by numerous veins of granite. These strata
much more closely resemble the Lower than the Upper
Laurentian rocks of Canada, and though, at so great a
distance from America, it is impossible to prove that they
are equivalent formations, the presumption that they are
of Laurentian age is very strong, and not the less so that
strata, having all the characters of Cambrian rocks, lie
quite unconformably upon them, fig. 54, p. 285. The
district was first described by Sir Roderick Murchison.
I can answer for the accuracy of his descriptions, having
inspected the ground with him, and personally mapped
a portion of the country at and about Durness. I know
of no other part of the British Islands in which Lau-
rentian strata certainly occur.1 No fossils have yet
been observed in these British rocks.

The CAMBRIAN and SILURIAN ROCKS of the British
series come next in succession. If these strata were
to be classified for the first time in England, with my
present knowledge, I would divide them into three, as
the most convenient method. The first series would
include the purple and green grits and slates of the
Longmynd and Wales, and range upward as high as
the top of the Tremadoc slates ; the second would range
from the base of the Arenig slates to the top of the
Bala or Caradoc beds, and the third from the base of
the Upper Llandovery beds to the top of the Ludlow
rocks. In Wales and its neighbourhood, where the
most typical series is found, each of these great bound-
ary lines is marked by unconformity, and analogous
unconformities are more or less found elsewhere in the
British Islands.

1 After their discovery by Murchison, the Laurentian rocks and
other details in the Highlands were mapped by Professor Geikie,
F.R.S. See his Geological Map of Scotland, 1876.

Cambrian Rocks. 57

It is probable, however, that only a few persons
would as yet agree with me in this classification, and
indeed, since the first publication, by Mr. Murchison, of
' The Silurian System,' dedicated to Professor Sedgwick
in 1839, there has been, after a temporary lull, but
little unanimity among British geologists on a subject
about which European and American geologists care
but little, and which is to a great extent a matter of
local opinion.

In 1841 and 1842 Sir Henry de la Beche and those
who worked with him, adopted the term Cambrian
for all the purple grits and slates of St. David's and the
Longmynd, then supposed to be unfossiliferous ; while
the name Silurian, nearly in the same sense as used by
Murchison, was employed for all the strata between the
uppermost beds of these rocks and the top of the Ludlow
series. When the Government Geological Survey
reached North Wales this classification continued for
a time unchallenged. Professor Sedgwick had pre-
viously called the equivalents of part of these strata in
the north of England the CUMBRIAN series, and at that
time he called the blue and grey slaty series of Wales
the CAMBRIAN series, on the assumption, then unques-
tioned, that they were all older than the recognised
Llandeilo flags of Murchison. But in the progress of
investigation by Sedgwick and many others, it ap-
peared that his original Cambrian, and Murchison's
original Lower Silurian strata, were in great part
equivalent, and the great Professor of Cambridge
naturally reclaimed all that part of his kingdom, the
boundaries of which had, for all Wales, not been clearly
defined when he first tried to subdue it. He therefore,
maintained, that the true Cambrian series included all
the strata from the base of the purple slates and grits

58 Cambrian

to the top of the Bala beds or Caradoc sandstone of
Murchison.

By way of healing differences and striking a just
middle boundary, Professor Phillips and Sir Charles
Lyell proposed that the term Cambrian should be used
as including all the strata from the known base of the
Longmynd, St. David's, and North Wales purple grits
and slates, through the Lingula flags up to the top of
the Tremadoc slates, a proposition which satisfied
neither of the claimants.

This is not a book in which to enter into the details
of a controversy which has comparatively little interest
beyond the confines of the British Islands, and will by-
and-by be forgotten along with other minor debates, that
in their day were of equal or more importance ; but I
have thought it worth while to sketch out the questions
involved, that in the conflict of lecturers and writers of
memoirs and manuals, ordinary readers may know
something of the origin of the varieties of opinion im-
plied in the different nomenclatures. In the meanwhile
I shall use the old-fashioned nomenclature adopted by
the Geological Survey, as most convenient for me, see-
ing that if any one in reading this book should find it
needful to look at the maps and sections of that Survey,
and at most other maps as well, he will find the word
Cambrian restricted to those strata, that at St. David's,
and in Merionethshire lie below the base of the Mene-
vian beds. In this sense, then : —

THE CAMBRIAN ROCKS of Wales consist of the purple
grits and slates, that form the greater part of the group
of hills that lie east of Cardigan Bay between the
estuaries of the Mawddach and most of the country
S.S.W. of Ffestiniog. In that region their strati-
graphical relation to the overlying Lower Silurian

Rocks. 59

rocks will be seen by referring to fig. 62, p. 322. They
form there the lowest central strata of a broad anti-
clinal curve. They are also well seen in the Passes of
Llanberis and Nant Ffrancon in Carnarvonshire, where
the celebrated slate quarries of Penrhyn and Llanberis
lie in these strata. The slates are purple, purplish-
blue, and green; and associated with them are beds
of greenish and grey grits and conglomerates. It is
important to observe that at Llanberis the latter contain
numerous water- worn pebbles of felspathic traps, jasper,
greenstone, black and purple slate, &c., so that these,
forming part of the oldest rocks of Wales, have been
partly derived from pre-existing rocky lands, simi-
lar to those that now form the neighbouring Silurian
country, but no visible trace remains of this more ancient
physical geography, except the pebbles in the con-
glomerate. In Anglesea the equivalent rocks are meta-
morphic chlorite and mica-schist and gneiss.

Cambrian strata also occur in the hills of the
Longmynd of Shropshire, where the strata stand nearly
on end. They consist of green, grey, and purple slaty
rocks, grits, and conglomerates. The only traces of
fossils yet discovered in these consist of worm-burrows,
and a trilobite, Palceopyge Ramsayi.

FIG. 13.

Section across the Longmynd and Shelve country.
Shelve Longmynd

1. Cambrian grits and slates. 2. Lingula flags of the Stiper stones.
3. Tremadoc beds. 4. Llandeilo and Caradoc rocks with igneous
interstratifi cations. 5. Upper Llandovery and Wenlock rocks.

At St. David's, in North Pembrokeshire, in equiva-
lent strata, Mr. Hicks found the following fossils in

6o

Cambrian

purple shales among the lowest beds of the series : —
A small bivalve crustacean Leperditia Solvensis and L.
Cambrensis.) two small Brachiopods, Lingulella ferru-
ginea and L. primceva. In a higher part of the series,
consisting chiefly of yellowish sandstones and gray shales,
he also found two sponges (Protospongia) and various
trilobites, Microdiscus sculptus, Conocoryphe Lyellii
and C. Solvensis, Paradoxides Harknessii, Plutonia
Sedgwickii, Agnostus Cambrensis, and a Pteropod
Theca antiqua. These rocks had previously been con-

FIG. 14.

Theca antiqua.

Microdiscus sculptu?.

Agnostus Cambrensis.

Lingulella ferruginea Paradoxides Harknessii. Leperditia Cambrensis.

Group of Cambrian Fossils.

sidered unfossiliferous, and the discovery is important
as showing that in sediments so old there existed a
considerable development of life of the same general
type as that found in overlying Silurian strata.

In Sutherlandshire, as already stated, red Cambrian
conglomerates lie on the Laurentian strata unconform-

Rocks. 6 1

ably, and fossils discovered in the north of Scotland by
Mr. Peach prove that Lower Silurian rocks (somewhat
metamorphic) rest un conformably on both.

Till within the last few years it was customary to
consider that all formations which had not yielded
fossilised fresh-water shells were of marine origin. Mr.
Godwin-Austen first broke through this fallacy, and
often insisted that the Old Eed Sandstone, as distinct
from the Devonian rocks, was deposited in fresh-water
lakes.

In 1871, I published two memoirs in the Journal
of the Geological Society, in which I attempted to
prove that in a broad sense, the red formations of
Britain were deposited in lakes, salt or fresh, or in
inland areas in which salt and fresh water alternated.
In one of these,1 I ventured to state ' that the absence
of marine mollusca in the Cambrian rocks ' of North
Wales and the Longmynd, as yet observed, may be due
to the same cause that produced their absence in the
Old Eed Sandstone (see p. 106), and that 'the presence
of sun-cracks and rain-pittings in the Longmynd beds
favours this suggestion.' The occurrence of marine
fossils, chiefly in the grey slates and ' olive-green grits
and shales ' of St. David's, as described by Mr. Hicks,
' may/ I state, ' possibly mark occasional influxes of the
sea into inland waters, due to oscillations of level,' pro-
ducing the same kind of alternations of marine and
fresh-water strata that occur in the Carboniferous series,
and in the Miocene beds of Switzerland and the Rhine.

It is but right to state, however, that, as regards
the Cambrian rocks, mine is not the usual opinion.

The LOWER SILURIAN rocks which conformably

1 On the Bed Kocks of England of older date than the Trias.
March 1871, ' Journal of the Geological Society,' vol. xxviii.

62

Menevian Beds.

overlie the Cambrian strata, have been classed under
various subdivisions, from the presence in each of
certain Trilobites and other fossils, sometimes peculiar
to, and sometimes more or less prevalent in, each sub-
formation. To the oldest of these the name Menevian

FIG. 15.

Protocystites
Menevensis.

Paradoxides aurora.

Arionellus longicephahis.

•

Conocoryphe coronata. Protospongia fenestrata. Discina pileolus.

Group of Menevian Fossils.

beds has been given, so called from Menapia, the old
Koman name of St. David's. They are of inconsider-
able thickness, and are found both in that district
and in North Wales, circling round the Cambrian rocks
of Merionethshire from Barmouth to Harlech, and in

Lingula Flags. 63

both areas there is a lithological passage and con-
formity between the Cambrian and Menevian strata,
fig. 62, p. 322.

Four species of sponges are at present known in
the Menevian beds of St. David's, named by Mr. Hicks.
They are all of his genus Protospongia, and one of
them, P. fenestrata, is found in the underlying Cam-
brian strata, also one Cystidean, Protocystites Mene-
vensis, a few Annelid tracks, and more than thirty
species of Trilobites of the genera Agnostus, Arionellus,
Anopolenus, Conocoryphe, Erinnys, Holocephalina,
Paradoxides, and Carrausia. Of these, seven species
belong to the genus Agnostus, one of which, A. Cam-
brensis, is also found in the Cambrian rocks, as its
name implies. There are seven species of Conocoryphe,
three of which are also Cambrian species, viz. C. ap-
planata, C. Bufo, and C. humerosa. Paradoxides
aurora is also common to both formations, and a few
Brachiopoda, such as Discina pileolus, Lingulella
ferruginea and Obolella sagittalis. Of Pteropods the
genus Theca is common, but, as far as I know, no
Lammellibranch molluscs or Gasteropoda are found
in these strata.

The Lingula flags rest conformably on, and in fact
pass by lithological gradations into the Menevian beds
(fig. 62, p. 322). They are best developed in Merioneth-
shire, Carnarvonshire, and at St. David's, and consist of
black and gray slaty rocks with beds of grit.

In these a marked and distinctive suite of fossils
occurs, the chief of which are Lingulella Davisii, and
many genera of Crustacea — Conocoryphe bucephala
and two others, Agnostus (4), Paradoxides (2), Holo-
cephalina (1), Anapolenus (2), Erinnys, and Cono-
cephalus— all Trilobites ; also a phyllopod crustacean,

64 Lingula Flags.

Hymenocaris vermicauda, and the bivalve crustacean
Leperditia bupestris. Various annelids are found,
Cruziana, &c., and in the higher part of the strata
Polyzoa, of the genus Fenestella, together with a few

FIG. 16.

Hymenocaris vermicauda. Orthis lenticularis.

Group of Lingula Flag Fossils.

brachiopoda of the genus Orthis, 0. lenticularis and
others, Obolella sagittalis and maculata, and Discina
labiosa, three species of Theca (pteropods), &c.

Of the fossils of this formation Pi otospongia fenes-
trata is common in the strata from the Cambrian to
the Lower Lingula flags, Agnostus Davidis and A.
scutalis, Anopolenus Henrici, A. Salteri are also
found in the Menevian beds, together with Conocoryphe
applanata, and C. humerosa, both of which begin in

Tremadoc Slates. 65

the Cambrian strata, while G. variolaris is common
to the Lingula and Menevian strata. Paradoxides
Harknessii, P. Hicksii, and P. aurora are common
to all three formations, and P. Davidis to the two
higher divisions. The same kind of passage of species
upward from the Cambrian slates and grits to the
Lingula flags, may be observed in some of the few
genera and species of Brachiopoda, Lamellibranchiata,
and Pteropoda, and I have specially insisted on this, in
connection with the fact, that at the junction of the
so-called three formations, there is no marked line of
division, but a lithological gradation from the lower
to the higher strata, accompanied by the passage of
species from lower to higher geological horizons.

The Tremadoc slates succeed the Lingula flags, and
may be considered as an upper member of that series,
while the red and grey Cambrian rocks form a lower
member. There is no clear lithological boundary-line
between them, and the whole lie conformably. Four-
teen genera of Trilobites are known in Wales from these
strata, the most characteristic of which are Asaphus
Homphrayi, &c., Angelina Sedgwicki, Psilocephalus
inflatus, &c., and Niobe Homphrayi. Several of the
genera of Trilobites are common to the Lingula flags
and the Cambrian beds below. Of these, Agnostus prin •
ceps is found in the Menevian beds, and Conocoryphe
depressa, C. invita, and Olenus alatus in the Lingula
flags. Orthis Carausii is a characteristic brachiopod,
and Lingulella Davisii and L. lepis are common to
these strata and to the Lingula flags, together with
Obolella plicata and 0. Salteri, while 0. sagittalis
ranges from the Cambrian up to the Tremadoc slates.
In Eamsey Island near St. David's many Lamelli-
branchiate molluscs have been found by Mr. Hicks, of

66

Tremadoc Slates.

the genera Palcearca, Glyptarca, Davidia, Modiolopsis,
and others, also Theca operculata, and other Pteropoda,
and several species of Bellerophon occur (J?. Arfonensis,
&c.), together with Cephalopoda, viz., Orthoceras seri-

FIG. 17.

Niobe Homfrayi. Palaearca Hopkinsoni. Orthis carausii.

Group of Tremadoc Slate Fossils.

ceum, and Cyrtoceras prcecox ; also Encrinites, and a
starfish, Palasterina Ramseyensis. Altogether, as
now known, the life of the time was richer than that of
the Cambrian and Lingula flag strata, but all of these
faunas are probably very imperfect and fragmentary in
the British area.

Physical Geography. 67

Leaving these details of stratification, I will now
endeavour to catch a glimpse of the physical geography
of our area during the time that the Cambrian, Lin-
gula, and Tremadoc rocks were being deposited. I have
already stated that the purple strata of the Cambrian
series seem to me to have been deposited in inland
fresh waters, subject to influxes of the sea, probably
owing to occasional subsidence of the land ; in the same
manner, for example, that in Tertiary times the Miocene
strata of Switzerland and the Ehine were deposited in
great fresh-water lakes, in areas that underwent local
temporary submergence. The thick strata of sandstones
in the Cambrian rocks of Merionethshire, indicate the
neighbourhood of land, and in Caernarvonshire the
numerous beds of sandstone and coarse conglomerate
interstratified with mud deposits — now slates, point not
only to the proximity of land, but even give a clear idea
of the kinds of rock of which that land was made.
' In the 8,000 feet of these rocks in Merionethshire
there is very little slate, and even the 700 or 1,000
feet of interstratified slaty beds in Caernarvonshire are
quite subordinate to the grits and conglomerates. * * * '
' The structure of this land may be partly inferred
from the nature of the pebbles in the conglomerate,
which are water-worn, and consist of purple and black
slates, quartz-rock, felspathic traps, quartz-porphyries,
and jaspers.'

The country from which these pebbles were derived
must, indeed, have physically resembled North Wales
of the present day, ' but except these pebbles no
trace of that land remains in or near North Wales/1
Fragments of this old continent, however, probably
still exist in the Laurentian rocks of the Outer He-
1 « The Geology of North Wales,' p. 160. A. C. Ramsay.
F 2

68 Physical Geography.

brides, on the coast of the West Highlands, where ex-
ceedingly red Cambrian sandstones and conglomerates
lie quite unconformably on the Laurentian strata.

While the Menevian and Lingula beds were being-
deposited I think it more than probable that the pre-
Cambrian continent still existed, for in the gritty strata
that form a large part of the Lingula flags, and in the
frequent presence of current marks (often called ripple-
marks), there are many signs that these strata were de-
posited in shallow water, and thus it would happen,
that during the time when these and the Tremadoc beds
were being formed, the whole area was undergoing a
process of slow sinking, into which sediments were being
constantly carried, just in proportion as the gradual de-
pression went on, so that, in the long run, what witli
the effects of sub-aerial degradation, and what with the
results of progressing submersion, the old pre-Cambrian
land of this neighbourhood finally was buried and
disappeared.

69

CHAPTER VI.

ARENIG, LLANDEILO, AND BALA BEDS.

The Arenig Beds succeed the Tremadoc slates at
St. David's in South Wales, and in North Wales they
also overlie the Tremadoc slates between Towyn and the
neighbourhoods of Dolgelli, Ffestiniog, Tremadoc, and
Criccieth in Caernarvonshire, north of which they also
occur in part of the country between Caernarvon and
Bangor. They were first distinguished by Professor
Sedgwick, and named Arenig slates, and afterwards
termed lower Llandeilo beds by Sir Roderick Murchi-
son, who had previously included them as part of the
Llandeilo flags in his descriptions and sections of the
Lower Silurian rocks that lie west of the Stiper Stones
near Shelve, in Shropshire.

In the large district of Merionethshire the Arenig
slates appear at the base of the great volcanic series of
felspathic lavas and ashes, of which the mountains of
Cader Idris, Aran Mowddwy, Arenig, and the Moelwyns
form distinguished features in the landscape. They are
in these districts never more than about 800 feet in
thickness, and the Arenig beds of Merionethshire, at
their base invariably consist of beds of grit, sometimes
conglomeratic. The higher strata of this sub-forma-
tion are generally slaty. For reasons that will after-
wards appear, I believe that the Arenig strata, on a

7o Arenig Slates.

large scale, rest unconformably on the underlying rocks
of North Wales.

In Cumberland the Arenig slates form the moun-
tains of Skiddaw and Saddleback, and from the borders
of the Old Red Sandstone, a few miles further east, they
stretch right across the country westward to Egremont
and northward to Sunderland, south of which town, near
Cockermouth, they are directly overlaid by the Carbon-
iferous Limestone. In that country they have usually
been called the Skiddaw slates. In Scotland the
Durness strata belong to the same rocks.

In Britain the fossils that belong to this part of the
Silurian series are not very numerous, taken as a whole,
though some groups are remarkably abundant. As far
as observation has gone, Hydrozoa of the sub-class
Graptolitidse first appear in these strata, including some
20 genera and 48 species. The greatest number of
species belong to the genus Didymograptus, of which
20 species have been named, after which come Tetra-
graptus, Diplograptus, Dichograptus, and Dendro-
graptus.

Eighteen genera and 47 species of Trilobites occur
in the same rocks, including Agnostus (A. hirundo,
&c.) ; Asaphus (A. Homfrayi, &c.) ; Ogygia (0. Sel-
wynii, &c.) ; Trinucleus (T. Ramsayi, &c.) ; Calymene
(C. parvifrons, &c.), and many others. Of Brachio-
poda there are 7 genera and 18 species including three
Lingulas, Lingulella Davisii and L. lepis, 7 species
of Orthis, including 0. calligramma and 0. lenticu-
laris ; 2 species of Obolella ; 2 of Discina, and others.
Of Lamellibranchiata there are only 5 genera and 8
species known, including Modiolopsis trapeziceformis,
Palcearca socialis, and P. amygdalus, Ctenodonta
elongata, &c., and Redonia Anglica. Pteropoda of

Llandeilo and Caradoc Beds, 71

the genera Thecci and Conularia are found, and 6 species
of Bellerophon, and of Cephalopoda there are 5 species
of Orthoceras. Of univalve shells we have only 3
species — Pleurotomaria Llanvernensis, Ophileta, and
Raphistoma, and several other fossils needless to enu-
merate.

In all, 184 species are known at present in the
Arenig beds, mostly characteristic of these strata, for
only about 8 per cent, pass upward into this horizon
from the Tremadoc beds, a proportion of which go down
into the Lingula flags, and about 7 per cent, pass up-
ward into the Llandeilo flags.

Though in Wales the base of the Arenig beds is
clear, it seems as yet impossible to draw any definite
physical boundary between the Arenig beds and the
overlying Llandeilo slates, for there is nothing like un-
conformity, and no marked lithological difference in the
passage from one to the other. We have already seen
that there is a very limited passage of species from the
Arenig slates into those of the so-called Llandeilo series.1

Just about this time an important episode took
place in the history of the Llandeilo and Bala beds over
large tracts of Wales and Cumberland, for a series of
volcanic eruptions occurred on a great scale while the
strata were being deposited (fig. 62, p. 322). To this
subject I shall by-and-by return.

In North Wales the Llandeilo and Bala or Caradoc
beds combined, attain a thickness of from 4,000 to 6,000
feet, consisting chiefly of slaty rocks, sometimes inter-
stratified with grits and occasional bands of limestone,
of which the Bala Limestone is the most conspicuous.
The whole series ranges right round the mountains of

1 The Llandeilo flasks of North Wales are very unlike those of
Llandeilo, which are generally called Upper Llandeilo beds.

72 Llandeilo and Caradoc Beds.

Cader Idris, Aran Mowddwy, Arenig, and the Moelwyns,
resting on the lava beds and ashes, and overlaid on the
east by Upper Silurian strata, fig. 57, p. 304. They
also form, with igneous rocks, the larger part of the
Berwyn mountains, and with the Arenig slates the
whole of the ground between the Stiper Stones and the
Upper Silurian rocks of Chirbury and Montgomery, fig.
13, p. 59. The typical Caradoc Sandstone, crossing
the strike, ranges between Church Stretton and Caer
Caradoc, from whence it stretches in a broad band
northward towards the Wrekin, and southward to
Corston. The greater part of South Wales is formed
of slates and grits of Llandeilo and Caradoc age, lying
west and north of the Upper Silurian and Old Red
Sandstone strata, and the same formations, associated
with volcanic rocks, rise like an island surrounded by
Upper Silurian strata, in the country between Builth
and Llandegley in Radnorshire.

In South Wales, where they were first described by
Murchison, the Llandeilo beds consist of sandy cal-
careous flags, black slaty rocks, and beds of grit and
sandstone. A few beds of limestone occur in them in
Carmarthenshire, at Llandeilo, and in Pembrokeshire
near Narberth ; and the Bala limestone is found
higher in the series in the Caradoc or Bala beds of
Merionethshire. They are often highly fossiliferous.
There is a much larger development of fossils in the
Llandeilo flags than in the pre-existing Silurian strata.
The Trilobites of the Llandeilo beds are mostly peculiar
to it, and the genera JEglina, Barrandia, and Ogygia
are very common, Ogygia Buchii being especially cha-
racteristic. Viewed as a whole, however, the Llandeilo
beds, as already stated, pass insensibly into, and have
many genera and species in common with the Caradoc

Llandeilo and Caradoc Fossils. 73

FIG. 18.

Euomphalus corndensis. Modiolopsis expansus. Palsearca amygdalus.

Group of Llandeilo flag and Caradoc or Bala Fossils.

74 Llandeilo and Caradoc Beds.

Sandstone or Bala beds. 19 genera and 34 species of
corals have been described in these lower Silurian strata,
among which Heliolites and Petraia are perhaps the
most common.

Fragments of Echinodermata are common, including
Cystideans, common in the Bala Limestone, and one
star-fish, Palceaster Caractaci. In all, more than 40
genera and 200 species of Trilobites have been described
from the whole series of Lower Silurian British rocks,
among the chief of which are species of Olenus, Ag-
nostus, Ampyx, Lichas, Ogygia, Acidaspis, Asaphus,
Harpes, Ulcenus, Phacops, and Trinudeus (T. Carac-
taci). In the Caradoc beds alone, 23 genera and 111
species are known. Of bivalve shells there are 22
genera and 171 species of Brachiopoda, the most com-
mon of which belong to the genera Strophomena,
Leptcena, Lingula, Orthis, and Rhynchonella.

Of the Lamellibranchiate molluscs there are 17
genera and 87 species known at present, prominent
among which are Ctenodonta, Modiolopsis, Pterincea,
Palcearca, and Ambonychia. Of Pteropoda there are
known 6 genera and 31 species, of which Theca is most
abundant; 16 genera and 66 species of Grasteropoda,
the most characteristic of which in point of numbers
are Euomphalus (10), Murchisonia (15), Pleuroto-
wia/ria, Cyclo7iema,a,rLdHolopcea. Of Nucleobranchiata,
Bellerophon (14). Of the Cephalopoda there are 10
genera and 62 species — Cyrtoceras (5), Lituites (6),
Orthoceras (42), Phragmoceras (1), and others. No
fishes nor any other vertebrate animals have yet
been found in the Lower Silurian rocks of Wales or
elsewhere.

In Cumberland the Coniston Limestone is believed
to be the equivalent of the Bala Limestone of North

Igneous Rocks. 75

Wales, and the assemblage of fossils in each is very
nearly the same.

I have already mentioned the occurrence of an im-
portant episode characterised by volcanic eruptions,
during the accumulation of the Lower Silurian strata
in Wales. The proof of this is that in Carnarvonshire
and Merionethshire extensive interstratified sheets of
felspathic lavas and ashes are associated with the
Silurian rocks on two horizons, the lower that of the
Llandeilo beds, and the higher in the Caradoc series.
I do not, however, wish to imply that between them
there was a complete cessation of volcanic activity,
but simply that in what is now the region of North
Wales, there was for a time an interval of comparative
repose.

If any one will examine the Geological Survey maps
of North Wales, he will observe that opposite Barmouth,
beginning with the hills on the south side of the
estuary of the Mawddach, a great series of igneous
rocks sweep round the country in a crescent form, in-
cluding the mountains of Cader Idris, Aran Mowddwy,
the Arenigs, and lastly the Moelwyns, the high southern
escarpments of which overlook from the north the
beautiful vale of Ffestiniog. These consist of felspathic
lavas, and interstratified ashes or tufas, the whole
being also associated with bands of Silurian slate,
which are sometimes found to be fossiliferous, especially
when bedding and cleavage coincide. Among these
volcanic rocks, but especially in the Arenig, Tremadoc,
and Lingula beds below them, there are numerous lines
and bosses of greenstones (diorites, &c.), and also of
more purely felspathic traps, which are not interbedded
but distinctly intrusive. These I have elsewhere shown
give evidence of the underground working of the

76 Igneous Rocks.

melted matter, the eruption of which to the surface
through volcanic rents, produced the lava-flows and
ashes already mentioned. The ashy beds are sometimes
coarse and tufaceous, but were also often formed of
fine volcanic dust, which being now consolidated into
hard felspathic rocks, are at first sight somewhat diffi-
cult to distinguish from the associated lavas. Practice,
however, renders it comparatively easy, and in distin-
guishing the difference, the observer is aided by the
circumstance, that underneath each lava current the
slates, once beds of mud, are apt to be baked and por-
cellanised at the point of junction with the originally
hot lavas, which having in the meanwhile cooled, the
slaty beds that rest on them are in that respect un-
altered.

The second series of eruptions may be traced
as follows. Near Bala, not far below the limestone,
there are a few thin bands of volcanic ashes. These,
as we go northward to the rivers Machno, Lledr, and
Conwy, gradually thicken, and by-and-by get mingled
in that slaty area with numerous thin and thick bands
of felspathic lavas, the importance of which as large
masses, culminates in Snowdon and the surrounding
area, going northward by Grlyder-fawr, Grlyder-fach,
Carnedd Dafydd, and Carnedd Llewelyn, and so on to
Conway. South of Snowdon the same kinds of lavas
and ashes are seen in force on the sides of Moel Hebog,
and the great mass of Llwyd-mawr near Dolbenmaen.

Other large bosses of intrusive rocks, mostly fel-
spathic, occur on Y-Foel-fras, between Snowdon and
Conway, another between Llanllyfni and Bethesda, a
third near the eastern shore of Menai Straits, and
many more including the beautiful mountains of Yr
Eifl, or The Eivals, in the north horn of Cardigan Bay,

Unconformity. 77

known as the district of Lleyn. These, ere exposure
by denudation, probably were the roots of the volcanos,
or in other words the deep-seated centres from whence
the explosive force of steam drove out the lavas and
showers of ashes, which, during successive eruptions, with
minor periods of repose, got interstratified with the
mud and sand beds that were deposited in the sea of
the Llandeilo and Bala or Caradoc period.

On a smaller scale similar volcanic rocks are inter-
stratified with the Llandeilo and Bala beds of the
Berwyn Hills, also of the Breidden Hills, and the hills
west of the Longmynd and Stiper Stones towards
Chirbury and Church Stoke, of the country between
Builth and Llandegley in Eadnorshire, and in North
Pembrokeshire from the ground round St. David's, ex-
tending for many miles to the east, by Mathry, Fish-
guard, St. Dogmells and Mynydd Preselley.

The next question that occurs to me is, what was
the nature of the physical geography of this area
during the deposition of the Arenig slates, and also at
a later epoch when the Llandeilo and Caradoc or Bala
beds were being deposited.

With regard to the Arenig slates in Pembrokeshire
and Merionethshire, I know of no signs of unconformity,
that is to say, of a lapse of time unrepresented by the
deposition of marine strata either in Pembrokeshire
or in Merionethshire, unless there be some symp-
toms of it in the latter county. But when we go
further north into Carnarvonshire, the case is different.
There, at the widening of the Passes of Llanberis and
Nant Ffrancon, the Lingula flags are not more than
2,000 feet thick, whereas further south, between Ffes-
tiniog and Portmadoc, they are at least 4,000 feet in
thickness. Furthermore, in those valleys in Caernar-

78 Physical

vonshire there is, as yet, no 'certainty of the existence
of the Tremadoc slates, and these ought to be found
overlying the Lingula flags if the whole of the Silurian
series were present. Still further, as we approach
Caernarvon and Bangor, even the Lingula flags are
absent, and the Arenig slates are found lying directly
on the purple slates and conglomerates of the Cam-
brian series all the way from Bangor to Caernarvon.
This clearly shows that the base of the Arenig slates
has overlapped the whole of the Tremadoc slates and
Lingula flags, in the area between the Ffestiniog and
Portmadoc country and the neighbourhood of the
Menai Straits, and an overlap so great means uncon-
formity between the strata ; or, in other words, in this
area the strata of older date than the Arenig slates had
been raised above the sea, and subjected to sub-aerial
agencies of denudation, while the deposition of the
Arenig slates was going on elsewhere. In this manner,
therefore, it happens that the Arenig slates are now
found resting directly on the Cambrian strata, without
the intervention of the missing members of the series,
viz., the Tremadoc slates and Lingula flags ; and still
further north, in Anglesea, these strata are also wanting.

The effect of this episode in the physical geography
of the area seems to have been, that at this period a
tract of land lay in the north- west of what is now Wales,
and probably far beyond that district during the de-
position of the Arenig strata on its borders, but what
the features of that land were I cannot say, except that
it may have extended to Ireland, where there is a
similar unconformity, the Lingula flags and Tremadoc
slates being also wanting in Wicklow. Probably the
whole region was low and unimposing.

The next question that arises is, what was the

Geography. 79

nature of the physical geography during the time of
the volcanic eruptions already mentioned ? To me it
seems to have been somewhat of this sort.

On the margin of the ancient land, or at some dis-
tance therefrom, volcanic eruptions took place in the
sea-bottom somewhat of the nature of that which in
1831 took place in the Mediterranean between the
islands of Pantellaria and the south-west coast of Sicily.
This eruption was preceded by an earthquake on June 28,
and on July 10 John Corrao from his ship saw a column
of water 60 feet high and 800 yards in circumference
spout into the air, succeeded by dense steam, which rose
to a height of 1,800 feet. On the 18th the same
mariner found an island twelve feet high, from the
crater of which immense columns of steam and vol-
canic ashes were being ejected, ' the sea around being
covered with floating cinders and dead fish.' l The
eruption continued into August, when, by the ejection
of what is often called volcanic ashes, viz., pumice,
scoriae, and lapilli, on the 4th of that month the
island was said to have been more than 200 feet in
height and 3 miles in circumference. From that time
it gradually decreased in size, owing to the action of
the waves, and towards the close of the year the island
had been destroyed and disappeared, leaving only a
reef beneath the sea with a black rock in the centre,
from 9 to 11 feet under water, and which probably
marked the position of the funnel of the short-lived
volcano. Before the eruption took place it so happened
that Captain (afterwards Admiral) W. H. Smyth
sounded on the spot in more than 100 fathoms, and
this, added to 200 feet that the island rose above the
sea, gives 800 feet as the height of the cone from the

1 Lyell's « Principles of Geology,' vol. ii. p. 60, 12th edition.

8o Physical

bottom of the sea to its summit. In a case such as this,
it is easy to see that the ordinary marine sediments of
the area would get intermingled with volcanic ashes,
and possibly with submarine streams of lava.

Explosions of steam accompanied by floating cinders
are mentioned by Darwin as occurring at intervals in
the South Atlantic ; and anyone who will tax his
memory a little will recollect that a large proportion of
the volcanoes of the world are islands, or in islands, in
the Atlantic, the Indian Ocean, the Indian Archipelago,
and the Pacific Ocean, south and north. It has been
often remarked that almost all volcanoes are in the
neighbourhood of the sea.

I think, then, at the time of the deposition of the
Llandeilo and Bala beds of our area, our terrestrial
scenery consisted of groups of volcanic islands scattered
over the area of what is now North Wales and South
Wales, and extending westward into the region of the Irish
strata of the same age, and northward as far as the sea
that then rolled where Cumberland now stands ; for there
also volcanic rocks occur in great force, all of the same
general character as those found in Wales. There is
however, this difference between the two areas, that,
whereas in Wales ordinary sediments are plentifully in-
terstratified with lavas and ashes, and sometimes even
lithologically intermingled with volcanic ashes, in the
Cumbrian area it is only for a few feet at the very base of
the volcanic series that interstratifications take place,
the whole of the rest of these Silurian volcanic rocks
of Westmoreland and Cumberland being quite destitute
of any intermixture of marine sediments. Exclusive
of intrusive rocks, the whole consists of purely terres-
trial lavas, volcanic conglomerates and ashes, the latter
often well stratified, for where showers of ashes fall

Geography. 8 1

there layers of stratification will be formed, whether
they fall in the sea or on land. It has been suggested
by Mr. Ward that some of this fine volcanic dust fell
into lakes that filled old craters or areas of subsidence
during periods of partial repose, and this seems highly
probable, for the finely divided matter is so beautifully
stratified, that these beds were, and still are by some,
mistaken for marine strata.

When we consider the vast amount of these pro-
ducts of ancient volcanoes, there can be no doubt that,
rising from the sea, some of them must have rivalled
Etna in height, and others of the great active volcanoes
of the present day, and, as most volcanoes have a conical
form, we can easily fancy the magnificent cones of
those of Lower Silurian age. But that is all we know
respecting them, and whether or not they were clothed,
like Etna, with terrestrial vegetation, no man can tell.
It is hard to believe that they were utterly barren, but
as yet no trace of a flora has been found in Lower
Silurian strata.

There is another point bearing on the physical geo-
graphy of the time that has sometimes crossed my mind
in connection with these island volcanoes, which is, that
we may, with some show of probability, surmise, that
then, as now, the prevalent winds of this region blew from
the west and southwest, for the following reason. In
Merionethshire and Caernarvonshire the various volcanic
products gradually thin out and disappear to the west,
between the ground south of the estuary of the Mawddach,
and the neighbourhood of Tremadoc on the north. As we
pass round the large crescent- shaped masses of lavas and
ashes it becomes evident as a rule that the ashy series of
beds show a tendency to thicken more and more in an
easterly direction for a space, and finally to decrease in

G

82 Physical Geography.

thickness in the same direction, till, in the Bala country
and further north, they are represented only by a few
insignificant beds of ashy strata, a character of which
the Bala limestone itself sometimes feebly partakes.
The idea is, that the prevalent westerly winds had a
tendency during eruptions to blow the volcanic dust
and lapilli eastward, and that these materials fell thick-
est near the vents and at middle distances, and gradu-
ally decreased in quantity the further east they were
carried.

To those unaccustomed to technical geological argu-
ments a word of warning remains. Let no reader
suppose that in Wales he will now find clear traces of
these old volcanic cones and craters in their pristine
form, such, for example, as the extinct craters of
Auvergne and the Eifel. Semi-circular hollows sur-
rounded by igneous rocks like those of Cwm Idwal anf*
Cwm Llafar he will find plentiful enough, and these,
in old guide-books and other popular literary produc-
tions, have sometimes been described as craters. So far
from that being the case, such cirques or corries are
ancient valleys of erosion, the rocks of which have been
exposed to the weather perhaps ever since Upper Silurian
times, and have been subsequently modified by glaciers,
during the last Glacial Epoch, in days, comparatively
speaking, not far removed from our own. The truth about
these ancient volcanoes is, that long after they became
extinct the whole Lower Silurian area was disturbed
and thrown into anticlinal and synclinal curves, which
suffered denudations before the beginning of the de-
position of the Upper Silurian rocks, and the positions
in which the lavas and ashes now stand will approxi-
mately be best understood, if we suppose Etna by
similar disturbances to be half turned on its side,

Lower Silurian Rocks, Scotland. 83

and afterwards that the exposed portion should be irre-
gularly cut away and destroyed by processes of long-con-
tinued waste and decay, partly sub-aerial and partly
marine.

The remaining areas in Great Britain occupied by
Lower Silurian rocks lie in Scotland. The southern
district extends from St. Abbs Head on the east to Port-
patrick on the west coa?t, forming the uplands of the
Lammermuir, Moorfoot, and Carrick Hills, fig. 55,
p. 287. They chiefly consist of thick banded strata of
grits and slaty beds, much contorted, and in the
western part of the area, where bosses of granite and
other igneous rocks occur, they are often metamorphosed.
The fossils which they contain prove them to belong
to the Llandeilo, and Bala or Caradoc series.

In Wigtonshire great blocks of gneiss, granite, &c.
are imbedded in the dark slaty strata near Corswall,
and similar large blocks occur in Carrick in Ayrshire.
Where they came from I cannot say, for all the nearest
granite bosses in Kirkcudbrightshire and Arran are of
later date than the strata amid which these erratic
blocks are found. I therefore incline to the opinion
that they must have been derived from some Lauren tian
region, of which parts of the mainland and of the Outer
Hebrides then formed portions, and when I first saw
them I could, and still can conceive of no agent capable
of transporting such large blocks, and dropping them
into the graptolite-bearing mud, save that of icebergs.
One of the blocks measured by me near Corswall, in 1865,
is 9 feet in length, and they are of all sizes, from an inch
or two up to several feet in diameter. Many persons
have considered, and will still consider, this hypothesis
of their origin to be overbold, but I do not shrink from
repeating it, and I may mention that the same view

o 2

84 Lower Silurian Rocks,

with regard to these ancient boulder beds is held by
Professor Greikie and Mr. James Geikie, who mapped
the country.1

The Lower Silurian rocks of the south, pass under-
neath the Old Eed Sandstone and Carboniferous rocks
of the midland parts of Scotland, and rise again on the
north in the Grampian Mountains. A great fault,

1 I shall by-and-by have to notice the recurrence of glacial
episodes at various epochs in geological history, a subject with
which ever since 1855 I have had a good deal to do. (On Permian
Breccias, &c. ' Journal of the Geol. Soc.' vol. ii. p. 185). It is diffi-
cult to make out the ground on which all the old, and many of the
middle aged geologists, have cast aside the various evidences that
have been adduced in support of the recurrence of glacial epochs
or episodes, especially as I remember no argument that has been
brought forward, excepting that in old times, the radiation of in-
ternal heat through the crust of a cooling globe, produced warm and
uniform climates all over the surface, and that the further you go
back in time the hotter they were. The Lias was accumulated in
warm seas, and if so those of the Carboniferous times were warmer,
and those of Silurian times warmer still, and I have heard a dis-
tinguished geologist declare in a public lecture, that the tropical
vegetation of the Coal-measures, was due to the heat that radiated
outwards from the earth's crust, aided by that produced by the flaring
volcanoes of that epoch ! Undoubtedly there must have been a geo-
logically prehistoric time, when internal heat may have acted on the
surface, and perhaps the sun may have been hotter than now, and
that also had its effect. I, however, can see no signs of these internal
and external interferences since the times in which the authentic
records of geological history have been preserved, and these extend
backward earlier than the Lower Silurian epoch. I recollect the
time when what passed for strong arguments were urged to prove
that the former great extension of the Alpine glaciers advocated by
Agassiz, and the existence of glaciers in the Highlands, Cumberland,
and Wales, proved by him and Buckland, were mere myths. Now,
however, there is such a persistent run upon the subject, that more
memoirs have been, and still are being, written about it, than per-
haps on any other geological question. Coincident with this a
beginning of the acceptance of the theory of the recurrence of
glacial episodes, is slowly making its way both in England and the
Continent.

Scotland. 85

proved by Professor Geikie, runs at the base of that
so-called chain right across Scotland, from the neigh-
bourhood of Stonehaven on the east coast, to Loch
Lomond on the west. Its effect is to throw down the
Old Eed Sandstone on the south-east, partly against
the Silurian rocks, and partly against volcanic tufas
and other strata belonging to the Old Ked Sandstone
itself. From that region, nearly the whole of the
Highlands, from the Grampians to the north coast of
Scotland consists of Lower Silurian rocks often intensely
contorted, and formed of quartz-rocks and flagstones,
gneissic and micaceous schists, clay slate, and chlorite
slate. Associated with these, there are certain lime-
stones, sometimes crystalline, but where less altered,
sometimes fossiliferous, fig. 55, p. 287. One of these,
near the base of the Silurian series, runs in a long band
from Loch Erriboll, on the north coast, southward to
Loch Broom, where for a space of about fifteen miles
it is lost, to reappear between the east side of Sleugach
and Loch Carron. The same limestone is well seen in
the Island of Lismore in Loch Linnhe, and here and
there on the sides of Strathmore or the Great Glen (a
line of fault), through which the Caledonian Canal was
constructed. Elsewhere in the Highlands, further east,
streaks of limestone occur. Immense masses of granite
here and there rise in the midst of the strata, one of the
smaller of which forms great part of Ben Nevis, the
highest mountain in Britain, 4,406 feet in height, and
another the splendid peaks of the Island of Arran. No
interbedded igneous rocks have yet been found among
the Silurian rocks of Scotland.

The strata of the Highlands, not of Lower Silurian
age, are the Laurentian gneiss and Cambrian conglome-
rates and sandstones already mentioned, intersected by

86 Lower Silurian Rocks, Scotland.

so many noble Fiords between Sleat and Cape Wrath,
while on the east there are large tracts of Old Red
Sandstone, more or less extending from Thurso in
Caithness to the Great Glen, Moray Firth, the river
Spey, and yet further east. Fig. 55, p. 287.

In times within the memory of the writer, all these
metamorphic rocks of the Highlands were classed in
Wernerian style as Primitive strata, thrown down in
hot seas before the creation of life in the world. The
progress of research showed that gneiss and other rocks
now called metamorphic, are of many geological ages ;
and the fortunate discovery of fossils in these strata, at
Durness, by Mr. C. Peach, in 1854, showed them to be
of Arenig age, a discovery the importance of which
was at once seen by Sir Roderick Murchison, who by
this means, revolutionised the geology of the greater
part of the northern half of Scotland. Feeling anxious
to have a second opinion respecting the justness of his
new views, he asked me to accompany him on a long
tour through the northern Highlands in 1859, when I
mapped part of the country at Durness and Loch Eriboll,
and the whole matter seemed to me so plain, that the
wonder is, that any man with eyes ever dreamed of dis-
puting it. In these days no one now thinks of denying
the Lower Silurian age of the chief part of the gneissic
rocks of Scotland, the features of which have been
mapped by Professor Geikie, first in concert with Sir
Roderick Murchison, and afterwards personally in more
detail.1

With regard to the physical geography of the time,
little is certain but this, that almost the whole of the area
now called Scotland was under the sea, during the time

1 See ' Geological Map of Scotland,' last edition, by Archibald
Geikie, LL.D., F.R.S., 1876.

Physical Geography. 87

that these Lower Silurian strata were being deposited.
The only sign of pre-existing land, is found on the west
coast between Cape Wrath and Loch Torridon, where
the Llandeilo beds lie alike unconformably on the
Cambrian and Laurentian strata. This proves, that
when the lowest Llandeilo beds began to be depo-
sited, the underlying rocks formed the eastern margin
of a territory, of which probably our Outer Hebrides was
only a part, but how far it may have stretched westward
it is impossible to say. However that may have been,
it seems certain that long before the uppermost strata
of the Lower Silurian rocks of Scotland were deposited,
these fragments of an older land, which are still pre-
served on the west, had been long submerged and
buried under the accumulating piles of the Silurian
strata. That even then an extensive land lay not
far off is certain, for the extent and great thickness of
the Lower Silurian rocks affords a measure of the
amount of waste of a pre-existing territory, the partial
and gradual destruction of wnich, by all the agencies
of denudation, provided mechanical sediments wherewith
to form thousands of feet of Silurian strata of mud and
sand, first consolidated, and long after metamorphosed
into quartzite, gneiss, and mica-schist. This land may
have occupied an area now covered by the Atlantic ocean.

88

CHAPTER VII.

UPPER SILURIAN SERIES.

THE strati graphical order of the UPPER SILURIAN SERIES
is shown in the table p. 30. They were deposited
under the following circumstances : — The Lower Silu-
rian rocks in large areas in the British Islands and
in some other areas, were upheaved, more or less con-
torted, and in many places suffered a great amount
of denudation before the deposition of the Upper
Silurian strata began, which, therefore, in various
districts lie quite unconformably upon them. In the

FIG. 19.

1. Cwradoc sandstone (Lower Silurian").

2. Upper Llandovery beds.

3. Wenlock shale.

4. Wenlock limestone.

5. Upper Ludlow.

6. Aymestry limestone.

7. Upper Ludlow.

8. Old Red Sandstone.

typical district of Wenlock and Ludlow the arrange-
ment of the various subdivisions of these Upper Silurian
strata is as shown in figs. 19 and 22, the bands of lime-
stone generally forming bold terraces, that look north-

Upper Silurian Rocks. 89

westward to the mountains of the Longmynd beyond Le
Botwood and the beautiful valley of Church Stretton.

Notwithstanding the unconformity mentioned above,
there are in Wales, and partly in Shropshire, rocks
containing suites of fossils, many of them peculiar to the
horizon in which they occur, and a few common to
Upper and Lower Silurian. Part of these strata, such
as the Lower Llandovery beds, have been formed during
minor oscillatory movements of sea and land. In
South Wales, Stricklandinia (Pentamerus) lens occurs
plentifully in these Lower Llandovery rocks, and
sparingly in the Upper Llandovery rocks ; while P.
oblongus occurs sparingly in the Lower Llandovery
rocks, and in great numbers in the Upper Llandovery
beds, on which rests the Tarannon shale. By far the
larger part of the fossils of the Lower Llandovery rocks
are, however, essentially of Lower Silurian type, and,
besides, they are quite conformable with, and pass by
easy lithological gradation into the underlying strata.

With the Upper Llandovery or Pentamerus beds,1 as
they were formerly called, the case is very different, for
in Shropshire they rest unconformably on the Cambrian
and Lower Silurian rocks indiscriminately, and possess
a beach-like character, being in places formed of pebbles
derived from the rocks on which they rest, as in fig. 20,
and in Eadnorshire near Built h, the Upper Silurian
rocks including these Pentamerus-bearing strata, lie
with extreme unconformity, alike on the lowest and the
highest Llandeilo and Caradoc beds of that old volcanic
area, as shown in figs. 20, 21, 22.

My belief, therefore, is that these Upper Llandovery
beds, which form the true base of our Upper Silurian

1 See fig. 23, p. 94, Pentamerus oblongus is so common in these
strata that they were originally called Pentamerus beds.

90 Llandovery Beds.

strata wherever they occur, were often beaches of the
period ; and this is further proved by the fact that they
are often conglomeratic, containing rounded pebbles
derived from the rocks on which they rest, while, as at
May Hill and Woolhope, they are coarsely sandy.

From these facts we arrive at the conclusion that
during the beginning of Upper Silurian times, part of
FIG. 20.

1. Cambrian rocks.

2. Pentamerus limestone and conglomerate.

the area now called Wales consisted of islands formed
of Lower Silurian strata and volcanic rocks, round
which the occasional consolidated beaches are still
visible.

Groing further into the physical geology of this epoch,
we find that in South Wales the Upper Llandovery
beds lie unconformably on a large scale on the Llandeilo
and Caradoc series, a fact proved by the conflicting
dips and strikes of the two sets of strata; while in
North Wales, similar conflicting strikes, and the steady
overlapping of the Upper on the Lower Silurian beds,
proves the same fact, for east of Bala the base of the
Upper Silurian beds lies about 2,000 feet above the Bala
Limestone, while in the neighbourhood of Conway they
almost touch that horizon.

Another important point connected with the physi-
cal geography of the period is that, after a time, the
Lower Silurian islands and other areas began to undergo
a process of slow depression beneath the sea. If we

Physical Geography. 9 1

turn to the Shropshire area between Church Stretton
and Chirbury, including the Cambrian rocks of the
Longmynd, this is what we find. On the vertical and
highly inclined strata of the Cambrian and Lower
Silurian rocks, the conglomerates and limestones of the
Upper Llandovery beds form in the lower country a kind
of narrow fringe, surrounding great part of the area, and
lying from 500 to 900 feet lower than the broad, flat-
topped, and gently undulating hills of the Longmynd
and Shelve. Almost on the highest level of one of
these flats, at the well known Bog-mine, there is a
small outlying patch of Upper Llandovery beds, formed
of hard quartzose sandstone, at a height of 1,150 feet
above the sea, as roughly indicated in the following

diagram.

FIG. 21.

1. Cambrian grits, &c.

2. Lingula flags.

3. Tremadoc and Llandeilo beds.

4. Pentamerus beds.

5. Wenlock shale.

The inference is obvious, that these Pentamerus-
bearing strata began to be deposited at the bases of the
hills, and that by degrees, during a process of slow
submersion, the sea crept on and on inland, accompanied
by the deposition of marginal Upper Llandovery beds,
till at length, like an island in the coral seas of the
Pacific (but without the corals), this old Silurian Isle
was entirely swallowed up and buried, deep beneath
the succeeding great accumulations of Upper Silurian
strata, which in the adjoining area of Wenlock and

92 Physical Geography.

Ludlow are more than 3,000 feet in thickness. The
original extent of this long-buried island, may have
been about 24 miles in length by 14 in breadth, about
the size of the Isle of Man.

The same fate was undergone by the Llandeilo and
Caradoc rocks, that with lavas, ashes, and intrusive
greenstones, now lie between Builth and Llandegley in
Kadnorshire. This island was, however, lower and
smaller, its length having been about 20 miles, by 10
at its greatest breadth.

That these two tracts of land stood as islands in an
early Upper Silurian sea, I have no doubt ; and on
grounds less definite, I am of opinion, that at the very
beginning of the Upper Silurian epoch, the greater part
of Wales, both south and north, formed land, some of
it higher than now, for since that time the Lower
Silurian rocks of that region have undergone great and
repeated denudations. As, however, the deposition of
the Upper Silurian formations progressed, a steady
submersion took place of the neighbouring land, from
the waste of which, sediments were derived ; but
whether or not its highest mountains were swallowed up
and buried before the close of the Upper Silurian epoch
I am quite unable to say. That this entire burying of
the Lower Silurian rocks of Cumberland took place,
seems most probable ; and while the Lower Silurian
rocks of the Highlands of Scotland, and the West of
Ireland, certainly formed high land during the begin-
ning of Upper Silurian times, I have no precise data
by which to determine what was their subsequent fate.

A section of the Silurian strata, as seen near Caer
Caradoc and Wenlock, is shown in fig. 22.

The same kind of development passes southward
beyond Ludlow, forming beautiful scarped woody ter-

Upper Silurian Rocks.

93

races, but beyond that into South Wales the limestones
disappear, or are occasionally only very feebly repre-
sented, and the whole consists chiefly of shales, some-
times sandy, in which no definite lines of subdivision
for the subformations can be drawn.

FIG. 22.

1. Caradoc sandstone (Lower Silurian').

2. Upper Llandovery limestone and sandstone^

lying unconformably on No. 1.

3. Wenlock shale.

4. Wenlock limestone.

5. Lower Ludlow shales, concretionary. UPPer Silurian.

6. Aymestry limestone.

7. Upper Ludlow sandy flags and shales.

8. Passage beds, and

9. Old Red Sandstone.

Far east of this, at Usk, Woolhope, May Hill, the
Malvern and Abberley Hills, and at Dudley and Walsall,
the limestone formations (so-called) are well developed,
while in North Wales the Upper Silurian rocks chiefly
consist of shales and interstratified grits without any
bands of limestone. Near Llangollen, where the shaly
strata are much affected by cleavage, they become true
slate. In Scotland, the Upper Silurian rocks occur
between the Solvvay Firth and the Cheviot Hills, and
are said to lie unconformably on the Lower Silurian
strata. Further north they only occupy small areas
near Lesmahago, and at the north-west base of the
Pentland Hills.

All of these formations are in general terms
fossiliferous. The Wenlock limestone is in great part

94

Upper Silurian Fossils.
FIG. 23.

Strophomena euglypha.

Protaster Miltoni.

Pentamerus oblongus.

Bellerophon dilatatus.

IllEenus Barriensis.

Calymene Blumenbachii. Phacops caudatus.

Group of Upper Silurian Fossils.

Upper Silurian Rocks. 95

formed of Corals, Encrinites, Mollusca, and Trilobites,
Corals often predominating. The most characteris-
tic shell of the Aymestry limestone is Pentamerus
Knigktii.

The grouping of fossils in the Upper Silurian rocks
is in general terms much the same as in the Lower series,
although new genera appear, but a very large proportion
of more than 700 Llandeilo and Caradoc species were
extinct in our area, only about 16^ per cent, being
common to the Lower and Upper series. The Corals,
which are in general not very numerous in British Lower
Silurian rocks, have increased to 82 species of 27
genera, of which 15 genera and about 65 species are
new. The Echinodermata (stone lilies) increase to 55
species, only 1 species of which, an Actinocrinus, is
common to Lower and Upper Silurian rocks. Several
new starfish appear, especially in the Upper Ludlow
rocks. There is one true Echinus (sea-urchin), Palce-
chinus. In Britain the Trilobites decrease to 30 genera
and about 130 species. Among the Hydrozoa the
Graptolites decrease to 3 species in Britain ; and there
are about 20 known species of Polyzoa. There are 21
genera and 126 species of Brachiopoda. Among these,
of the genus Atrypa there are 8 species. Athyris and
Obolus appear for the first time in lists of fossils.
Leptcena from 10, decreases to 6 species; Orthis from
58 to 21 ; while Rhynchonella increases from 12 to 16,
and Strophomena decreases from 27 to 15. Of the
genus Spirifera there are 3 species in the Lower Silurian
rocks, and 8 in the Upper. In all, 2 1 genera and about
126 species of Brachiopoda are known in the British
Upper Silurian strata, and 22 genera and 171 species
in the Lower. The Lamellibranchiate mollusca in-
crease from 17 to 18 genera, and from 71 to 87 species,

96 Bone Beds.

most of the latter being new. There are 7 species of
Pteropoda of 3 genera. It is remarkable that the
described Gasteropoda only amount to 15 genera and
52 species, while in Bohemia, in equivalent rocks, 200
species, some years since, are mentioned by Barrande,
and as many of the Brachiopoda and Lamellibranchiate
molluscs. Of the Nucleobranchiata 10 Bellerophons
are known, and 7 genera and 53 species of Cephalopoda,
among which the genus Orthoceras decreases from 42
to 35 species.

Near the top of the Upper Ludlow strata there
are several thin bone beds, containing teeth and
scales of small Placoid fish of the genera Onchus (?)
Sphagodus, and Thelodus. At present these are the
oldest known fishes. They are found in strata which
contain several species of the remarkable crustaceans
Pterygotus and Eurypterus, some of which are small in
size, while the largest Pterygotus, discovered by Dr.
Slimmon near Lesmahagow, in the uppermost Silurian
rocks, attained about 9 feet in length. The very
uppermost Silurian beds in England sometimes, as, for
example, near May Hill, contain the remains of land-
plants, consisting of small pieces of undetermined twigs,
and the sporecases of one of the Lycopodiacese Pachy-
theca spherica.

In these last-named facts there is much significance,
bearing on the physical geography of the next so-called
geological epoch, which will be explained in the sub-
sequent chapter. In the meanwhile I may remark, that
I use the words so-called geological epoch, in the same
sense that the words epoch or period are employed in
dealing with civil or political events. Taking the
geological world, and the civil world, which deals with
the history of man as parallel, there is no break in time

Upper Silurian Fossils. 97

FIG. 24.

Arachnophyllum typus.

Cyathophyllum truncatum.

Cyrtia exporrecta.

Rhynchonella navicula.

Petraia bina.

Omphyma turbinata. Orthoceras annulatum.

Group of Upper Silurian fossils.

98 Geological Epochs.

in either case. In the latter, certain remarkable events
induce us to break it into periods, characterised by special
events, which were always led up to gradually by broad
changes of power or of opinion. In the former, there
are often great breaks in the chain of geological history r
which, locally, are not filled up by stratigraphical
deposits, and which under these circumstances form
definite geological epochs, while in other cases (as in
Civil history), the change of conditions was so great in
given areas, that the new series of events may be locally
classed as constituting new geological epochs. This is
eminently the case when we attempt to realise the
history of the Old Bed Sandstone, as locally and physic-
ally distinct from that of the Contemporaneous Devonian,
strata.

99

CHAPTER VIII.

DEVONIAN AND OLD RED SANDSTONE ROCKS.

IN 1836 Sedgwick and Murchison described the exist-
ence in Devonshire of a series of rocks bearing fossils
intermediate in character between those of the Upper
Silurian series and those of the Carboniferous Lime-
stone. This was done with the assistance of Mr. Lons-
dale in all the palseontological part of the question, in
which the argument chiefly lay. On these and certain
stratigraphical grounds, it was considered that they are
the equivalents of the Old Eed Sandstone of the centre
of England and of Scotland, and the name DEVONIAN
being applied to them, the terms Devonian and Old
Ked Sandstone are generally considered as equivalents
in point of geological time.

According to the late Professor Jukes, the lowest
strata of the Barnstaple Bay district in North Devon
consist of red sandstones and conglomerates, similar to
those of part of the Old Red Sandstone of Ireland, and
not unlike that of the Mendip Hills. This, taken in
connection with the resemblance of the overlying strata
to the lower Carboniferous rocks of the south of Ireland,
led him to consider the chief part of the Devonian rocks
of Devonshire to be of Carboniferous age. To this con-
clusion he was led partly by palaeontological considera-
tions into which I cannot here enter. The opposite

H2

ioo Devonian Strata.

opinion, that the Devonian strata are in the main the
'marine equivalents of the Old Red Sandstone, continues
to be generally held. Till a new survey of Devonshire
helps to settle the question I give the usual reading of
the history of the Devonian strata^ though I think it
probable that Jukes will turn out to be correct in
questioning the right of the Devonian strata to the
conventional name of an independent series.

In Devonshire the strata have been divided into
Lower ; Middle, and Upper Devonian. The Lower
chiefly consists of slaty beds and green and purple
sandstones, with many Brachiopoda of the genera
Chonetes, Orthis, Spirifera, &c. The Middle group,
which includes the Plymouth limestone, contains
numerous corals, the most common genera of which are
Acervularia, Alveolites, Cyathophyllum, Favosites,
Petraia, Strephodes, and the sponge Stromatopora.
With these are found Encrinites, Spirifers, Atrypce,
Leptcence, Productce, RhyncTionellce^ Stringocephali.,
and Calceola (G. sandalina) — the last a genus peculiar
to the Devonian rocks. Many Lamellibranchiate mol-
luscs also occur, together with Gasteropoda of the genera
Euomphalus, Loxonema, Machrocheilus, Murchisonia,
Pleurotomaria, Turbo, &c. Also many Cephalopoda
of the genera Clymenia, Cyrtoceras, Orthoceras,
Goniatites and Nautilus. The last two are unknown
in the British Silurian series, though Nautilus occurs
in the Upper Silurian rocks of North America. The
Groniatite may be roughly said to be intermediate in
structure between the Nautilus and Ammonite. The
latter does not occur in Palaeozoic strata. A few
Trilobites are found in the British Devonian rocks, and
various Crinoids. The Upper Devonian group contains
land plants and many shells, some of which are

FIG 25.

Stnngocephalus Burtini. Bronteus flabellifer.

Hcliolites porosus Favosites cervicornis.

Group of Devonian fossils (marine) ; and two from Old Red
Sandstone, the Cyclopteris and Anodonta (land and fresh- water), see
p. 115.

IO2 Devonian Strata.

identical with those found in the Lower Carboniferous
Limestone shales.

There is in England a considerable diminution in
the number of Devonian fossils when compared with
those of the Silurian rocks. Thus about 1,500 species
of Silurian fossils are named, while of marine Devonian
we have under 400 species, and adding those of all
kinds in the freshwater strata of the Old Eed Sand-
stone, 535 species. Of corals, 11 of the genera only
are also Silurian. Of Echinodermata, there are 10
genera and 21 species, only 3 of the genera being also
Silurian; Crustacea, 13 genera, 35 species, 5 of the
genera being also Silurian, including those found both
in the Devonian rocks and the Old Red Sandstone.
In the latter no Trilobites occur, but only Crustacea
of the genera Eurypterus (6), Pterygotus (4) (fig. 26),
Stylonurus (7), while in the Devonian formations of
Devonshire we find 5 genera of Trilobites: — Bronteus
(B. flabellifer) Cheirurus 2, Phacops 65 Homalonotus
2, and Harpes J, all being genera common in the
Silurian strata, though the species are distinct. Twelve
of the Devonian genera of Brachiopoda occur in
Silurian rocks, but of 96 Devonian species few pass
downwards, and these are doubtful. The most prevalent
genera of Brachiopoda are AtJiyris, Atrypa., Cyrtina,
Orthis, Rhynchonella, Spirifera, Streptorhynchus, and
Terebratula. Species of the genera Leptcena and Pen-
tamerus decline in numbers, while Orthis, Rhyn-
chonella, and Spirifera are much increased. Of 21
genera and 60 species of Lamellibranchiate molluscs,
the species are all, or almost all, distinct from those
of Siluria, while only 6 of the genera are the same.
The most prevalent forms are Aviculopecten (10),
Pterinea (9), Cucullcea (7), and Ctenodonta (7).

Old Rea Sandstone. 103

Megalodon is characteristic. Of the 13 genera of
Gasteropoda, 9 are Silurian, but of 47 species, all are
distinct. The most prevalent forms belong to the
genera Euomphalus (6), Loxonema (8), Macrocheilus
(7), Murchisonia (5) (there are 22 in the Silurian
rocks), and Pleurotomaria 8. There are 5 species of
Bellerophon, and 52 species of Cephalopoda, all distinct
from Silurian species. Of 6 Devonian genera, only
Orthoceras, Poterioceras, and Cyrtoceras are Silurian.
The most prevalent species belong to the genera Clymenia
(11), Cyrtoceras (13), Goniatites (10), this being their
first appearance in the British strata, and Orthoceras
(15), (there being 67 known species of this genus in the
Silurian rocks).

It is stated that only about 10 per cent, of Upper
Silurian fossils pass into the marine Lower Devonian
strata. These two formations in England are, however,
not found in contact, though they occur commonly
enough in the regular order of succession on the
Continent and in North America. About 10 per cent,
of Lower Devonian fossils pass into the Middle Devonian,
and about the same percentage from the Middle into
the Upper. If this be true there may possibly be
undiscovered unconformities between the subdivisions.

THE OLD EED SANDSTONE, as distinct from the
Devonian rocks, is undoubtedly intermediate in age to
the uppermost Silurian and the lowest Carboniferous
strata. It is sometimes difficult to determine its
precise limits either at its base or its top. It first
received its name in contradistinction to the New Red
Sandstone, the former occurring below, and the latter
above the Carboniferous strata.

A vast triangular tract of Old Red Sandstone lies
between the west coast of South Pembrokeshire, Bristol

1 04 Old Red Sandstone.

Channel, the south and south-eastern borders of the
Silurian rocks of Caermarthenshire, Breconshire, Rad-
norshire, and Shropshire, and the long line of Carboni-
ferous, Silurian, and New Red Marl strata that runs from
Colebrook Dale to the Severn, east of Dean Forest.
Fancy in your ' mind's eye ' the Carboniferous rocks
of the great South Wales Coalfield, and of Dean Forest,
to be stripped away, and the whole of the region men-
tioned, of 120 by 90 miles in length and breadth, would
consist entirely of Old Red Sandstone. The lower part
is chiefly composed of beds of red marl and sandstone,
with cornstones ; and the upper part contains strata of
sandstone and conglomerate, forming the Beacons of
Brecon, 2,860 feet high, these being the loftiest moun-
tains in South Wales.

Cornstones are impure concretionary limestones,
often imbedded 'in marl. In these, at the base of the
series, near Ludlow, are species of Pterygotus and
Pterichthys, and higher up, of Onchus and Cephalaspis,
thus correlating them by fossils to the Old Red Sand-
stone of Scotland (fig. 26). Along the border of this
formation, where the uppermost Silurian strata join the
Old Red Sandstone, there is a gradual passage both
palseontologically and in the colour and texture of the
strata. The Eurypteri and Pterygoti chiefly belong-
to these passage-beds, and in the same strata at the
very base of the Old Red strata, in which there are no
mollusca, are species of fish of the genera Auchenaspis,
Onchus (?), Pteraspis. Cephalaspis, and Plectrodus.
The Silurian marine mollusca, in fact, quickly'disappear
where the beds begin to get red in colour, notwith-
standing the perfect conformity of the two sets of strata
in England and the borders of Wales, as, for example,
in the neighbourhood of Ludlow. At Kington and

Old Red Sandstone. 105

south of Builth, where true passage-beds occur, the
ordinary shells of the Upper Ludlow rocks become far
less numerous, and are almost all of small size, including
species of Modiolopsis and ModMa, Lingula cornea,
Platychisma helicites, a small Discina, a small Theca,
a few small Crustacea, of the genera Leperditia, Gythe-
rellina, &c. The water was freshening and getting
unfitted for marine life.

The remains of Cephalaspis Lyellii (fig. 26) are
occasionally found all through the Old Eed Sandstone
of this large area. The absence of marine shells and
the nature of the fossil fishes of the Old Ked Sandstone
long ago led Mr. Godwin- Austen to infer that the
formation was deposited, not in the sea, as had always
been asserted, but in a great fresh-water lake, or in a
series of lakes. In this opinion I thoroughly agree,
for the nearest living analogues of many of the fish are
the Polypterus of the African rivers, the Ceratodus of
Australia, and in less degree the Lepidosteus of North
America. The red colour of the rocks also helps to
the same conclusion. Each grain of sand and marl is
red, because it is encrusted with a thin pellicle of
peroxide of iron, which could not have been deposited
from mere solution, as a crust enveloping each grain of
sand at the bottom of a great open ocean ; but if car-
bonate of iron were carried in solution into lakes, it
might have been precipitated as a peroxide through
the oxidising action of the air and the escape of the
carbonic acid.1

1 There is no analogy between the coarse red sandstones and
finer marls of the Old Ked Sandstone, and the very fine red ooze
dredged from the deeps of the South Atlantic. The latter is a
residue produced by the decomposition of Foraminifera, and in no
way resembles the coarse mechanical strata of Old Red Sandstone.

io6 Physical Geography.

The presence of land plants in the very uppermost
Silurian strata, as, for instance, near Ludlow and May
Hill, indicates the neighbourhood of land. The
physical geography of the area was rapidly changing,
marking the beginning of an evident Continental
epoch. The subject is of so much importance, and
when first propounded was considered to be such a
dangerous innovation on established views, that I
shall give the reasons in some detail, making use for
that purpose of passages from my memoir ' On the Red
Eocks of England, of older date than the Trias,' pub-
lished in the ' Quarterly Journal of the Geological
Society,' in 1871.

The circumstances which marked the passage of the
uppermost Silurian rocks into Old Red Sandstone seem
to me to have been : — First, a shallowing of the Silurian
sea by accumulation of sediment, aided by slow up-
heaval, which gradually produced a great change in
the physical geography of the district, so that the old
marine area became changed into a series of mingled
fresh and brackish lagoons, which finally, by continued
terrestrial changes, were converted into lakes ; and the
occurrence of a very few genera or even species of fish
and Crustacea, common both to the fresh and brackish
or even salt waters, does not prove that the Old Red
Sandstone is truly marine. At the present day, animals
that are commonly supposed to be essentially marine,
are occasionally found inhabiting fresh water. In the
inland fresh lakes of Newfoundland, seals are common.
They breed there freely, and never visit the sea. The
same is the case in Lake Baikal in Central Asia, and
it is on record that the inhabitants of the shores of the
Sea of Aral, now brackish, were in old times clad
in sealskins got from the seals that inhabited those

Physical Geography. 107

waters ; and though these facts bear but slightly on my
present subject, seals being air-breathing Mammalia,
yet in some of the lakes of Sweden ordinary marine
Crustacea are found. This may be accounted for in
the way that I now attempt to account for similar
peculiarities in the Old Ked Sandstone strata. These
Swedish lake-areas were submerged after the close of
the Glacial epoch ; and being deep basins (scooped out
in a manner which I shall explain in a later chapter),
while the land was emerging by upheaval, and after
its final emergence, the salt water of the lakes fresh-
ened so slowly, by influx of rivers, that some of the
creatures inhabiting it had time by degrees to adjust
themselves to new and abnormal conditions. *

Again, we may suppose a set of circumstances such
as the following : — If, by changes of physical geography
of a continental kind, a portion of the Silurian sea got
separated from the main ocean, more or less like the
Caspian and the Black Sea, then the ordinary marine
conditions of the ' passage beds,' accompanied by some
of the life of the period, might be maintained for what,
in common language, seems to us a long time. The
Black Sea was once united to the Caspian, and the
Caspian to the Aral, forming one great inland sea, which
under varying physical conditions, has more than once
changed its form and extent. At all events, since its
separation from the Black Sea the Caspian has been
simply a great brackish lake. The Black Sea is now
steadily freshening ; and it is easy to conceive that by
a geographical change, such as the upheaval of the Bos-

1 For much valuable information on this subject, see 'Annals
and Mag. of Nat. Hist.' third series, vol. i. 1858, p. 50, 'On the
Occurrence of Marine Animal Forms in Fresh Water,' by Dr. E. von
Martens : translated by Mr. W. S. Dallas.

io8 Physical Geography.

phorus, it might be converted into a fresh lake, if the
supply of river water were sufficient to overbalance
evaporation and secure an overflow. At present a great
body of salt water is constantly being poured out through
the Bosphorus, and its place taken by the fresh water
of rivers. Owing, however, to the uncongenial quality
of the freshening water, some of the Black Sea shells
are strangely distorted, as shown by Edward Forbes.

Or if we take the Caspian alone as an example, we
have an inland brackish sheet of water, with a present
area of 178,866 square miles, the surface of which is
83 feet below the level of the Black Sea. This, accord-
ing to accepted zoological and physical views, was
once united by a narrow strait with the North Sea.
Changes in physical geography have taken place of such
a kind that the Caspian is now disunited from the
ocean, while its waters are still inhabited by a poor and
dwarfed marine molluscan fauna, and by seals. If by
increase of rainfall the Caspian became freshened, the
loss of water by evaporation not being equal to supply,
it would by-and-by, after reaching the point of overflow,
be converted into a great fresh-water lake, larger in
extent than the whole area now occupied by the British
Islands and the Irish Sea. It is even conceivable that
the great area of inland drainage of Central Asia, now
holding many salt lakes, might in the same manner be
so changed that all its lakes would become fresh and
widened in extent, thus occupying areas larger than all
the Old Ked Sandstone of Europe. Under these cir-
cumstances, in the Caspian area we should have a
passage more or less gradual from imperfect marine to
perfectly fresh- water conditions, such as I conceive to
have marked the advent of the Old Eed Sandstone.
When the whole area was fairly separated from the sea,

Physical Geography. 109

the sediments might by degrees get into a condition to
get coloured red in the manner previously mentioned.
We have a case in point in an old inland sheet of water,
as shown by the Eed Marls of the extinct Miocene lakes
of Auvergne in Central France.

The uniformity of action here sketched may present
a difficulty to some geologists, seeing that on the
borders of South Wales the Upper Old Ked Sandstone,
over a large space, overlaps the lower strata till they lie
directly on Silurian rocks, and the same is the case in
parts of Scotland. But on consideration these circum-
stances do not present any real difficulty. If the great
hollow in which the Dead Sea lies, were gradually to
get filled with fresh water, and the whole by degrees
became silted up, 1,300 feet of strata would be added
above the level of the present surface, and the upper
strata all round would overlap the lower, apparently
much as the Old Ked Sandstone strata do in Wales and
the adjoining counties. If the Caspian and other parts
of the Asiatic area of inland drainage got filled with
fresh water, the same general results would ensue.

Like the recurrent circumstances that have attended
the rise and falls of empires through all historical time,
so geological history has often more or less repeated
itself, somewhere or other on the surface of the earth ;
and in this modern phase of Asiatic physical geography,
it seems to me that we may have, so far as it has gone,
a repetition of events, which, with minor variations,
have happened again and again, in old-world geological
epochs, the history of which I shall by-and-by have to
record. The farther off geological records recede, like
inscriptions in an unknown tongue, the more difficult
are they to decipher ; the nearer they come to our own
day, they are often more easy to read.

i io Old Red Sandstone.

In North Wales narrow streaks of Old Red Sand-
stone here and there crop out between the Upper
Silurian rocks, and the Carboniferous Limestone of
Flintshire and Denbighshire, and the same with bands
of corn stone forms the fine escarpment of Traeth
Dulas in Anglesey, where the sandstone lies directly on
Lower Silurian rocks.

In the northern counties also, at Kirkby Lonsdale,
Sedbergh, and Kendal, and all along the base of the
Carboniferous Limestone between Orton in Westmore-
land, and Greystock Park in Cumberland, patches and
a long line of Old Eed Sandstones, marls, and con-
glomerates occur.

A broad belt of Old Red Sandstone crosses Scotland
in a north-east direction between the Firth of Clyde
and the Firths of Forth and Tay, and Stonehaven in
Kincardineshire, and Montrose. Patches lie in Arran,
Bute, &c. The whole lies unconformably on Lower
Silurian clay slates, and dips to the south-east under
the Carboniferous rocks that occupy the great central
depression through which the Forth and Clyde chiefly
run. On the south-east side of this broad undulating
hollow the Old Red Sandstone again rises from beneath
the Coal-measures with a general north-west dip, and
skirting the Lammermuir Hills, strikes south-west into
the sea south of Ayr. On the south side of the Lam-
mermuir Hills, it again appears on the hills between
St. Abb's Head and Hawick, dipping under the Car-
boniferous rocks that, without a break, stretch from
Berwick to the neighbourhood of Derby.

North of Stonehaven detached patches of Old Red
Sandstone occur on the mainland as far as Pentland
Firth, beyond which it forms the greater part of the
Orkneys, and small portions of the Shetland Islands.

Old Red Sandstone. 1 1 1

The first patch lies between Fyvie and Penman Bay in
Aberdeensbire ; the second forms both shores of Moray
Firth and Dornoch Firth, and stretches a long way up
the Great Valley of the Caledonian Canal, through
which at one time I have no doubt it passed all the
way to the Firth of Lorn, between Oban and the island
of Mull ; and the third forms the greater part of Caith-
ness. On the west coast a large tract of hilly ground
between the neighbourhood of Loch Awe, Oban, and
Kerera is chiefly formed of Old Red conglomerate.

For the first compendious account of the Old Red
Sandstone of Scotland the world is indebted to Hugh
Miller, whose wonderful faculty of graphic description
enabled him, unassisted, to describe the rocks and the
remarkable forms of fish they contain, which till his
time were almost altogether unknown. Something,
however, still remains to be done, before the precise re-
lations to each other of some of the parts of the
Old Red Sandstone of Scotland are clearly established.
The researches of Professor Greikie and other officers of
the Geological Survey, have shown that, south of the
Grampian Mountains, there is an upper set of strata,
lying in basins unconformably on the lower Old Red
Sandstone.

Conglomerate often lies at the base of any part
of the series that rests directly on the ancient slates
and gneissic rocks, and occasionally thick conglo-
merates are intercalated among the sandy strata on
various horizons, as, for example, on Moray and Cro-
marty Firths. These beds are sometimes thin, and
sometimes of enormous thickness. Some of these con-
glomerates are clearly volcanic breccias and ashy beds ;
as, for example, on part of the Ochil Hills, south of the
Firth of Tay, and from thence stretching westward at

1 1 2 Glacial Conglomerates.

intervals to the Forth, near Bridge of Allan. The
ordinary sedimentary conglomerates are frequently very
coarse, containing both water-worn and subangular
fragments of the underlying rocks from the waste
(denudation) of which it has been formed. Some of
the fragments I have observed of a yard in diameter, in
the great band of conglomerate that lies at the foot of
the Grampian Mountains, and others, true boulders, of
equal size, on the north coast of Scotland, east of
Strathie in Caithness. The Silurian gneiss of the
Grampian Hills and of the Highlands in general, is
much older than the Old Red Sandstone, and the same
may be said of the strata of the Lammermuirs, both of
which were disturbed and denuded before the depo-
sition of the Upper Silurian rocks. Later denudations
of the same rocks formed the vast conglomerate of Old
Red rocks south of Dunbar.

Some of these conglomerates possess a character
which unmistakably marks them as glacial boulder
clays. The stones are of all sizes, and not mere pebbles,
and they are generally sub-angular, just like those of
many of the boulder clays of the last Glacial Epoch. Like
some of these boulder clays also, the stones are imbedded
in a red marly paste, once un consolidated clay, and in
similar conglomerates in the Cumbrian region, scratched
stones have been found in some cases unmistakably
resembling those which are allowed by all to have had
their markings produced by the agency of glacier ice.
A bold man might even go further, for opposite the
mouth of the valley of Ullswater, at the outlet of the
lake, there are great heaps of angular boulder-con-
glomerate, culminating in the big mound-like hills of
Mell Fell and the neighbourhood, the stones cemented
in a marly base. It is an obvious fact to skilled

Old Red Sandstone. 113

geologists, well known to those of the Geological Survey,
who mapped the ground, that some of the valleys of
Cumberland are of older date than the deposition of the
Old Eed Sandstone, and standing on the ground it was
impossible for me not to fed the idea, that Mell Fell
and Little Mell Fell look like, and may be, the relics
of an old moraine, shed from a glacier of Old Red
Sandstone age, that flowed down a valley far older than
that of modern Ullswater, and long before the special
hollow in which the lake lies was formed. The
mountains were much higher than now, for since then
they have undergone an immense amount of denudation.

In Scotland fishes are more or less found in all the
broader districts occupied by Old Red Sandstone, but it
was chiefly in the north, in Caithness, and on both sides
of Cromarty and Moray Firths, that Hugh Miller made
his wonderful discoveries of fossil fishes of many
species. They are found generally in bituminous
schists and flags with occasional nodular concretions,
and lie in various minor horizons among red and varie-
gated sandstones and conglomerates, which contain the
remains of many fish of the genera Diplopterus,
Coccosteus-) PterichikyS) Diplacanthus, Osteolepis,
Glyptoloemus, Dipterus, Holoptychius, Cephalaspis,
besides Crustacea, such as Pterygotus9 and the small
bivalve Estheria Murchisonice. (Fig. 26.)

Most of the genera belong to a sub-order of Ganoid
fish called Crossopterygidce by Huxley, from the fringe-
like arrangement of the fins, a sub-order several species
of which are still living in the rivers of Senegal and in
the Nile.

I have specially mentioned these circumstances, for
the purpose of keeping before the mind of the reader
the broad fact that the Old Red Sandstone, as a whole, is

I

FIG. 26.

Pterygotus Anglicus. Cephalaspis Lyelii.

Group of Old Red Sandstone fossils.

Physical Geography. 115

distinct in space, if not in time, from the marine Devonian
strata, for in most books both are generally included
under the term Devonian, and the ordinary reader
makes no distinction between them. There is, however,
this marked distinction, that one is of marine and the
other of fresh- water origin, and therefore that the latter
belongs to a broad Continental area, outside the shores of
which our British Devonian beds were deposited, while
in other areas, such as part of Russia, the intermingling
of fresh-water and marine inter stratifications seems to
imply a set of estuarine conditions. That our Old Red
Sandstone, to the very top, was of fresh-water origin is
evident, not only by the presence of special genera of
fish, but also in the rocks of Dura Den, of a fresh- water
shell, Anodonta Jukesii, and of ferns, Adiantites Hi-
bernicus and Cyclopteris, also Lepidodendron, &c.
The shell proves fresh water, and the plants the vicinity
of land. See Fig. 25, p. 101.

When all the foregoing statements are fairly con-
sidered, it seems to me that we obtain sufficient mate-
rial from which to form a conception of the physical
geography of our area during the deposition of the Old
Red Sandstone ; as follows : —

In a mountainous region of which the Scandinavian
chain formed part, the lakes of the Old Red Sandstone
epoch lay ; for patches of these strata opposite Scotland,
and bordering the sea, lie on the Norwegian coast.
What was the extent of the Great Lake in which the
central Scottish strata were deposited I am unable to say,
for they strike out to sea in the Firth of Clyde on the
west and to the North Sea on the east coast, forming a
stretch of country 100 miles in length by about 60 in
breadth. Whether or not, the Old Red Sandstone of

i 2

1 1 6 Physical Geography.

this area was originally united to that which borders
the Firths of Moray and Dornoch, and from thence on
to the sandstones of Caithness and the Orkneys, I
cannot tell, though it has been usually stated that
the eastern side of the Lower Silurian rocks and the
Grampian heights were continuously fringed by Old
Bed Sandstone. It seems to me, however, to be not
unlikely, that as the great Grampian range south of
the Dee even now attains to heights of about 2,000
feet in Kincardineshire, in older times, having suffered
much less from denudation, they were higher than
now, stretched further east, and possibly formed an
effectual barrier between two lake-areas in which Old
Eed Sandstone was deposited. But even if the red
sandstones of the whole of Scotland were once united to
those of the coast of Norway, in one continuous stretch
of inland water, it is not without parallel in the
living world, for the brackish Caspian lake occupies
a larger area, and it has been said that even in his-
torical times the Caspian was larger than now. The
great fresh-water lakes also of North America, from
Lake Superior to Lake Erie, exclusive of Ontario, oc-
cupy an area far larger than the whole of Scotland with
all its islands. Three of these lakes, Superior, Michi-
gan, and Huron, practically form one sheet of water,
united by straits somewhat analogous to those of the
Bosphorus and Hellespont ; and the lowest of these,
Lake Huron, is only 37 feet below the level of Lake
Superior, while Erie is 36 feet lower than Lake Huron,
with a distance of more than 70 miles between them,
part of which is occupied by Lake St. Clair.

When we try to realise the kind of scenery of this
old period, we are led to something of this kind. The
lake or lakes, was or were, more or less encircled by high

Physical Geography. 1 1 7

mountains, and on the banks, and perhaps as occasional
islands, volcanic cones disgorged streams of lava and
discharged showers of ashes and stones, to be interstrati-
fied with the ordinary sediments, in a manner analogous
to that which accompanied the deposition of the Miocene
strata in Auvergne and other areas in what is now
central France. At the same time, from the lofty moun-
tains that now form the Highlands, but higher then,
glaciers descended into the water, and fleets of icebergs
floated hither and thither, and, melting, dropped their
moraine matter to intermingle with other sediments,
while further south, in Cumbria, similar glaciers de-
scended from the ancient mountains, higher and dif-
ferent in form from those of modern date in the same
area.

In a region still further south, we come to the
lake in which the Old Eed Sandstone of South Wales
and the adjoining counties was deposited. These
strata certainly spread further north and west than the
edge of the main mass does now, a fact shown by the
large outliers by Presteign, Clun, and Bettws Crwyn in
Montgomeryshire. Making an allowance for this ex-
tension, the lake must have been not less than about
100 miles in length, by a breadth varying from 70 to
100 miles, for traces of Old Eed Sandstone have been
proved in deep borings through the coal-measures at
the south end of the South Staffordshire coal-field.
Away in the distant west, rose the lofty mountains
formed in part of the far more ancient Lower Silurian
rocks of North Wales, but no contemporaneous volcanic
rocks are anywhere found among the Old Red Sandstone
strata that were deposited in the adjacent lake, the
eastern shores of which were, I think, low and unim-
posing.

n8

Plants.

Respecting the vegetation of the country there is
little to say, for the ferns and lepidodendrons afford
but feeble and fragmentary evidence. It may have
been that the whole region stood at a comparatively
high and bleak level, or it may be that the plant-bear-
ing localities remain to be discovered. This, however,
we know, that in North America, in equivalent strata,
there lie buried the remains of a large and luxuriant
flora, which generically has close affinities with that of
the succeeding Carboniferous Epoch. Such plants as we
have lie, some at the base, and others near the top of the
British Old Eed Sandstone, which, indeed, in some areas
gradually merges into the Carboniferous strata, that,
under varying marine and wide-spread terrestrial con-
ditions, form the next stage of one long Continental
Epoch.

119

CHAPTEE IX.

CARBONIFEROUS SERIES.

CARBONIFEROUS EOCKS. — In the south and middle of
England, the Carboniferous rocks consist chiefly of
Limestone at the base and Coal-measures above. In-
cluding the South Wales, the Forest of Dean, the
Somersetshire and other areas, a typical section of the
beds is as follows : —

Feet. Feet.

Coal-measures 1,000 to 12,000

Millstone grit 500 , 1,000

Yoredale rocks 100

Carboniferous or Mountain Limestone . 500
Carboniferous Limestone shale . . .100
Yellow Sandstone with plants, Ireland, &c. 100

1,000

2,500

500

200

Generally resting on Old Red Sandstone.

The Yellow Sandstone beds often form a passage
from the Old Eed Sandstone to the Carboniferous rocks,
and the plants have carboniferous affinities. The ac-
companying shales in Pembrokeshire and elsewhere,
contain numerous fish-teeth, Spirifers, Productas, and
a few Lingulas ; and the Carboniferous Limestone,
which is more than 2,000 feet thick in South Wales,
and in Somersetshire, is so highly fossiliferous that it
may be stated that the whole of the limestone once
formed parts of animals. The lowest 500 feet consists
chiefly of fragments of Encrinites. The Yoredale rocks
of Yorkshire have no precise lithological parallel in

1 20 Coal-measures.

South Wales and Somerset. They consist chiefly of
shales and sandstones, with marine shells and occasional
land-plants. The Millstone grit of South Wales is
comparatively unfossiliferous, but sometimes contains
the remains of plants, and more rarely Orthoceras and
other marine shells.

The Coal-measures and Millstone grit of Monmouth-
shire, Glamorganshire, and Pembrokeshire, lie in a
great oval basin, encircled by a rim of Carboniferous
Limestone, beneath which lies the Old Red Sandstone.
The Coal-measure beds alone were estimated by Sir
William Logan at from 10,000 to 12,000 feet thick.
They consist of alternations of sandstone, shale, fireclay
or underclay, coal, and ironstone. There are about 1 00
beds of coal in the field, many of which are workable,
chiefly in the lower part of the series, where the prin-
cipal ironstones also occur. In the shales and sand-
stones large stems of plants are sometimes found stand-
ing vertically, in the positions in which they grew.
Underneath each bed of coal is a bed of underclay with
Stigmaria, forming the soil in which the plants were
rooted, by the decay of which, passing through the
stage of peat, material was supplied for the subsequent
production of coal. Stigmaria, once supposed to be a
special plant, was first proved by Mr. JBinney to be
the root of Sigillaria, and about the same time Logan
showed that the underclay was a soil that lay invari-
ably underneath beds of coal, and indeed that these
roots and rootlets are in every underclay. The plants
(the decay of which formed beds of coal) consisted
largely of gigantic club-mosses, such as Lepidodendron
and Calamites (Equisitacese) of various species, and
many other ferns, with a few Coniferse, &c.

Passing from east to west in this coal-field, the coals

Coal-measures.

121

(sometimes the very same beds) gradually change
from so-called bituminous to anthracitic varieties. It
is remarkable that anthracite usually occurs in coal-
fields the strata of which have been much disturbed
and contorted, as, for instance, in the mountains of
Pennsylvania. Anthracite is simply a metamorphic
variety of coal ; and in Pembrokeshire, where the coals
are most anthracitic, the strata have been violently
contorted. There is a connection between the heat
that produced metamorpljism and the lateral pressure
that produced contortion, for pressure with movement
is convertible into heat. A line of disturbance passes
from the banks of the Wye south of Builth, through
the north part of the coal-field south of Llandeilo, and
from thence westward into Pembrokeshire, where masses
of igneous rocks appear in contact with the coal-field.
In connection with this, it may be that the rocks of the
coal-field remained a long time highly heated, and so,
by a species of distillation, deep under ground, the
bituminous were converted into anthracite coals.
FIG. 27.

1. Old Red Sandstone.

2. Carboniferous Limestone. -»

3. Millstone Grit. \ Carboniferous series.

4. Coal measures with beds of coal. J

Dean Forest may be looked on as an outlier of the
South Wales coal-field. Fig. 27 may be supposed to
represent the arrangement of the strata on the east side
of this very perfect basin. The limestone is about 700

122 Coal-measures.

feet thick, and the Coal-measures, according to De la
Beche, 2,765 feet. The limestone contains brown
haematite iron ore in cavernous holes. There are in the
field 23 chief beds of coal.

The Bristol and Somersetshire coal-field was also
originally joined to the South Wales Carboniferous
rocks, till separated by denudation. The Carboniferous
Limestone series near Bristol, and on the Mendip Hills,
is about 2,500 feet thick, containing the usual marine
fossils in great variety. The Coal-measures and Mill-
stone grit of the Bristol and Somersetshire coal-field lie
in a basin, the base of which is formed of this limestone.
The Coal-measures are altogether about 7,000 feet
thick, and consist of an upper and a lower series, sepa-
rated by thick beds of grit, called the Pennant rock,
about 2,000 feet in thickness, and which itself holds
beds of coal, some of them of value. Altogether they
contain about 46 beds of coal, with a total thickness of
about 98 feet. A large part of this Carboniferous basin
is unconformably covered by New Eed marl and Liassic
and Oolitic strata, and here and there portions of the
coal-field are exposed by denudation of the New Eed
marl between Bristol and the Mendip Hills, where the
beds rise rapidly, and a narrow strip of Coal-measures
skirts the Mendip limestones, the whole dipping north
at high angles. Similar Coal-measures probably under-
lie the marshes, and part of the secondary strata south
of the Mendip Hills.

These three coal-basins, South Wales, Dean Forest,
and Bristol, once united, have only been separated by
denudation similar to that shown at p. 33. In the
case of these coal-fields the intervening spaces are anti-
clinal, and the basins synclinal curves, and therefore it
is not only possible, but probable, that other coal-basins

Coal-measures. 123

may lie far to the east beneath the Oolitic, Cretaceous,
and Eocene strata of the London basin.

The Culm -measures of Devonshire, though of true
Carboniferous age, and probably representing much of the
series, are nearly unproductive of coal. Near their base
there are intermittent thin streaks of limestone, which
may feebly represent part of the great masses of
Somerset and South Wales, just as the thin worthless
coals represent the numerous seams of these coal-fields.
But the conditions of deposition in the areas were
apparently very different. In the Devonshire area the
purely terrestrial intervals, marked by the growth of
land plants in situ, seem to have been infrequent and
transitory, and from bottom to top common aqueous
strata prevail.

Further north, in the neighbourhood of Newent,
narrow bands of poor Coal-measures are barely trace-
able between the Old Red and the New Red Sandstones,
and still further north, round Bewdley, there lies the coal-
field of the Forest of Wyre, consisting of strata by no
means very productive of coal-beds. They lie directly
on the Old Red Sandstone, the Carboniferous Limestone
being absent. The Coalbrookdale coal-field joins that
of the Forest of Wyre, and lies partly on a thin deve-
lopment of Carboniferous Limestone, and partly
unconformably on Upper Silurian rocks. On the north-
west, the lower part of the New Red Sandstone is
faulted against it, and on the east it is overlaid by
Permian strata. It contains several bands of good
nodular ironstones, which often yield Producta, Conu-
laria, Orbicula, Limulus, and other marine remains, and
in some of the strata fossil beetles, dragonflies, and spiders
have been found. There are in places 22 beds of
coal in this field, about 10 of which are workable, some

1 24 Coal-measures.

of them from 3 to 6 feet thick, with beds of under-
clay, the whole being interstratified with shales and
sandstones. The total thickness of these Coal-mea-
sures is about 1,000 feet. The adjoining coal-fields of
Le Botwood and Shrewsbury are comparatively of minor
importance. The North Wales coal-field in all essen-
tial geological points resembles that of South Wales, and
lies on the Carboniferous Limestone, which is from 800
to 1,000 feet thick. South of Wrexham the whole dips
east under the Permian rocks, and further north under
the New Eed Sandstone. The Denbighshire part con-
tains at least 17 beds of coal, most of which are
worked, and the Flintshire part at least 12 beds.
A small fragment of the same strata occurs in the
central part of Anglesey. It is underlaid by the
Carboniferous Limestone, and on the south-east is
faulted against the Cambrian rocks. Permian strata
overlie it, but the smaller faults and a greenstone dyke
which affect the coal do not pass through the Permian
beds, which lie unconformably over all.

In the centre of England the basement beds of the
South Staffordshire coal-field rest directly on the
Wenlock Limestone of the Upper Silurian series. This
field, in the northern part, contains 14 beds of coal,
(retting closer to each other by degrees in the south,
several of these coalesce to form the thick coal, in places
40 feet in thickness, with two thin partings. The rocks
are pierced by basalts and a white felspathic -looking
trap, which has charred the coals at the points of junc-
tion, and is undoubtedly connected with the great
basaltic mass, called the Eowley Eag, that overlies the
Coal-measures.

The New Eed Sandstone on the east is faulted
against the Warwickshire coal-field, and generally over-

Coal-measures. 125

laid by the Permian rocks on the west. It contains six
beds of workable coal, besides ironstone, and on the
south, where the strata pass under the Lower Keuper
Sandstones, several of these, as in South Staffordshire,
coalesce to form two beds of coal. The lower part of
the Coal-measures is traversed by several lines of intru-
sive dioritic greenstones running in the line of strike.

The Ashby-de-la-Zouch coal-field is overlaid by the
New Red Sandstone, and partly underlaid by the Car-
boniferous Limestone, and partly, probably, by a con-
tinuation of the Cambrian rocks of Charnwood Forest.
It is divided into two districts or minor basins — the
eastern, containing 1 5 beds of coal, 1 1 of which are
workable ; and the western 1 1 beds. Nine are of superior
quality. The Coalbrookdale, South Staffordshire, and
Warwickshire coal-fields present so many points of
resemblance, that undoubtedly they were all originally
formed as one coal-field, and even now in great part
may be continuous in the districts that lie between,
concealed by Permian and New Red strata.

North of this coal-field the Carboniferous rocks are
somewhat modified in details. Between Derbyshire and
Berwick they stretch north and south without a break
for 200 miles, by about 60 miles in width. At the
southern end, near Derby, the New Red Sandstone over-
lies them. West of Cheadle, along the edge of the
North Staffordshire coal-field, they are generally faulted
against the Permian rocks, north of which lie the coal-
fields of Cheshire and Lancashire. The Carboniferous
Limestone and Millstone grit rise between these coal-
fields, forming the hills of Derbyshire ; and the Coal-
measures are thrown off on either side of the anticlinal
axis, forming, in the east, the Derbyshire and Yorkshire
coal-field, and on the west those of North Staffordshire,

126 Coa l-measures.

Cheshire, and Lancashire. Three or four beds of igneous
rock, called loadstone, lie in the limestone. The Mill-
stone grit of these areas is much mingled with shale, and
between it and the Carboniferous Limestone there are
often thick beds of shale and sandstone, called the Upper
Limestone Shale, or Yoredale rocks. North of the
Kibble the Carboniferous Limestone itself is divided by
numerous interstratincations of sandstone and shale,
with occasional beds of thin coal, and this increasing in
the northern parts of Northumberland, the equivalents of
the southern mass of Carboniferous Limestone die away
into a few subordinate beds of limestone, and fairly pass
by degrees into a lower coal-field, with several poor
beds of coal.

The Lancashire, Cheshire and North Staffordshire
coal-fields, exclusive of the Millstone grit, vary from
about 3,500 to 7,500 feet in thickness, counting from
the beds on which the unconformable Permian strata
happen to rest. They include about 30 coal-beds in
North Staffordshire, in Lancashire 14 good seams about
St. Helens, 15 at Wigan, 16 between Manchester and
Bolton, and 13 at Burnley. Many of these, which in
different districts go by different names, are equivalent
beds. Fish remains and many marine and estuarine
or fresh water shells occur among the interstratified
shales and sandstones. There are also many beds of
ironstone. The Nottingham, Derbyshire, and Yorkshire
coal-fields united give about 1 5 beds of workable coal.
All these are ironstone areas, and North Staffordshire
is the great pottery district of England. The finer
clay is imported, only the coarser qualities for tiles, &c.,
being native.

The Newcastle coal-field is about 1,600 feet thick,
and contains about 16 beds of coal throughout the

Igneous Rocks. \ 2 7

district. The lower coal-field of Northumberland,
as already stated, is of the age of the Carboniferous
Limestone series of Wales, and the Berwickshire coals
of Scotland are of the same general age. There is
another much smaller coal-field near Ingleton in North
Lancashire which contains 8 beds of coal, and in Cum-
berland the Whitehaven Coal-measures, which lie on the
Carboniferous Limestone, have 14 beds.

The great Scottish coal-fields lie in a broad syn-
clinal curve, in which are the valleys of the Clyde and
Forth. Beneath the Calciferous Sandstone and Carbon-
iferous Limestone series, Old Eed Sandstone, underlaid
by Silurian rocks, rises on the south-east between St.
Abb's Head on the east and Grirvan on the west ; while
on the north-west the Old Eed Sandstone resting on
the Lower Silurian rocks of the Highlands, rises from
beneath the same Carboniferous strata between the Frith
of Tay and the Clyde, near Dumbarton. The whole tract
is about 100 miles in length, by 40 to 50 in breadth.

The lower Carboniferous strata are much intermin-
gled with igneous rock, sometimes felspathic, sometimes
augitic. Some of these are intrusive, but large masses
consist of truly interbedded lavas, associated with
strongly marked and thick strata of volcanic ashes and
conglomerates, well seen, for example, on the cliffs
between Dunbar and Belhaven. The Carboniferous
Limestones, which in occasional bands overlie the Cal-
ciferous Sandstone, do not lie in a mass at the base of
the Coal-measures, but, as in the North of England, the
limestone occurs in several beds, chiefly in the lower
part of the series, interstratified with beds of sandstone,
shale, and occasionally of coal. In Linlithgowshire
and the Campsie Hills limestones are interbedded with
trap. Marine, fresh or brackish water, and terrestrial

128 Coal-measures.

alternations are of constant occurrence. In some cases
in East Lothian, beds of fireclay, with Stigmaria, and
thin layers of coal lying on old terrestrial soils, im-
mediately underlie marine limestones with Productas.
In the Dalkeith coal-field valuable beds of coal with
shales, &c. are interstratified with a thick series of beds
of Carboniferous Limestone. The Burdiehouse brackish
water limestone in East Lothian is the lowest of the
limestones, and yields many small bivalve Crustacea
of the genus Estheria, besides fish of the genera Mega-
licthys and Holoptychius.

In the East and Mid Lothian coal-fields about
20 beds of workable coal occur, besides many smaller
layers. Eleven workable beds of coal are known
above the Millstone grit or Moor rock, and 17 asso-
ciated with the Carboniferous Limestone beds below
the Millstone grit. The Carboniferous strata of the
Lothians cross the Firth of Forth beneath the sea, and
form great part of Kinross and Fife, where there are
29 workable beds, one of which is 21 feet, and others
from 5 to 9 feet in thickness. The western part of
the basin in Lanarkshire and Ayrshire yields 8
or 10 workable coal seams. It is in these districts
that the well-known black-band ironstones occur.

I have already said that the South Wales, Dean
Forest, Bristol and Devonshire Carboniferous areas
originally formed one, and have been separated by
disturbance of the strata and subsequent denudation.
The same kind of original continuity may be inferred
concerning all the coal-fields of the middle of England,
North Wales, and northward to Cumberland and North-
umberland, and the latter was even probably joined to
the great coal-field of central Scotland. After the
close of the Carboniferous epoch, this large area was

Carboniferous Limestone Fossils. 129

also thrown into a series of undulating anticlinal and
synclinal curves, great denudations occurred, and the
result was that the individual coal-fields now lie in
basins often separated from each other by intervening
tracts of Millstone Grit and Carboniferous Limestone.
Sometimes portions of these basins are concealed by
unconformable overlying Permian and New Red strata.
Thus, the Northumberland and Durham coal-field is pro-
bably a basin, partly out at sea, and the southern edge
of which is overlaid by Magnesian Limestone. The
Yorkshire and Derbyshire coal-field is in my belief
another basin, the eastern half of which must crop up
against the Magnesian Limestone, deep under ground,
and miles to the east of where it first dips beneath
that limestone. The Lancashire and North Wales coal-
fields also form parts of another great basin, in places
probably 6,000 feet or more beneath the New Red Marl
of Cheshire. These statements will be more easily un-
derstood by referring to figs. 63, p. 325, and 115, p. 601.
In the purely marine strata of the Carboniferous
series, of which the Carboniferous Limestone forms the
most important part, we find that more than 30 genera
and about 100 species of Corals have been named.
Among the most common are species of the genera
Cyathophyllum, Clisiophyllum, Syringopora, Litho-
strotion, and Zaphrentis. Crinoidea are numerous,
the most common of which belong to the genera Actin-
ocrinus, G'yathocrinus, Platycrinus, Woodocrinus,
and Poteriocrinus ; 3 species of Echiniclse also occur.
Trilobites are scarce in the Carboniferous rocks, the
most characteristic genera being Griffith/idea and Phil-
lipsia. Among other Crustacea there are Estheria,
Eurypterus, Prestwichia, Belinurus, and Limulus.
Polyzoa are common. Brachiopoda are also exceedingly

FIG. 28.

Pleurorhynchus minax. Gomatites spharicus.

Phillipsii Aviculopecten

Derbiensis. sublobatus.

Euomphalus pentangulatus. NautUus biaiigulatus.

Group of Carboniferous Limestone Fossils.

Coal-measure Fossils. 131

numerous, and comprise 18 genera and 160 species, the
most strikingly characteristic of which are Productus,
Spirifera, Rhynchonella, and Terebratula. The genus
Orthis only yields 12 species, a great decrease when com-
pared with its development in Silurian seas. There are
334 species belonging to 49 genera of Lamellibranchiata,
which, unlike their comparative development in Silurian
rocks, far exceed the Brachiopoda, both specifically and
generically, indicating a remarkable approach to the types
of Secondary times, in which Lamellibranchiate molluscs
by far predominate. The most common of these are
Aviculopecten, Posidonomya, Area, Conocardium,
Edmondia, Modiola, Nucula, and Sanguinolites.
Of Gasteropoda, there are 29 genera and 206 species,
among which are many species of Euomphalus and
Pleurotomaria. Of the Nucleobranchiata, 23 species of
Bellerophon are known, and 148 species of Cephalopoda,
the chief of which are Ooniatites, Nautilus, and
Orthoceras. Ninety-nine genera and 221 species of
fish have been described, some of which probably lived
alike in the sea and in fresh and brackish water.

In the Carboniferous rocks, chiefly in the Coal-
measures, more than 500 species of fossil plants have
been named, a large proportion of which are ferns,
some of great size. The most common genera are Sphe-
nopteris, Pecopteris, Neuropteris, Cyclopteris, Odon-
topteris, Caulopteris (tree-fern), &c. The remaining
plants belong chiefly to genera of Calamites (Equisitee
of large size), Lepidodendron (tree Lycopodiums),
and Sigillaria, Fig. 29. Coniferous trees, the fruit of
which is Trigonocarpum, also occur. In the Coal-
measure strata of Britain there have also been found
many fresh-water Crustacea of the genus Cypris, fresh-
water bivalves, Anihracomya, Anthracosia, &c., wings

FIG. 29.

Alethopteris lonchitidis Calamites (restored). Neuropteris gigantea.

Prestwichia rotundata. Anthracosia acuta.

Group of Coal-measure Plants and Freshwater Shells.

Physical Geography. 133

and wing-cases of beetles and other insects, spiders, &c.
Earn pittings on the shales are not infrequent, together
with sun-cracks and footprints of Labyrinthodont
Amphibia, Dendrerpeton, Anthracosaurus, and other
genera. The rain pittings in this special case, tell of
showers falling on surfaces of moist mud, exposed by
the temporary retirement of fresh water, and the sun-
cracks of the drying and shrinkage of that mud ; and
these joined with the footprints of Amphibia tell of
daily events which by happy accidents got perpetuated,
first, by baking in the sun's rays. Next, when the area
was again overflowed, new layers of mud settled on
these impressions, and afterwards becoming consolidated
into shale ; and thus we have, in a measure, fossilised
sunshine, showers, and footsteps of old Amphibians, im-
printed, during their occasional visits to the moist land,
on the margin of the water in which they chiefly lived.

Before closing the subject I must endeavour to
explain under what broad conditions of Physical
Geography the Carboniferous series was formed.

It is impossible to have an intimate knowledge of
the Carboniferous rocks, even within the limited area
of the British Islands, without coming to the conclusion,
first, that the various strata were formed in seas, some
comparatively open and deep, some shallow, estuarine,
and restricted in area, and some .in fresh water ; and
second, that beds of coal were due to terrestrial vegetable
growths that flourished and died on the land, and were
buried with the soils on which they grew. To examine
all of these points in full detail would require the
writing of a special treatise, and I can here only glance
at the proofs.

In the southernmost parts of South Pembrokeshire,

134 Physical Geography.

the limestone is about 2,500 feet thick. Going north
to Haverfordwest it rapidly thins out, and finally dis-
appears by overlap in a distance of twelve miles. A
rapid thinning of the same strata also takes place
between the shore of Bristol channel in Glamorganshire
and the north side of the South Wales coal-field. In
the Mendip Hills the limestone has also a thickness of
about 2,500 feet. Traces of it are still seen south
of Bideford Bay, at Cannington Park, a few miles north-
west of Bridgewater, while on the northern borders of
the Culm-measures of North Devon, it may be said to
have almost entirely disappeared as a special formation.
Among the limestone hills of Derbyshire it is of enor-
mous thickness, and its base is unknown ; but s® in-
distinct is the bedding in part of the centre of that
region, that it is often as hard to make out the
details of stratification as it is in a large consolidated
modern coral reef. North of Clitheroe the bosses of
limestone are in places remarkably massive, and thin
away in various directions so rapidly, that the incautious
geologist is at first tempted to imagine faults where
none exist. Further north, near Settle, Kendal, and
round the sides of the Yale of Eden, it is well developed
and distinctly bedded ; but passing east and north, into
Durham and Northumberland, it rapidly splits up into
a few comparatively insignificant bands, separated by
thick interstratifications of shale, sandstone, and minor
beds of coal. The lower coal-fields in Scotland lie in
equivalent strata.

In Ireland the phenomena are still more remarkable,
for in the south and south-west, as described by Jukes,
the same masses of limestone in a few miles sometimes
thin away from some 2,000 to 200 or 300 feet in
thickness.

Physical Geography. 135

The prevalence of corals in the thick masses of
Carboniferous Limestone, and sometimes the rapid thin-
ning out of these masses in opposite directions, point
to the conclusion that they were true coral reefs, of the
nature of the Barrier Eeefs of Australia and the Pacific
Ocean, and that they thinned away on one side to a
feather edge in the direction of the land, and on the
other more steeply towards the deep sea. These len-
ticular masses were probably formed round outlying
•islands, large and small, undergoing a process of slow
depression, or otherwise on the shores of some old con-
tinent, the details of the original shape of which are
now lost to our knowledge. One part of this land,
however, consisted of that area now known as the moun-
tainous parts of Wales, and the adjacent Silurian and
Cambrian territory that underlies the Coal-measures of
South Staffordshire, Warwickshire, and Leicestershire,
Derbyshire, Cumbria, and the South of Scotland, while
far north the Grampian mountains and the whole of the
North Highlands stood higher above the level of the
sea than they do now, for ever since they have suffered
from denudation.

But while in the south, coral reefs of the nature of
Barrier Eeefs or Atolls were being formed, in the north
the case was different ; for there, as in parts of the
modern Pacific, volcanic action was rife, and this is
witnessed by the lavas and ashes, intermingled and in-
terstratified with the whole of the Carboniferous series
in Scotland. This area, together with the north of
what is now England, was therefore more or less an
area of elevation, accompanied by oscillations of
partial depression. Thus it happens that in these
regions, the bands of Carboniferous Limestone are quite
insignificant when compared with the thick interstrati-

136 Physical Geography.

fications of shale and sandstone with occasional beds of
coal that lie between them, and which, excepting the
beds of coal, were of ordinary aqueous sediments.

This naturally leads to the question under what
circumstances were the purely mechanical sediments
and the beds of coal formed ? The answer is, that
after the close of the Carboniferous Limestone epoch
in the south, the area got filled up by the sands of the
Millstone Grit and the more muddy strata (now shales
and sandstones) that overlie them, and this shallowing
of the seas may have been aided by partial upheaval of
the area, till part of it was nearly at, and at length a little
above, the level of the sea. Through this flat conti-
nental land, great rivers ran, bordered by wide marshy
flats, on which the vegetation grew that by its decay
and death became transformed into peat. Then by
gradual depression these areas were again covered with
water, in the first instance salt or fresh, as the case
might be, but in all cases resulting in the deposition of
layers of sediment. The area was thus converted by
degrees into low land, covered by vegetation, a new
growth and decay took place, and it was again depressed
beneath the water to receive newer sediments, and so
on through a vast period of time, till, for example, all
the 10,000 feet of the South Wales coal-field were
accumulated, interstratified with the hundred beds of
coal, great and small, that lie among the shales and
sandstones ; and in equal or less degree the same was
the case with all the other coal-fields of England and
Wales, as far north as those of Lancashire and
Yorkshire.

But when we come to other Carboniferous areas,
further north, the case is somewhat different. There
we find, in Durham, Northumberland, and Scotland, no

Physical Geography. 137

thick masses of limestone, but only thin bands, inter-
stratified with thick deposits of shale and sandstone,
similar in most respects to those of the Coal-measures
of Wales, and, like these, interstratified with beds of
coal. The inference is obvious, that in these areas the
conditions that prevailed were such, that a given area
during oscillations of level was at one time sea, as
proved by the sea shells in the strata, at another fresh
water, as witnessed by the shells Anthracosia, Anthra-
comya, &c., and at another time land, as shown by the
beds of coal, each underlaid by its terrestrial soil of
underclay with Stigmaria, the roots of Sigillaria.

If this be true, we get a hint of a new phase of the
physical geography of an epoch immediately succeeding
that of the Old Eed Sandstone. I have often thought
that if we might imagine the vast flat territory of
Northern Asia, with all its mighty rivers, to face south,
so that they might run into a sub-tropical sea, we
would have something like a picture of our Carboni-
ferous epoch, succeeding one, the chief character of
which, was the presence of numbers of large continental
lakes. This at all events seems certain, that beds of
coal are not the result of woody matter drifted into,
and waterlogged in, lake hollows, by rivers, as was once
imagined ; but rather, considering the magnitude of
the areas which the beds of coal cover, that they bear
witness to the existence of a vast continent, or, if we
take the whole world into account, of vast continents,
through which wandering rivers traversed flat areas,
comparable to those of the largest river areas of the
living world. Deltas of the present day offer many
analogies. The mouth of the Whang-ho or Yellow
river is now 250 miles north from where it entered the
sea about twenty years ago. The modern delta of the

138 Physical Geography.

Mississippi has an area of more than 12,000 square
miles, consisting chiefly of sands and clays, with much
vegetable matter, and that of the Nile an area of about
21,000. The delta of the Ganges and Brahmapootra is
more than 48,000 square miles in extent, has peaty
beds interstratified with clays and sands, containing
freshwater shells and freshwater tortoises, often much
below the level of the neighbouring sea. The area of
all England and Wales is 57,812 square miles, and
the areas of all the coal-fields of Great Britain extended
to their original size did not equal that of this great
delta.

It is not to be supposed that, in each coal* field, each
bed of coal extends over the whole area. On the con-
trary they thicken and thin out, and have their edges
like many a modern peat moss, and the vegetation of
the Carboniferous epoch flourished and decayed rapidly,
on moist ground and in a moist atmosphere, not of
excessive warmth, as has often been stated, but, in the
opinion of Sir Joseph Hooker, ' in a moist and equable
climate,' that could scarcely have been sub-tropical.

'39

CHAPTER X.

PEKMIAN STRATA.

IN England there are certain red strata, known as PER-
MIAN, which occupy a sort of debatable ground, lying
between the Carboniferous and New Red or Triassic
series. Sometimes they have been classed with the
former, sometimes with the latter, by those who like
to insist on hard and fast lines of division between each
formation. These strata, lying not quite conformably
either with the underlying or the overlying formation,
I prefer to consider as in some sense transition beds,
making one of the steps in that change of the physical
geography of our area which put an end to the develop-
ment of Coal-measures, and made it possible under new
conditions for the Permian strata to be deposited.

They are usually divided (as in Germany) into two
subformations, viz. : —

Magnesian Limestone and Marl Slate,
Eothe-todteliegende.

The higher English beds in certain areas consist chiefly
of Magnesian Limestone or Dolomite, interstratified
with certain marls, and the lower of red marls, sand-
stones, and conglomerates. But if we take England as
a whole this division does not hold good, for in the
eastern part of England the Magnesian Limestone often
lies directly on the Coal-measures, and in Lancashire and

140 Permian Strata.

the Vale of Eden, in the north, only a few thin beds
of Magnesian Limestone lie in the middle of red
sandstones and marls. Hard and fast lines of division
by no means hold good in this case.

The Permian strata were for long considered as form-
ing a lower part of the New Red Sandstone, till separated
from it by Professor Sedgwick, in his celebrated Memoir
on the Magnesian Limestone. They were afterwards
called Permian by Sir Roderick Murchison, from the
ancient Government of Perm in European Russia,
where they are extensively developed.

Between the neighbourhood of Nottingham and
Tynemouth in Northumberland, they have been sub-
divided by Professor King, into —

Crystalline and other limestones.
Brecciated limestone.
Fossiliferous limestone.
Compact limestone.
Marl slate.

The Marl slate lies at the base, but these sub-
divisions are by no means constant, and the lines
between them are not always definite. In many places
the rock consists of round masses of all sizes, often as
large as good-sized cannon balls, all cemented together.
The section is finely exposed on the sea -cliffs between
Hartlepool and South Shields, with great outlying
masses of rock rising out of the sands like ruined
castles, pierced by caverns with lofty ragged pillars and
arches, worn out by the restless sea, and through which
the daily tide flows. In their range from Nottingham
to this district the Magnesian Limestone is inter-
stratified with three minor beds of red marl.

In Nottinghamshire the position of these Permian
strata to the underlying Coal-measures, and the over-

Permian Strata.

141

lying Trias, or New Eed series, is shown in the following
diagram : —

1

c

fc

1 — '

1 5

3 CH

L> 3

4 m

R

i

o
O

1 N

3

•

o

o

"M ' ' 0)
fl O

O

S • • 1

• s

.

^ o) a

a

1

^J

White and Re
. Conglomerate
. Red Sandston
. Magnesian Li

"D^/J TUoY-1

. Magnesian L

Looked on as a whole, the Magnesian Limestone of
this district lies quite unconformably on the Carboni-

142 Permian Strata.

ferous series, for while between Nottingham and the
neighbourhood of Leeds they lie upon Coal-measures,
between Leeds and the vicinity of Darlington they
overlap the north edge of the Yorkshire coal-field, and
rest directly on the Millstone Grit and associated
shales as far as the south end of the Durham coal-field,
north of which they again lie on Coal-measures.

The limestone and marl slate are often fossili-
ferous.

In Lancashire, Cheshire, and North Staffordshire,
the Permian strata chiefly consist of red marls and
sandstones, interstratified near Manchester with a few
thin bands of Magnesian Limestone, where both lime-
stones and marls are fossiliferous, containing bivalve
shells of the genera Pleurophorus, Bakevillia, and
Schizodus, Turbo, Natica, &c. Similar marls and
sandstones, bordered by New Ked Sandstone, stretch at
intervals from the border of the North Staffordshire
coal-field to that of Shrewsbury, and skirt the Denbigh-
shire coal-field on the east. In the more central parts
of England the same kinds of rock border the Coal-
brookdale, Forest of Wyre, South Staffordshire, and
Warwickshire coal-fields. In the Permian strata of
Warwickshire there are beds of conglomerate, the
waterworn pebbles of which largely consist of fragments
of Carboniferous Limestone. A few stems of trees have
been found in them, together with Calamites, and two
or three casts of shells of the genus Strophalosia
(fig. 31), together with a Labyrinthodont Amphibian,
Dasyceps Bucklandi.

A large extent of Permian red sandstones and marls
occupy the beautiful Vale of Eden in Westmoreland
and Cumberland (see fig. 104, p. 521), from whence
Permian strata extend into the valleys of the Nith and

Permian Boulder Beds. 143

the Annan in Scotland, brecciated like those of the
Clent and Abberly Hills.

In the South Staffordshire district, and in the
Clent and Bromsgrove Lickey Hills, the Permian marls
and sandstones are capped by a remarkable brecciated
conglomerate, consisting of pebbles and large blocks of
stone, generally angular, imbedded in a marly paste,
once soft clay. These conglomerate beds are about 400
feet thick. South of Colebrookdale, near Enville, and
between that country and the Abberly and Malvern
Hills, the same rocks occur, largely associated with
coarse brecciated conglomerates, similar to those of the
Clent Hills. The fragments have mostly travelled from
a distance, apparently from the borders of Wales, and
some of them are three feet in diameter. In some cases
the smooth surfaces of the stones still retain striations,
identical in character with those found in ordinary
boulder-clay, or made by modern glaciers. Many of
the stones are of greenstone and felstone, apparently
derived from the Silurian traps of Montgomeryshire
and North Wales, and at the south end of the South
Staffordshire coal-field, near Northfield, I found in these
strata large slabs of Pentamerus limestone, such as are
only known in the Longmynd country, on the borders of
the Cambrian rocks in Shropshire. So completely,
indeed, does the whole deposit resemble the Post-
pliocene boulder-clay, that I have no doubt that there
was a glacial episode during part of the Permian epoch.
In Thuringia the conglomerates of the Rothliegende
have the same lithological character as the brecciated

O

conglomerates of the Abberly Hills and Clent Hills,
and they may be considered equivalents both in position
and origin.

The chief part of the Permian fossils have been

144 Permian Fossils and

found in the Magnesian Limestone, and they are.
generically and specifically, few in number, but, as a
whole, their affinities and grouping are decidedly
Palaeozoic. Some of the genera of plants have a Coal-
measure aspect, including Catamites, Lepidodendron,
Neuropteris, Sphenopteris, and Alethopteris, besides
Walchia, Ullmannia, Cardicocarpon, and fragments
of silicified coniferous wood. Only 9 genera and 21
species of Brachiopoda are found in these strata, viz.
Camarophoria 3, Crania 2, Distina 1, Lingula 2,
Producta 2, Spirifera 3, Spiriferina 2, Strophalosia
4, and Terebratula 2. These partly belong to genera
which also occur in the Carboniferous rocks. The same
strata contain 16 genera and 31 species of Lamelli-
branchiate molluscs, the most common of which are of
the genera Schizodus, Gervillia, Solemya, &c. ; 26
species of Gasteropoda, 2 Nautili, and many ganoid
fishes, the most common belonging to the very cha-
racteristic genus Palceornscus, of which there are 6
species (fig. 31, p. 148). All the Permian fish have hete-
rocercal tails, like the majority of the Palaeozoic genera,
in which the vertebral column is prolonged into the upper
lobe of the tail, whereas in most of the modern fishes the
vertebral column is not prolonged into either lobe.
The reptilian remains, both of the red rocks and of
the Magnesian Limestone, are partly Amphibian, as
shown by the Labyrinthodont Dasyceps Bucklandi of
Kenilworth, the footprints in the red Permian sand-
stones of the Vale of Eden, and Corncockle Moor, in
Dumfriesshire, and Lepidotosaurus Duffii of the lower
part of the Magnesian Limestone ; while others from
the marl slate, Proterosaurus Speneri and P. Huxleyi,
were true land Lacertilian reptiles.

Excepting the Magnesian Limestone, all the Per-

Physical Geography. 145

mian rocks are red. As with the thin pellicle of
peroxide of iron that incrusts the grains of sand and
mud of the Old Eed Sandstone, so the colour of the
red Permian sandstones and marls is due to a thin in-
crusting pellicle of peroxide of iron, such as I have
elsewhere attempted to show is often characteristic of
deposits in inland waters.

I now come to the main point : — What were the
peculiarities of the Physical Geography of the British
area in Permian times ? To explain this I shall partly
use the matter published in 1871, in the 'Journal of
the Greological Society,' in my paper ' On the Eed
Rocks of England of older date than the Trias.'

First, the plants found in our Permian strata are
chiefly of genera, but not of species, common to the
Coal-measures, viz., Catamites, Lepidodendron, Wal-
chia, Chondrites, Ullmannia, Cardiocarpon, Aletlio-
pteris, Sphenopteris, Neuropteris, and many fragments
of coniferous wood of undetermined genera. Inland
waters would be likely to receive land plants borne into
them by rivers, but this yields no certainly conclusive
evidence, since land plants are not very uncommon in
marine strata of the Lias and Oolites.

The evidence derived from the remains of Laby-
rinthodont Amphibia and of land reptiles, clearly points
to the close proximity of land. First, there is the Laby-
rinthodont Dasyceps Bucklandi from the red Permian
strata near Kenilworth, and next, Lepidotosaurus Duffii,
found near the base of the Magnesian Limestone, where
it gradually passes into the underlying marl slate, and
from the marl slate itself were obtained Proterosaurus
Speneri and P. Huxleyi, both, according to Huxley,
true land Lacertilian reptiles. Further north, in the
red sandstones of the Vale of Eden, Professor Harkness

L

146 Physical Geography.

found footprints, apparently of Labyrinthodonts, at
Brownrigg, in Plumpton, and near Penrith ; and many
years ago numerous footprints were described by the
late Sir William Jardine, which were found on the sur-
faces of beds of sandstone in Corncockle Moor and in
other parts of Dumfriesshire. All of these footprints
clearly indicate that the animals were occasionally
accustomed to walk on bare damp surfaces, which were
afterwards dried by the heat of the sun, before the
flooded waters overspread them with new layers of
sediment in a manner such as now takes place during
variations of the seasons in many modern salt lakes.
Pseudomorphs of crystals of salt in the Permian beds
of the Vale of Eden, and deposits of gypsum and per-
oxide of iron, help to this conclusion, together with
the occurrence of sun-cracks or rain-pittings impressed
on the beds. The Pseudomorphous crystals of salt tell
of the evaporation of pools by solar heat, for neither
crystals of chloride of sodium (salt"), nor deposits of
sulphate of lime (gypsum), could have been formed
amid common mechanical sediments at the bottom of
an open ocean. Only concentration of salts, by solar
evaporation of inland waters, could have produced this
result.

Eight genera and 21 species of fishes have been
found, chiefly in the marl slate. They are Acro-
lepis 1, Calacanthus 2, Dorypterus 1, Gyracanthus 1,
Gyropristis 1, Palceoniscus Il,Platysomus 2, and Py-
gopterus 2. Grenerically they have strong affinities
with those of the Carboniferous age, some of which were
undoubtedly truly marine, while others certainly pene-
trated shallow lagoons bordered by peaty flats. There
is nothing extraordinary in the occurrence of seafish
in an inland salt lake.

Physical Geography. 147

If we now turn to the assemblage of shells we shall
find it to be very poor in number. In the red marls and
bands of Magnesian Limestone at and near Manchester,
the very few species found in the marls and thin lime-
stones are poor and dwarfed in aspect, and in this re-
spect, and the small number of genera they somewhat
resemble the living molluscan fauna of the Caspian
Sea.

In the true Magnesian Limestone district of Notting-
hamshire, Yorkshire, and Durham, the case is somewhat
different. There we find a more numerous molluscan
fauna, but wonderfully restricted when compared with
that of Carboniferous Limestone times. I give it in
some detail, that the reader may judge for himself, as
the facts have an important bearing on my argument.
The numbers are taken from Mr. Etheridge's forth-
coming work.

BRACHIOPODA. — Camarophoria 3, Crania 2, Discina
1, Linyula 2, Producta 2, Spirifera 3, Spiriferina 2,
Strophalosia 4, Terebratula 2 : in all, 9 genera and 21
species.

LAMELLTBRANCHIATA. — Aucella 1, Mytilus 2, Avi-
cula 2, Gervillia 5, Area 2, Cardiomorpha 1, Cteno-
donta 1, Leda 1, Myalina 1, Myochoncha 1, Pleuro-
phorus i, Edmondia 1, Astarte 2, Schizodus 5,
Solemya 4, Tellina 1 : in all, 16 genera and 31 species.

UNIVALVES. — Calyptrcea 1, Chemnitzia 1, Chiton
3, Chitonellus 4, Dentalium 1, Natica 2, Pleuroto-
maria 3, Rissoa 1, Straparolus 1, Turbo 5, Turbo-
nilla 4 : in all, 1 1 genera and 26 species.

PTEROPODA. — Theca 1.

CEPHALOPODA. — Nautilus 1 .

The whole comprises only 38 genera and 80 species,
a very poor representative of the teeming life in the Car-

L 2

148

Physical Geography.

boniferous Limestone sea, from which more than 1 ,500
species have been named. It is to be remarked also.

FIG. 31.

Productus horridus.

Fcnestella retiformis.

Camerophoria Schlotheimi. Lingula Crcdneri. Strophalosia lamellosa.

Palaeoniscus comptus.
Group of Permian Fossils.

that all of the Permian shells are dwarfed in aspect,
when compared with their Carboniferous congeners.

In this poverty in number, and dwarfing of the
forms, these Permian fossils may be compared with the

Physical Geography. 149

still less numerous fauna of the Caspian Sea, as far as
that fauna is known, which sea, or brackish lake, was, it
is believed, once connected with the northern ocean, as
the fauna seems to testify. My belief is, that these
Permian waters were also of an inland, unhealthy
nature, and, like those of the Caspian, had previously
been connected with the open ocean.

Besides the poverty in number and small size of
the mollusca, the chemical composition and lithological
structure of the Magnesian Limestone, seem to me to
afford strong hints that it was originally deposited in a
large inland salt lake, and not that it was entirely de-
rived from calcareous organisms, and subsequently
altered into dolomite by chemical changes. I am well
aware that there are such masses, occasionally, for ex-
ample, in the Carboniferous Limestone which was formed
in an open sea. Some modern atolls are known to be-
come dolomitised, as described by Dana, but in the
Magnesian Limestone corals are chiefly conspicuous by
their absence. I repeat that the Permian Magnesian
Limestone was not, as used to be supposed, formed
in the sea, but in an inland salt lake, under such
circumstances that carbonates of lime and magnesia
were deposited simultaneously, probably, by concentra-
tion of solutions due to evaporation. In an open sea,
lime and magnesia only exist in solution in very small
quantities, and limestone rocks there are formed, as in
coral reefs, by organic agency.

In some of the lower strata of the Magnesian Lime-
stone, when weathered, it is observable that they consist
of many curious thin layers, bent into a number of very
small convolutions, approximately fitting into each
other, like sheets of paper crumpled together. These
dolomitic layers convey the impression that they are

150 Physical Geography.

somewhat tufaceous in character, as if the layers, which
are unfossiliferous, had been deposited from solutions.

In other parts of the district, along the coast of
Durham, large tracts of the limestone consist of vast
numbers of ball-shaped agglutinated masses, large and
small, and I have observed in limestone caverns, in pools
of water surcharged with bicarbonate of lime, that
sometimes precipitation takes place on a small scale
producing similar nodular bodies. It is notable also
that when broken in two, many of the balls are seen to
have a radiated acicular structure, that is to say, from
the centre rudely crystalline- looking bodies all united,
radiate to the circumference. In other places we find
numerous bodies radiating in a series of rays that gradu-
ally widen from the centre, and are unconnected at their
outer ends, which remind the spectator of radiating
corals. There is, however, nothing organic about them,
and I do not doubt that they owe their growth to some
kind of crystalline action going on at the time that the
limestone was being formed.

The occurrence of gypsum in the marly strata of
the Permian series, helps to the conclusion that they
were all deposited in inland waters, for it is impossible
to conceive of pure sulphate of lime having- been thrown
down from solution in the ocean.

In these views I do not stand alone, for similar con-
clusions are held by Dr. Sterry Hunt, as shown in Sir
William Logan's ' Geology of Canada,' and Professor
Dana in his ' Manual of Greology.'

The chemical argument is not, however, what first
led me to suspect that the Permian Magnesian Lime-
stone was deposited chiefly from solution, in an inland
salt sea, but rather the poverty and dwarfed character of
the fauna alone, while I soon saw that the chemical

Physical Geography. 151

deposition of the limestone may account for the total
absence of fossils in the larger part of the formation.
Whether or not the water was too salt for the healthy
production of numerous shells and corals, is a question
I have not yet attempted to solve, being in the mean-
while content to prove (as I think) that the waters
formed inland lakes, that lay in a large continent which
began in Old Eed Sandstone times, but had undergone
many modifications in its physical geography before the
Permian lake-basins came into existence.

152

CHAPTEE XL

NEW RED SANDSTONE AND MARL, AND RH^TIC BEDS.

THE NEW KED SANDSTONE SERIES, or TRIAS, succeeds
the Permian strata. It has received the name of Trias
from the fact that when fully developed, as in Germany,
it consists of the three great divisions of Keuper marls,
Muschelkalk, and Bunter Sandstein. Comparatively
few genera and no species of bivalve shells pass thus far
upwards. The majority of the old genera of Brachiopoda
disappear, and the whole grouping of the fossils now
ceases to be Palaeozoic, and assumes a character com-
mon to the Mesozoic or Secondary strata. The British
section, with the exception of the Muschelkalk, is as
follows : —

•-Red marl and thin bands of white sandstone, with
Keuper < Rock-salt.

I White sandstone and red marl.
(Muschelkalk absent in Britain).

f Soft red sandstone.
Bunter < Quartz conglomerate.

I Soft red sandstone.

These beds, with variations, occupy the undulating
lands from Devonshire along the banks of the Severn,
round the eastern borders of the Palaeozoic rocks of
Herefordshire and North Wales. From thence they
stretch eastward to the Permian and Carboniferous
rocks of Lancashire, North Staffordshire, and Derby-

New Red Series. 153

shire. They surround all the midland coal-fields and
Permian beds between Shrewsbury, Coventry, and
Derby, and from thence, everywhere unconformably
overlying the Permian rocks, they stretch north in a
long band from Nottingham to the river Tees.1 The
general arrangement of these strata will be easily
understood by help of the diagram, p. 1 54.

No fossils are known in the New Red or Bunter
Sandstones of England, but a few marine shells are
found in equivalent strata on the Continent.

In England, above the Upper soft red sandstone are
beds of red, white, and brown (Keuper) sandstone, with
interstratifications of red marl, often ripple-marked,
and containing bones and footprints, chiefly of Laby-
rinthodont reptiles, together with a few plants and a
peculiar fish, Dipteronotus cyphus, found near Broms-
grove, in Worcestershire. The larger impressions of
footprints are 8 to 10 inches in length, and in front of
each there often is a smaller one made by the forefoot,
fig. 33.

In beds of Magnesian conglomerate at the base of, and
associated with the New Eed Marl at the edge of the
Mendip Hills, Dr. Riley and Mr. Stutchbury discovered

1 The Muschelkalk (absent in Britain) may be well seen, among
other places, near Gotha, and at Eisenach, in Thuringia. It is a grey
shelly limestone, rich in Terebratulce, Trigonicc, Nyce, Plagiostomas,
Aviculce, Oysters, and Pectens. The genus Ceratites, closely allied
to, if not a true Ammonite, occurs here. Lamellibranchiate molluscs,
some of new genera, abound as individuals, while Brachiopoda (ex-
cepting Terebratulce) sink in the scale.

At Guttenstein and Werfen, in the Austrian Alps, there are
strata at the base of the New Ked Sandstone which are not
Permian, and which contain a rich and peculiar fauna — Ammo-
nites, Belemnites, and other secondary forms, being mixed witli
OrtJwceratites, Goniatites, and other genera usually considered
characteristic of Palaeozoic times.

New Red Series.

Rock Salt. 155

the bones of land lizards, Thecodontosaurus antiquus,
Palceosaurus Cylindrodon, and P. Platyodon.

The rock salt of England lies above these beds in the
great marly plains of Lancashire, Cheshire, and Worces-
tershire. It is found at varying depths, in interrupted
lenticular beds, ranging from a few feet to about 120
feet in thickness. No fossils occur in the salt. The
mass is usually of a reddish colour, due to the presence
of ferruginous impurities.

For long there was a total absence of any rational
account of the manner of deposition of rock-salt, but I
think few geologists now doubt that it was precipitated
in supersaturated salt lakes during the Keuper period ;
and this could only have been done by evaporation, due
to solar heat acting on the waters of salt lakes which
had no outflow, like the Great Salt Lake of Utah, for
example, or the salt lakes of Central Asia and of the
Sahara.1 The red marl varies from 500 to 2,000 feet
in thickness, and contains a thin band of white sand-
stone, often with pseudomorphs of crystals of rock-salt,
and also bearing a small bivalve crustacean, Estheria
minuta, a lamellibranchiate small bivalve shell, Pul-
lastra arenicola, a fish, Hybodus Keuperi, footprints
of Labyrinthodon giganteus, and others, also bones of
reptiles, and traces of land plants, fig. 33. Teeth also of a
small Marsupial mammal, Microlestes antiquus, occur
in the red marls near Watchett in Somersetshire. This
is the oldest known mammalian relic. In Scotland,
at Lossiemouth, Keuper sandstones contain scutes and
bones of a crocodile, Stagenolepis Robertsoni, Hypero-
dapedon, and a land lizard, Telerpeton Elginense.*

1 See memoir < On the Physical Relations of the New Bed Marl
Ilhaetic Beds, and Lower Lias : ' Geological Journal, 1871 : Ramsay.

2 On the Continent, near Strasburg, abrut thirty species of plants

156

Physical Geography.

On the whole, the same kind of arguments already
applied to the Permian strata, may, with increased force,
be used in relation to the New Eed Sandstone and marl,
especially the occurrence of rock-salt, gypsum, the
red colour of the rocks, and the prevalence of the foot-
prints and bones of Labyrinthodont Amphibia, and the
remains of crocodiles, land lizards, Deinosauria, and
plants. To me there remains no trace of a doubt that
the New Eed Sandstone was deposited in an inland lake,
or lakes, possibly fresh, but probably brackish, and that

FIG. 33.

Estlieria minuta.

Labyrinthodon giganteus.

Triassic Fossils.

the overlying Keuper or New Ked Marl beds were
formed in a great salt lake, or lakes, if we take all
Europe into account.

But inferences still more striking may be drawn
respecting the Physical Geography of the time.

By referring to the descriptions of the Old Eed

are known in the Bunter beds, chiefly Ferns, Calamites, Cycads,
and Coniferae, and with them fish and Labyrinthodont amphibia,
and marine mollusca of the genera Trigonia, Mya, Mytilus, and
Posidonia, so few in number, that in connection with the Laby-
rinthodonts, &c., they suggest the idea not of an open ocean, but of
a salt lake. Teeth of a Marsupial mammal (Microlestes antiquus)
occur in a bed between the Keuper and Liassic strata in Wiir-
temburg.

Physical Geography. 157

Sandstone, Carboniferous, Permian, and New Red form-
ations, it will be seen that, by the writer, they are all
considered to afford evidence of continental as opposed
to purely marine conditions ; for the Old Bed Sand-
stone was deposited in fresh water, the Coal-measures,
whether below, interstratified with, or above the Car-
boniferous Limestone, on the edges of, and to a great
extent on, a continent with large rivers, marshes, and
beds of peat, and the Permian and New Red series
both in salt lakes ; in other words, a great continental
epoch in Northern Europe (and in other regions), lasted
from the close of the Upper Silurian epoch down to
the end of the deposition of the New Red Marl, one
main feature of ivhich was the abundance of reptilian
life, partly Amphibian. Those parts of it in which
the Permian and New Red strata were deposited can
be best compared physically to the great area of inland
drainage of Central Asia, so dry and arid where not
artificially irrigated by rivers, and in which, from the
Caspian Sea for 3,000 miles to the east, and far south
towards the Himalayah, in a comparatively rainless
district, all the lakes are salt, excepting those which
have an outlet into some lower lake.

I specially draw attention to these remarkable
inferences, for surely they give something like a broad
view of an old phase of a long-enduring physical
geography, so long, indeed, in my opinion, 4 that the
great continental era, which began with the Old Red
Sandstone and closed with the New Red Marl, is com-
parable, in point of geological time, to that occupied
in the deposition of the whole of the Mesozoic or Se-
condary series (later than the New Red Marl) and to
the whole of the Cainozoic or Tertiary formations, and,
indeed, to all the time that has elapsed since the begin-

158 Rhatic Beds.

ning of the deposition of the Lias down to the present
day.1

When portions of geological history can be reduced
to some such form as this, it seems to possess a kind of
human interest in its resemblance more or less to the
physical geography of to-day.2

THE RILETIC BEDS occupy only a small space in
England, estimated by superficial area ; for in general
they run in a mere narrow strip between the New Red
Marl and the Lower Lias, and in fact form true beds of
passage from the Marl to the Liassic strata. To make
this statement clear it is necessary to allude to a part
of the geology of the Alps and of Italy.

Professor Stoppani has described a series of strata
on the river Esino, in Italy, which he considers to be
equivalent in geological time to the Red Keuper Marls
north of the Alps. These strata, which he calls the
Infra-Lias, contain about 200 species of fossils, chiefly
mollusca, with a few Echinodermata and sponges, and
at the top lie the well-known beds called the Avicula
contorta zone, by Oppel, a name adopted in England for
these strata by Dr. Wright, when he separated them
from the ordinary beds of the Lias limestone and clay,
and correlated them with their continental equivalents.

On the north side of the Tyrolese Alps, the Lower

1 < Proceedings of the Royal Society,' No. 152, 1874 : Ramsay,
' On the Comparative Value of certain Geological Ages ; or, Groups
of Formation considered as Items of Geological Time.'

2 Though I had often lectured on some of the questions respect-
ing these old lakes and other points connected with the terrestrial
conditions of the times, it was not till 1871 that I published any-
thing on the subject in the papers alluded to in notes, and later, in
1874, in the * Proceedings of the Royal Society.' Little or nothing
is to be found in any Manual of Geology on the subject, except
in the third edition of ' The Student's Manual of Geology,' by
Professor Jukes, edited by Archibald Geikie, published in 1872.

Rhcztic Beds. 159

St. Cassian and Hallstatt beds are believed by Hauer
and Suess to represent the same strata ; that is to say,
they are the ocean representatives of the red marls of
England and other parts of Europe, which I described
as having been deposited in large inland salt lakes.
The Rhcetic beds of England, which merely represent
the very topmost part of the Italian series, seem to
have been deposited in shallow seas and estuaries, or
in lagoons or occasional salt lakes of small size, now
and then separated from the sea by minor accidental
changes in physical geography.

On the north shore of the estuary of the Severn, at
Penarth, near Cardiff,1 and elsewhere in England, there
is a perfect physical gradation between the New Eed
Marl and the Rhaetic Beds, shown by interstratifications
of red, green, and grey marls, which, varying in different
areas, pass upward by degrees into limestones, sand-
stones, and black shales. It is, therefore, impossible
always to determine in this series precisely where the
New Ked Marl ends and the Rhsetic Beds begin ; and,
indeed, all through the Red Marl, from bottom to top,
there is a tendency to a recurrence of interstratified
deposits that, lithologically, closely resemble the lower
parts of the Rhsetic beds, as, for example, at Penarth,
near Cardiff. The ' White Lias ' of Lyme Regis is now
classed with this subformation.

All over England, wherever the base of the Lower
Lias is well seen, the Rhaetic beds, rarely more than 50
or 100 feet thick, are found to lie between the Lias and
the New Red Marl. As a general rule they are seen to
pass conformably and by easy gradations into each other,
and they were, indeed, always classed with the Lias, till
separated from these strata bf Oppel.

1 The Rhsetic strata are sometimes called the Penarth Beds.

160 Physical Geography.

The succession of events that, through the Rhgetic
beds, marked the transition from the New Red Marl to
the Lower Lias seems to have been as follows : —

In the latter part of the Triassic epoch, as already
stated, our Keuper, or New Red Marl, beds were depo-
sited in an area that now forms part of England, and
this area was in those days a great salt lake.

This lake gradually got partly rilled with sedi-
ments, and by-and-by, through change in amount of
rainfall, or through increase of heat, it ceased to have
an outflow, evaporation being equal to, or greater than,
the influx of water. Concentration and precipitation of
salts ensued as already explained.

Subsequently, during deposition of the marly sedi-
ments, by increase of rainfall, or climatic change of
temperature, the water became somewhat less salt, but
still sufficiently saline, by evaporation of the moisture
on wet surfaces, to produce crystals of salt (now pseudo-
morphs) in sandy layers interstratified with the marls,
together with layers and nodular masses of gypsum,
which state of affairs continued up to, and even during,
the deposition of recognised Rhsetic strata. That
Jxhaetic areas got dried by temporary exposure is certain,
lor besides the pseudomorphs, sun- cracks are common in
the strata.

In our area, sinking of the district took place at or
about the time when the lake or lakes got nearly
filled with sediment, and a partial influx of the sea over
shallow bottoms was the result. The deposits that
ensued, accompanied by a small migration of marine
forms of life, constitute the Rhaetic beds of England.

Many years ago, the late Professor Edward Forbes
stated to me that the fauna of the White Limestone
of Lyme Regis, then called White Lias, reminded him,

Rhcztic Fossils. 1 6 1

in its assemblage of forms, of the molluscan fauna of
the Caspian Sea, which is few in genera and species,
and of an abnormal kind, in consequence of the brackish
quality of the water. In the Black Sea also, there
are misshapen forms, stated by Edward Forbes to be
due to the gradual freshening of the water, because of
the constant influx of rivers into it, and the current
that runs through the Bosphorus into the Mediterranean
Sea. Both of these cases relating to continental seas of
a lake-like character, bear on the subject in question ;
especially seeing that these British beds of passage are
also comparatively poor in genera and species, and that
some of the species, to which special names have been
given, are variable or even distorted in form. Others
are hard to distinguish from shells common in the
Lias, while some also occur in the great Marine Bhsetic
series of the Continent, and some pass upwards into
the ordinary Lias. It is, indeed, difficult not to believe,
that some of these forms are in reality abnormal and
due to the locally unhealthy quality of the water in
which they lived.

Though this volume has little to do with general
palaeontology, the following account of the fauna bears
on these questions, and I therefore give it in some detail.
It also helps to show that our Rhsetic beds represent a
set of local conditions that marked the passage of the
Keuper marls into the undoubted Lower Lias, and,
indeed, in places it is hard to separate them litholo-
gically.

In these Khsetic beds there are now known two
Crustacea, viz. Tropifer Icevis, from one of the Bone
beds, and Estheria minuta, first known in the Keuper
sandstones, and one Brachiopod, Discina Toivnshendi,
the only one known in our Khsetic strata. Of the

M

1 62 Rhcetic Fossils.

Lamellibranchiate molluscs, Lima precursor very
much resembles Lima punctata of the Lias ; Monotis
decussata occurs at the top in thin limestone bands,
which some have considered to form part of the Lower
Lias. Ostrea fimbriata may possibly be 0. irregularis
of the Lias, but oysters are so variable in form that
they are of small value in such an inquiry. Pecten
Valoniensis, also a Khaetic shell, is a very variable
form. Plicatula intusstriata passes into the Lower
Lias. Anoplophora musculoides, another Rhaetic
shell, occurs with Monotis decussata in the thin bands
of limestone at the top, which some geologists call
Lias. Modiola minima is found both in the Rhaetic
and Lower Lias strata. Figures of some other well
known fossils are shown in fig. 34.

All the Grasteropoda of the Rhaetic beds are said to
be peculiar to that formation, and the same is the case
with the fish ; for, many years a.go, Sir Philip Egerton
declared ' that the beds in question, hitherto considered
as belonging to the Lias, must be removed from that
formation, inasmuch as they present a series of fishes
not only specifically distinct from those of the Lias,
but possess, in the Granoid genera, the heterocerque
tail, an organism confined to the fishes which existed
anterior to the Lias.' l Of the Reptilia, Plesiosaurus
costatus, P. Hawkinsii, P. trigonus, and, according to
the late Mr. William Sanders, Ichthyosaurus platyodon,
are common to these Khaetic beds, and to the basement
beds of the Lower Lias. The discovery by Professor
Boyd Dawkins of the small Marsupial mammal Micro-
lestes antiquus, in the grey marls at Watchett, in
Somersetshire, is not without significance, for it speaks

1 'A Notice on the Occurrence of Triassic Fishes in British
Strata; ' « Proceedings of the Geological Society,' 1841, vol. iii., p. 409.

Rhcetic Fossils.

1 6

of the neighbourhood of land that bordered the old
Triassic lake, and the succeeding shallow Khsetic sea,
part of which was the Mendip Hills, ' the home of the
Microlestes.' !

In the beds of passage, from 10 to 50 feet above

FIG. 34.

Pecten Yaloniensis.

Ceratodus parvus.

Avicula contorta.

Discina Townskendi.

Nomacanthus
filifer.

Myophoria postera.
Group of Ehaetic Fossils.

the Bone bed, there are certain thin bands in
Gloucestershire, named by the Eev. P. B. Brodie, who

1 For notices of this old land, see De la Beche ' On the Formation
of the Kocks of South Wales and South- West of England ' ; and
Ramsay, ' Denudation of South Wales and the Adjacent Counties of
England,' Mem. Geol. Surv. vol. i. 1846; and 'Abnormal Conditions
of Secondary Deposits,' &c., by Charles Moore, ' Quarterly Journal
Geol. Soc.' vol. xxiii., 1867.

M 2

164 Physical Geography.

first described them, the ' insect limestones.' The
fossilised contents of these bands throw some light on
the physical geography of the lands that bordered the
waters of the time, for in them have been found
numerous elytra and other remains of Beetles, Grass-
hoppers, Cicadas, Dragon-flies, and other neuropterous
insects, associated with a fresh-water shell of the genus
Cyclas, the shells of Cypris, and with ferns, Cycads,
and leaves of Monocotyledonous plants. These beds,
therefore, indicate either fresh-water strata, or else the
immediate proximity of land, from whence streams
washed into the sea insects, fresh-water Crustacea,
shells, and land plants.

Sir Charles Lyell remarks that 'the size of the
species (of insects) is usually small, and such as taken
alone would imply a temperate climate ; but many
of the associated remains of other classes must lead
to a different conclusion.'1 This, however, seems to
be explained by a remark long ago made to me by
Edward Forbes, who, while working with Captain
Graves, during the hydrographical survey of the ^Egean
Sea, observed that, during heavy rains, vast numbers
of insects were washed into the sea, not such as in-
habited the low hot shores of the ^Egean, but those
that lived in the high cool regions of the neighbouring
mountains, which, caught in the floods of rain, were
washed into rivers and borne onwards to yield food for
fishes in the ocean.

In conclusion, if, as I believe, the New Ked Marl
was deposited in a salt lake, if it be the equivalent in
time of the marine Infra-Lias beds of Stoppani in
Italy, and of the Lower St. Cassian and Hallstatt beds
of Hauer and Suess, then the Avicula contorta beds,
1 « Student's Elements of Geology,' p. 351, 1874.

Physical Geography. 165

being the natural marine successors of these strata on
the Continent of Europe, are in like manner the natural
marine successors of the lake-formed sediments of the
red Keuper marls, and in reality are true passage
beds from those red marls into the Lower Lias ; and a
candid consideration of the fossil fish, reptiles, shells,
insects, and plants of the British Khsetic strata
strengthens this view. When the waters of the old
lakes were invaded by the sea, a migration of a few
marine forms took possession of the old lacustrine area,
and this depression gradually proceeding, culminated
in the development of the great Liassic fauna, at a time
when the old continent was submerged, and the moun-
tain tracts were converted into groups of islands, the
shores of which were washed by a broadening Liassic
sea.

1 66

CHAPTER XII.

LIASSIC AND OOLITIC, OR JUKASSIC STRATA.

IN the previous chapter, I stated that the continental
area in which lay the lakes of the epoch of the New Red
Marl, underwent partial submersion, during which our
passage beds, called the Rhsetic or Avicula contorta

Jr o

strata, were deposited. This sinking of the land going
on by degrees, resulted in the formation of groups of
islands, round which, first the LIAS, and afterwards the
OOLITIC SERIES were deposited, the whole, on the Con-
tinent of Europe, and now often in Britain, being
grouped under the name of Jurassic formations.

The general stratigraphical relations of the larger
masses of the Liassic and Oolitic series, in the southern
half of England, will be easily understood by reference
to fig. 5, p. 25.

The high ground now called Wales and Hereford-
shire, undoubtedly formed part of one of these islands ;
Dartmoor and other palaeozoic elevations in Devon and
Cornwall formed others ; probably the hilly regions of
Derbyshire another ; and, certainly, the Cumbrian
mountains a fourth ; while there can be no doubt that
parts of the south of Scotland, and the greater heights
of the Highlands, also stood as islands washed by the
Liassic sea.

It is not, however, to be supposed that the actual

Lower Lias. 167

forms of these island territories were even approximately
identical with those of the present mountains, and
the limits and orographic contours of these fragments
of an old physical geography can only be approximately
guessed at. They have undoubtedly been subjected to
repeated disturbance and upheaval since the beginning
of the deposition of the Lias, but after these old
palaeozoic mountains first rose high into the air, they
suffered so much from all the agents of waste and
degradation, that in Liassic and pre-Liassic times, I
have no doubt they were higher than now, and partly
occupied more extended areas.

THE LOWER LIAS CLAY AND LIMESTONE is about
900 or 1,000 feet thick, where best developed in England,
and consists of beds of blue clay or shale (weathering
brown), interstratified with beds of blue argillaceous
limestone, largely quarried in Leicestershire, Warwick-
shire, and elsewhere, for hydraulic lime. These lime-
stones, lying flat and unconformably on the upturned
and denuded edges of the Carboniferous Limestone,
form splendid cliffs on the coast of Glamorganshire,
and, with the Khsetic beds, they are also well exposed
in the coast section at Lyme Regis. From thence,
scarcely interrupted at the east end of the Mendip
Hills, the Lower Lias strikes north to the junction of
the Severn and Avon, and again NE. and N. to the
sea-coast of Yorkshire, E. of the river Tees. Through-
out this area it usually forms a flat or undulating
country, lying much in pasture land. The strata dip
generally gently to the east, but are sometimes for a
space quite flat. Occasionally the limestones of the
Lower Lias form a low escarpment, generally facing
west, and, almost invariably, the Marlstone or Middle
Lias makes a similar and higher escarpment, the top

FIG. 35.

Nautilus truncatus. Nautilus striatus.

Group of Lias Fossils.
m. Middle Lias or Marlstone. u. Upper Lias ; all the rest Lower Lias.

Middle L ias. 1 69

of which is formed of a tough brown fossiliferous
limestone, generally of only a few feet in thickness, but
nearly constant in its occurrence from Dorsetshire to
Yorkshire, and the very indefinite base of the Marlstone
forms the eastern boundary of the Lower Lias.

The Lower Lias clay and limestone of England is, as
a whole, rich in fossils, the general grouping of which
cannot be more than noticed here in a cursory manner.
These strata yield Extracrinus among the Crinoids,
(fig. 35); of Brachiopoda, a few species of Spiriferce,
Terebratulce, and Rhynclionellce, and numbers of
Lamellibranchiate molluscs, such as Gryphcea incurva,
Oysters, Pectens, Limas, Pinnas, Aviculas, Pholado-
myas, and others. Having been deposited mostly in
deep sea, univalve shells are much less common, but of
the Cephalopoda, which are free swimmers, there are
vast numbers of Ammonites, Belemnites, and Nautili
(see fig. 35), together with many fishes, and the great
marine Enalosaurian reptiles, Ichthyosaurus (fish- lizard)
and Plesiosaurus (see fig. 36), and the insectivorous
flying reptile, Pterodactylus brevirostris.

THE MAKLSTONE SERIES, or MIDDLE LIAS, which suc-
ceeds the Lower Lias clay, is generally somewhat argil-
laceous below, graduating upward into a brown, fer-
ruginous, soft, sandy rock, with hard nodular bands, and
a very marked brown ferruginous limestone at the top.
It is ricn in many forms of Ammonite, Belemnite,
Plagiostoma, Lima, Pinna, Pholadomya, Pecten,
Modiola, Terebratula, and Rhynchonella, besides a
very characteristic Spirifer (S. Walcotti, fig. 36), one
of the few remaining shells of that Palaeozoic genus.
Where the Lower Lias and Marlstone join, the strata
graduate into each other, but through the central parts
of England these passage-beds are rarely clearly ex-

1 70

Lias Fossils.

Upper Lias. 1 7 1

posed. In Yorkshire, however, on the sea-cliffs near
Staithes, the stratigraphical relations of the strata are
perfectly clear, and it is evident that there is no line of
demarcation between them, and through about 15 feet
of strata, including some of the well-known beds of
ironstone, fossils common to both occur, one of the
most conspicuous of which is Pecten cequivalvis.

THE UPPER LIAS CLAY plays a comparatively un-
important part in the physical geology of England. In
Gloucestershire it first begins to appear near Bath, but
so thin, that it is impossible to represent it on maps of the
1-inch to a mile scale. About Wotton-under-Edge it
begins to get more definite, and from thence, in a
narrow strip between the Marlstone rock, and the sands
beneath the Inferior Oolite, it runs northward by
Dursley, Stroud, Pains wick, and Chipping Camden, and
following all the contours of the Oolitic escarpment,
looks out upon the great plain of Lias, in the broad
valley of the Severn, or winds about among the intricate
system of minor valleys that lie between Minchin-
Hampton and Chipping Camden, and between Burford
and Banbury. In this progress, gradually increasing in
thickness, it forms great tracts of the clay lands in
Northamptonshire, between Great Brington and Arth-
ington, and in the neighbourhood of Uppingham and
Oakham in Rutland, while further north, the clay runs
in a long narrow strip, still overlying the Marlstone,
into Yorkshire, where it is finely exposed in the sea-
cliffs near Whitby, and where in old times great excava-
tions were made for the extraction of shale, and the
manufacture of alum.

Taken as a whole, the Upper Lias is a stiff dark
blue clay, with occasional layers of limestone often
nodular, containing many Belemnites, Ammonites, and

172 Lias and

Nautili, and bivalve shells, similar, in general grouping
of genera, to those of the Marlstone and Lias clay, with
both of which, but especially with the Marlstone, it has
species in common. In Yorkshire, the well-known jet
of Whitby is excavated from the shales on the cliffs,
and is formed of the fossilised stems of coniferous trees
that grew on the hilly islands, on the west and north.

The remarkable assemblage of large Keptilia that in-
habited the Liassic seas, the number of great and small
Cephalopoda, including many species of Ammonites,
Nautili, and Belemnites, the swarms of Terebratulse and
Bhynchonellse, the plentiful genera and species of
Lamellibranchiate molluscs and of univalve shells, all
speak of warm seas, surrounding islands, on which
grew Cycads, Zamias, and other plants, that seem to
tell of a tropical or subtropical climate. Nor was this
phase of the physical geography of the time specially
peculiar to the Lower Lias, for it belongs alike to each
of the divisions, and, as we shall by-and-by see, was
continued into much later times.

Nothing is more clear to me than this, that there
was no break in time between the successive conven-
tional divisions of the Lower, Middle, and Upper Lias.
Each in ascending succession lies quite conformably on
the other ; between the Lower and Middle divisions
there is a clear lithological passage, accompanied by
passage of species, and though there is generally a very
sudden break in lithological character between the
Marlstone and the Upper Lias clay or shale (due,
perhaps, to rapid depression of the area), yet contrary
to a not unprevalent belief, there is a greater number
of species common to these divisions than is generally
imagined.

Out of 668 known species in the Lower Lias, 94,

Passage of Species. 173

or about 14 per cent, pass into the Middle Lias ; and
of 500 species in the latter, 57, or about 11^ per cent,
pass into the Upper Lias ; while of 312 Upper Lias
species, 39, or about 1 2J per cent, pass into the Inferior
Oolite which succeeds it.

Few biologists and geologists now believe in the
sudden extinction of entire old marine faunas, or
even of the greater part of them, and their equally
sudden replacement by new creations ; for it begins to
be generally understood that life is variable and pro-
gressive, the change of species in given areas being due
chiefly, in comparatively short epochs, to migrations
out of and into these areas, in consequence of changes
of local conditions, such as depth of water, and nature
of sediments, while in long periods of geological time,
it is best accounted for by that process of evolution so
clearly expounded by Darwin. Neither is it a fair
test of the community of species in two so-called form-
ations, to take the entire fauna of the lower one, and
calculate the percentage of forms that pass into the
overlying deposit, for, between the lower and upper
parts of many thick formations, there is often the same
kind of difference in assemblage of species that there
is between the adjoining parts of two so-called distinct
formations. In judging then of passage of species, if
we had all the data, the fairest method would generally
be to estimate the passage of forms by those in
common between the upper part of the lower formation
and the lower part of the upper one, in which case it
would often be found, when there is a natural confor-
mity between the strata, that the percentage of species
that pass onward is much increased.

We now come to the Oolitic series of strata.

On the flank of the Cots wold escarpment, south of

i 74 Passage of Species.

Wotton-under-Edge, in Gloucestershire, the Upper
Lias clay is very poorly developed, and between
it and the ordinary limestone of the Inferior Oolite,
there are thick beds of soft brown sand, with inter-
mittent hard, sandy, calcareous bands, containing
Ammonites, Belemnites, Pentacrinites,and bivalve shells.
Above these there are bands of impure sandy limestone,
called in 1856, by Dr. Wright of Cheltenham, the
Cephalopoda bed, because of the prevalence in it of
Ammonites, Belemnites, and Nautili, some of which,
with other forms, are also common in the Upper Lias
clay. This fact induced him to consider these sands
and impure limestone to be so intimately related to
the Upper Lias, that he named them in his Memoir
6 the Upper Lias Sands ' l instead of ' the Mitford Sands
(of the Inferior Oolite,') a name long before given to
them by William Smith.

According to existing lists, 17 species of Conchifera
pass from the sands into the overlying Oolite strata,
and, indeed, about 39 or 40 species of all kinds are
common to the Upper Lias and the overlying Oolitic
formations,2 thus linking the Lias to the Oolites in a
continuous chain of specific life.

Throughout the southern half of England, from the
English Channel to the borders of Northamptonshire,
the various members of the Oolitic series maintain a
tolerably uniform character.

THE INFERIOR OOLITE LIMESTONE forms the lowest
member of this series. It first appears between the west
end of the Chesil Bank and Bridport Harbour in Dorset-
shire, from whence, underlaid by the before-mentioned
sands, broken and interrupted by many faults, it ranges

1 * Journal of the Geol. Soc.' 1856, p. 292.

2 As catalogued by Mr. Etheridge.

Inferior Oolite. 175

northward by Beaminster and Sherborne to the east
end of the Mendip Hills and the neighbourhood of
Bath, where it forms the flat tops of the scarped hills
intersected by so many winding valleys. From thence,
in a long narrow strip, it runs on by Wotton-under-
edge, Dursley, and Painswick, in Gloucestershire, near
which, on the flat-topped Cotswold Hills east of Chel-
tenham, it broadens, and more or less forms great part
of the wide plateau that extends from Burford to the
neighbourhood of Chipping Camden. Beyond this
region it narrows, and finally thins away, and as a
limestone disappears in Oxfordshire, a few miles north-
east of Chipping Norton, where I shall leave it for a
time.

It chiefly consists of yellow limestone, and along
with other limestones of the series is called Oolitic, for
in many cases they consist of concretionary bodies
about the size of a pin's head, compacted like the eggs
that form the roe of a fish (egg-stone) cemented in a
calcareous matrix. One of the most typical sections
occurs near Cheltenham, on the summit of the bold
escarpment that overlooks that town. There, at the
base, the Oolitic grains are often as large as peas, and
the rock is locally called pea-grit.

The whole is apt to be fossiliferous, abounding in
Lamellibranchiate molluscs, Limas, Pectens, Oysters,
Cardiums, Pholadomyas, Trigonias, and others need-
less here to name ; and of Brachiopoda, Terebratulas and
Rhynchonellas are exceedingly numerous. Gasteropoda
also occur in profusion, including species of the genera
Pleurotomaria, Natica, Littorina, Patella, &c. Be-
lemnites. Ammonites, and Nautili are found in pro-
fusion, together with genera and species of sea-urchins,
such as Cidaris, Pseudo-diadema, Pygaster, &c.

176 Fullers Earth.

Plants are rare in the purely marine strata of
Gloucester shire and the south of England, but frag-
ments of coniferous trees are sometimes found, the
most remarkable of which is a large cone of Araucarites
hemisphcericus. This, in addition to the nature and
multiplicity of genera and species of the marine fauna,
plainly tells of land not far off, a fact that will become
still more clear as we get further on with the history
of the Oolites, and its bearing on the old physical
geography of the land of the Oolitic epoch.

THE FULLER'S EARTH accompanies and overlies the
Inferior Oolite through the whole length of this area,
excepting where locally interrupted by faults. It con-
sists chiefly of tenacious bluish clay, with frequent thin
shelly bands of limestone, often largely charged with a
small oyster, Ostrea acuminata, and with Terebratulae.
In the neighbourhood and south of Bath a strong band of
limestone lies in the middle of the clay, known as the
Fuller's Earth Kock.

Near Upper Slaughter in Oxfordshire, this sub-
formation entirely thins away, and is known no more.
Its greatest thickness, near Bath, is about 200 feet.
The name was originally given to it by William Smith,
because in places it contains beds of Fuller's Earth, long
ago much used in the famous woollen factories of
Gloucestershire. I call it a subformation, because
very many of its fossils are also common in the Inferior
Oolite, though a few are peculiar.

THE GREAT or BATH OOLITE of this southern half
of England succeeds the Fuller's Earth, and consists,
when fully developed, of

Forest Marble.
Great Oolite.
Stonesfield Slate.

Stones/kid Slate. 1 7 7

The local development called the Stonesfield Slate
consists of beds of laminated shelly and oolitic limestone
and sandy flags, with much false bedding, and contain-
ing ferns, Cyclopteris, Glossopteris, Pecopteris, &c. ;
Cycads, Bucklandia squamosa, Zamias, Palceozamia
of various species, and Coniferae. Elytra of beetles
and wings of insects (Libellula Westwoodii, &c.) ;
bones of Plesiosaurus, Crocodile, &c. ; also Ostrea,
Terebratida, Rhynchonella, Lima, Pecten, Trigonia,
Patella, Nerincea, Belemnites, Ammonites, &c., are
all found in these thin shallow water deposits. The
reptiles include Ichthyosaurus advena, Plesiosaurus
erraticus, and crocodiles of the genus Teleosaurus,
allied to the Gravial of the Granges (T. brevidens
and T. subulidens), together with a great carnivorous
lizard, Megalosaurus Bucklandi, that walked on the
neighbouring land, and was probably about 30 feet in
length. A flying reptile, Ramphorhynchus Bucklandi,
allied to the Pterodactyle, is found in this subformation,
which has long been especially celebrated as containing
the remains of mammals, viz. the lower jawbones of
species of small insectivorous marsupials, Amphitherium
Broderipii, A. Prevostii, Phascolotherium Bucklandi,
and Stereognathus Ooliticus.

I call the Stonesfield Slate a local development
because it is by no means of universal occurrence at the
base of the Great Oolite, and is chiefly known in those
parts of Gloucestershire that lie eastward of Cheltenham
on the broad Oolitic plateau, and in Oxfordshire at and
near the town of Stonesfield, where it perhaps attains
its greatest thickness. There it is largely manufactured
into what are called slates, but in reality are small slabs,
the coarse fissile character of which has no relation to
jwhat is known as slaty cleavage. From these areas

N

178 Great Oolite.

going south along the Oolites, the Stonesfield Slate
rapidly thins away, or changes itslithological character,
for it is quite unknown at the base of the Great Oolite
towards Wotton-under-Edge and Bath. In the opposite
direction going northward, the Stonesfield Slate passes
into the Northampton Sand, where we will leave it for
the present.

The Great Oolite was originally so called -by William
Smith in 1812, and the Upper Oolite in 1815, to dis-
tinguish it from the Lower or Inferior Oolite, which lies
below the Fuller's Earth, whereas the former lies above
it. It is often named the Bath Oolite, and the greatest
development of that excellent building-stone is near
the city, which is almost entirely built of ' Bath stone.'
It first makes its appearance on the south near Norton
St. Philip, about six miles south of Bath, from whence,
overlaid by Forest Marble, it ranges northerly, forming
the flat-topped scarped hills on either side of the Avon
near Bath, and so on by Wotton-under-edge to Minchin-
Hampton. Beyond this it forms a large part of the
table land, intersected by valleys, that lie between
Minchin-Hampton in Gloucestershire and Towcester in
Northamptonshire. In Northamptonshire its lowest
sandy beds are the equivalents of the Stonesfield Slate,
To this part of the subject I shall return in describing
important physical changes that take place further
north.

The best beds of the Great Oolite are of cream-
coloured limestone, so soft when first extracted from the
quarry, that it can be easily sawed into blocks, but
hardening on exposure. Some of its fossils are also
found in the Fuller's Earth and the Inferior Oolite, and
a few are first known in the Lias, and, indeed, through-
out the whole there is a general agreement in the

Lower Oolitic Fossils.

FIG. 37.

179

Terebratula perovalis. Acrosalenia hemicidaroides. Rhyuchonella spinosa .

Pkoladomya fidicula. Nautilus sinuatus. Trigonia costata.

Ammonites Macrocephalus. Purpuroidea Morrisii. Ammo. Humphresianus.

Group of Fossils of the Lower Oolitic Formations. \ \

N2 \ i »

i8o Forest Marble.

genera of shells. Corals occur in the Great Oolite,
including more than twenty species, chiefly belonging to
the genera Styling Isastrea, Thamnastrea, &c., and
Brachiopoda of the usual genera Rhynchonella (Rh.
concinna, &c.), and Terebratula(T. digona, T. obovata,
&c.), besides great numbers of Lamellibranchiata, the
most numerous of which belong to the genera Ostrea
(0. Sowerbii, &c.), Pecten (P. vagans, &c.), Ger-
villia (6r. monotis, &c.), Lima (L. cardiiformis, &c.),
Mytilus (M. imbricatus, &c.), Trigonia (impressa,
&c.), Cardium, Astarte, Ceromya concentrica, &c.
Pholadomya socialis, &c., Cyprina, Pecten, Lima,
and many others. Near Minchin-Hampton it is rich
in Gasteropoda, among the most common of which
are many of the genera Patella, Pleurotomaria,
Trochotoma, Purpuroidea (P. Morrisii), Natica,
Chemnitzia, Nerinea, Alaria, Ceritella, Cylindrites,
Turbo, and many others. Ammonites and Belemnites
are rare at Minchin-Hampton, but further south
Gasteropoda decline, and Cephalopoda are more nu-
merous. Echinodermata of the genera Acrosalenia,
Clypeus, Echinobrissus, and others are not uncommon,
and Pentacrinite joints occur rarely. Fishes' teeth,
Hybodus, Pycnodus, and Strophodus, and scales of
Lepidosteus are sometimes found, and reptiles of the
genera Teleosaurus and Megalosaurus, together with
the gigantic Ceteosaurus (or whale-lizard), probably
about 50 feet in length, and most likely amphibious.

The Forest Marble forms the topmost beds of the
strata that usually are called Great Oolite. They are
formed of shelly limestone, with much false bedding,
very similar in structure to the Stonesfield Slate, and as
a marble the rock has sometimes been used for orna-
mental purposes. Its beds are full of Oysters, stems of

Cornbrash. 1 8 1

Pentacrinites, fragments of Echinodermata, Pectens,
Aviculce, Terebratulce, &c. In it occurs the Bradford
clay, in which is found the beautiful Crinoid, Apiocri-
nites rotundus, and also Terebratula digona, and many
fragments of Coniferous wood.

On the south coast the Forest Marble borders the
sea for a considerable distance between Bridport Harbour
and Portland Isle, from whence it ranges north by
Wincanton to Frome in Somersetshire. A few miles
further north, the Great Oolite proper crops from under-
neath it near Norton St. Philip, and beyond this town
and Bath it everywhere overlies the Great Oolite, and
forms the surface of vast tracts of country between the
Avon, Cirencester, and Burford, in Gioucestershire,
beyond which, towards Witney, on the river Wlndrush,
it gets broken into outliers, and also becoming thinner,
it either dies out, or is gently overlapped by the Corn-
brash about three miles north of Bicester in Oxford-
shire.

The COKNBRASH forms the uppermost member of
those formations that are usually classed as Lower
Oolite. It is generally of inconsiderable thickness (15
to 100 feet), and beginning in Dorsetshire between
Bridport and Weymouth, it ranges at the surface all
across that county, excepting where overlapped by the
Cretaceous strata between Abbotsbury and the neigh-
bourhood of Evershot. It is remarkably constant,
striking with the underlying and overlying strata all
through Wiltshire, Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire, and
Northamptonshire, and onward into Lincolnshire ;
but north of the Humber it disappears for a space,
being again overlapped by unconformable Cretaceous
strata.

Throughout all this long range it retains in a

1 82 Passage of Species.

remarkable manner the same lithological character,
showing evidence of deposition in shallow water. It is
partly formed of pale marly limestones and clays, pass-
ing in places into shelly, and occasionally oolitic, build-
ing-stones. When partly decomposed near the surface,
it assumes a rubbly character, and forms a fertile soil,
whence its agricultural name of Cornbrash, the word
brash being an old word expressive of this loose rubbly
character.

The Cornbrash is generally very fossi lifer ous, the
general assemblage of genera of Echinoderms, corals,
Cephalopoda, Brachiopoda, Lamellibranchiata, &c. being
much the same as in the Great and Inferior Oolites.
So much, indeed, is this the case, that of the forms found
in the Great Oolite, 1 00 species pass into the Cornbrash,
while of those in the Inferior Oolite, 89 species pass up
into the same formation.

This community of forms is very important, showing
as it does, that if some of the Inferior Oolite species
are absent in the Fuller's Earth and Great Oolite, they
must, nevertheless, during the deposition of these strata,
nave lived elsewhere, and returned in a later time, that
of the Cornbrash, to inhabit the same area when a con-
genial set of marine conditions ensued, thus establish-
ing a strong and direct succession of life through the
whole of these formations which together, in the
language of the day, form the Lower Oolite. In fact,
this division of these strata into formations, is in great
part lithological, and the difference of faunas in them
was dependent on changes of conditions of depth &c.
in a sea, where limestone, sands, or clays were being
deposited. The four so-called Oolitic formations already
described, may in truth be spoken of as one, there
being not much more difference between their fossils,

Middle Oolites, Oxford Clay. 183

than there is between those of what are called different
zones in other recognised single formations.

Facts of this broad kind are of more importance to
the general reader than trying to remember names of
fossils, and what I now endeavour to do, is to disabuse the
mind of the idea, too often implied in manuals, that
the marked characteristic of strata is, that they consist
of perfectly distinct zones, each having its own species,
which have little connection with each other. What
applies to the Lias and Lower Oolites, equally applies to
the connection of the latter with the Middle, and of the
Middle with the Upper Oolites, and I shall therefore
treat the remainder of this subject as briefly as
possible.

The next group of strata, as generally received, is
formed of the Middle Oolites, which consist or* the
following divisions, the oldest being placed at the
bottom : —

Coral Rag and Calcareous Grit.

fClay.
Oxford Clay< Kelloway Rock.

I Clay ; a thin band.

In the south of England, much faulted, the OXFORD
CLAY occupies considerable strips of country between
Weymouth Bay and the river Bredy, about a mile east of
Burton Bradstock. Beyond that faulted region, and
the overlapping of the Cretaceous strata of Dorsetshire,
the Oxford Clay, about 650 feet in thickness, comes on
in great force at Melbury Samplord and Melbury Osmund,
where it is underlaid by about 50 feet of Cornbrash.
From thence it runs somewhat north-easterly, covering
a broad tract of country, by Melksham in Wiltshire,
and so on by Chippenham, Cricklade, Fairford, Bamp-
ton, Oxford, Bicester, Buckingham, Fenny Stratford

1 84 Kelloway Rock.

and Bedford, north of which it covers an immense tract
of country, twenty miles in width, in the neighbourhood
of Huntingdon. Still further north it underlies the
great alluvial flats of Cambridgeshire, and the waters of
the Wash, and beyond this, in Lincolnshire, in con-
sequence of the gradual overlap of the Cretaceous strata,
the area occupied by the Oxford Clay narrows by
degrees. North of the Humber it is entirely overlapped
for a space, to reappear in Yorkshire, where it is well
exposed on the sea-cliffs in Filey Bay, accompanied by
the Kelloway Eock.

Not the least remarkable circumstance connected
with the Oxford Clay is the very frequent occurrence in
it of this Kelloway Rock, which some persons would
willingly raise to the rank of an independent formation,
because of its palaBontological peculiarities. The thin
clay that occasionally lies beneath it contains a goodly
proportion of species also found in the Cornbrash, but a
greater number found in higher parts of the Oxford
Clay. When analysed it appears that the Calcareous
sandstone, called the Kelloway Eock by Smith,1 contain*
not less than about 150 species, of which very nearly
one-half are also found in older formations, thus
forming a close bond of union between them. An
equal number passes upward from the Kelloway Eock
into the overlying Oxford Clay, or, if absent there, are
found in formations still higher in the series.

The KeOoway Rock contains many Gryphceas
and Ammonites, one of which, A. Calloviensis, is
especially characteristic of this stratum. Several other
Ammonites, and Ancyloceras Calloviense, besides
Nautili (.ZV. hexagonus\ &c., are found in it. Bra-

1 I believe originally 'Kelloway's Rock,' named from Kelloway,
who quarried it.

Coral Rag. 185

chiopoda and Lamellibranchiata, of genera and some
species common to all the Oolites, are common. The
Oxford Clay also contains many Belemnites, Ammo-
nites, and other shells, among which, Ammonites
Jason, Ostrea flabelloides, and Gryphcea dilatata
are characteristic of this formation. Trigonia costata,
an inferior Oolite species, passes upwards thus far.
The general assemblage of fossils in the Oxford Clay
and Kelloway Eock generically, and largely in species,
strongly resembles that of the Lower Oolite formations,
but the life is not so numerous. Fishes, Hybodus,
Lepidotus, and Pycnodus are found, and Eeptilia of
the genera Dakosaurus, Ichthyosaurus (I. dilatatus
swdthyreospondylus), Megalosaurus Bucklandi, Pleio-
saurus gamma and P. grandis, 4 species of Plesio-
saurus, P. Oxoniensis, &c., Rhamphorhynchus
Bucklandi, Steneosaurus, and Streptospondylus
Cuvieri.

The plentiful assemblage of fossils in an accidental
stratum so thin as the Kelloway Eock, lying in the
Oxford Clay, speaks of physical conditions in the sea
favourable to the development of life, and the diminu-
tion of species in the thick beds of the Oxford Clay
seems to tell of the deepening of a sea in which much
muddy sediment was being deposited.

The CORAL EAG is a rubbly limestone, trending,
with occasional interruptions, from Somersetshire to
Yorkshire, the details of which it is unnecessary to give.
It is associated in places with sandy strata known as
the Calcareous grits, and is often almost entirely com-
posed of broken shells and Echini, Gidaris Smithii,
Hemicidaris intermedia, Pyg aster umbrella, Py gurus
costatus,&c., and numerous corals (whence its name) of
the genera Isastrea, Thecosmilia, Protoseris, &c.,

i86

Upper Oolites.

Ammonites, a few Gasteropoda, and various genera of
bivalves, common in the Oolitic formations.

This formation is rarely more than about 300 feet
thick, and about one-third of its fossils are well known
in older Oolitic strata, while less than a tenth pass
FIG. 38.

Ammonites Jason. Cidaris florigemma.

G-ryphsea clilatata.

Belemnites hastatus.

Isastrasa explanata. Chemnitzia Heddingtonensis. Pholadomya aequalis.
Group of Fossils in the Middle Oolites.

upward into the overlying Kimeridge Clay and Port-
land rocks.

For reasons connected with the physical geography
of this epoch, which will be mentioned further on, I
confine the Upper Oolite to two formations, viz. :

Portland Limestone and Sand,
Kimeridge Clay.

The stratigraphical arrangement of these strata and

Kimeridge Clay.

of the overlying Purbeck Lime-
stone is well seen in the Isle of
Portland, where all the strata dip
gently from north to south, as
shown in the annexed diagram.

The KIM BRIDGE CLAY takes
its name from Kimeridge Bay in
Dorsetshire, on the cliffs of which
it is well exposed, with bands of
cement stones and many fossils,
such as Ammonites, Belemnites,
Reptilian bones, and many ordin-
ary molluscous shells. Certain
hard, shaley bands at Little
Kimeridge have been at intervals
used for the manufacture of
naphtha and mineral oils, but, I «
think, never with great success. |j
West of this area the clay is well
known in the northern half of
Portland Isle, in Portland Road,
and in the country near the chalk
hills, between Ringstead Bay and
Abbotsbury. North of this it is
overlapped by the Cretaceous
rocks between Abbotsbury and
Buckland Newton near Cerne
Abbas, from whence, beginning
in a narrow band, it gradually
widens, trending north along the
borders of the Cretaceous escarp-
ment between Shaftesbury and
Mere. West of Mere it occurs in
interrupted patches at the foot of

1 88 Kimeridge Clay.

this great escarpment as far north as Kowde, near
Devizes, where it is again overlapped by the uncon-
formable Cretaceous strata, to reappear at Calne, from
whence, on the north-east, it comes on in great force,
covering a broad tract of country by Swindon and
Longcott. A little east of Longcott, a great tongue
of Lower Grreensand, running out to Farringdon, over-
laps the Kimeridge Clay. Escaping from this overlap,
the clay runs eastward by Abingdon, Netley, Quainton,
and the south end of Stewkley, between which and
Leighton Buzzard it is again overlapped by broad-
spreading strata of Grault and Lower Grreensand.
Between this area and the fens of Lincolnshire it
doubtless lies deep underground, well to the east of the
Chalk escarpment, for it is well known to underlie
much of the marshes on either side of the Wash, from
whence it trends north in a strip at the base of the
Lincolnshire Wolds as far as the Humber, where it is
again unconformably overlapped by the Cretaceous
strata of the Yorkshire Wolds, to reappear in great
force in and around the Vale of Pickering, between
Hambleton Hills and Filey Bay in Yorkshire.

The Kimeridge Clay is in places from 500 to 600
feet in thickness, but of late, in a great experimental
boring in the Weald of Kent, after passing through the
Purbeck and Portland Limestones and Sand, it was
pierced to the depth of 921 feet, below which came clays
supposed to be the Coral Rag and Oxford Clay, the base
of which was not reached at 1 ,906 feet when for financial
reasons the boring was abandoned. The meaning of
this seems to be, that whereas these clays, in their range
from Dorsetshire to Yorkshire, were deposited in com-
paratively shallow areas not very far from land, in the
Kent area they were laid down in a much deeper sea.

Upper Oolite Fossils.
FIG. 40.

189

Ostrea deltoidea. Rhynchonella inconstans. Mantellia nidiformis.

Ammo, biplcx. Natica elegans. CeritLium Portlandicunu

Group of Kimeridge Clay and Portland Fossils. Upper Oolite.

1 90 Portland Beds.

A shell peculiarly characteristic of the Kimeridge Clay
is a large oyster, Ostrea deltoidea, Fig. 40. Shells of the
genera Rhynchonella (Rh. inconstans) and Terebratula,
Discina (D. Humphresiana, &c.), Lingula ovalis,
Pinna, Astarte, Pecten, Trigonia (T. incurva), and
other bivalves, and Ammonites and Belemnites, are
also common, the Belemnites sometimes almost paving
the ledges of the seashore in Kimeridge Bay. Fishes
of the Oolitic genera already named, with others, are
found, and many remains of reptiles, among others
Turtles, Crocodiles of the genera Goniopholis, Teleo-
saurus and Steneosaurus, 5 species of Ichthyosaurus,
8 of Plesiosaurus, and 5 of Pleiosaurus, some of the
last of great size. Cetiosaurus longus and Megalo-
saurus Bucklandi also occur. Fragments of wood are
not uncommon.

The PORTLAND LIMESTONE and SAND lie above the
Kimeridge Clay. The best sections of these rocks
occur in the Isle of Portland, as shown in fig. 39,
p. 187. The sand which forms the base of the forma-
tion, is there 150 feet thick, and the limestone about
70. Of this, about 20 feet forms marketable stone
in three horizons, from the best part of which the
celebrated Portland stone is derived, used in many
public buildings, of which St. Paul's may be cited
as an example. The limestone, like those of most
other Oolite formations, is cream-coloured, and gene-
rally fossiliferous. Among the most common forms
found in it are Trigonia gibbosa and T. incurva,
Pecten lamellosus, Ostrea expansa, Cardium dissimile,
Terebra Portlandica, and various AmmowUes, some of
them of large size. The lowest beds are full of layers
of flint and chert. The sand is fossiliferous, containing
Oysters, Cardiums, &c. The Portland stone also occurs

Northampton Oolites. 191

at the south end of the Isle of Purbeck, in the Vale of
Tisbury in Wiltshire, at Swindon, and in the Vale of
Aylesbuiy. The beds are very inconstant in their out-
crop, only showing at those places which were probably
near the original western margin of the sea of the
period. At Swindon both limestone and sand are of
trifling thickness. Outliers of it occur in Bedfordshire,
and the whole has evidently been exposed to denuda-
tion before the deposition of the Cretaceous rocks.

Such is a brief outline of the marine Oolitic strata
in the south and centre of England, and also of the
Upper and Middle Oolites in their range into York-
shire.

It will be observed that in this description I have
specially insisted on the unconformable overlapping of
the Cretaceous strata across the Portland, Kimeridge,
and other formations, at intervals, all the way from
Dorsetshire to Yorkshire, for by-and-by it will appear
that this fact has an important bearing on the physical
theory of the deposition of the Purbeck and Wealden
strata, which come next in succession.

In the meanwhile, I must return to the Northamp-
tonshire area, where we left the Lower Oolites, and
follow them into Yorkshire, when it will be seen, that
they were formed under physical conditions in some
respects very different from those which obtained in the
South, while the marine clays and limestones of the
Lower Oolites of that area were being deposited.

It will be remembered that in Gloucestershire, a
few miles west of Stow-on-the-Wold, the Fuller's Earth
thins out, and the Inferior Oolite and Stonesfield Slate
come together, the latter being formed in part of the
sandy flags that make the base of the Great Oolite, and
constitute the Stonesfield Slate. Going easterly into

1 9 2 Northamptonshire and L incolnshire.

Oxfordshire, these beds get still more sandy, the lime-
stone of the Inferior Oolite disappears by degrees, sandy
beds replace them, which are overlaid directly by the
sands of the Great Oolite, the two forming together
what are generally known as the Northampton Sands.
By-and-by, in the district of Rockingham near Ged-
dington, the Inferior Oolite Limestone begins to re-
appear, overlying the lower part of the Northampton
Sands, and lying flat, and thickening by degrees, it
forms the surface of a great tract of country towards
Stamford and Thistleton, in Northamptonshire and Rut-
landshire, also towards Grantham, and in Lincolnshire,
being always underlaid by the Northamptonshire Sand.
The Inferior Oolite of this district is well known as the
Lincolnshire Oolite Limestone. The sands beneath it
have been largely worked in Northamptonshire for
ironstone, and their upper part is occasionally white,
' with remains of plants, sometimes vertical, also thin
seams of lignite, and miniature underdaysj while
6 thin seams containing Cyrena (a fresh-water bivalve
shell) occur in this part of the series. These beds have
been distinguished by Mr. Judd as the Lower Estuarine
Series.*

Above the Lincolnshire Oolite Limestone there lie
certain strata, named by Mr. Judd the Upper Estu-
arine Series., forming, in his opinion, the lowest part
of the Great Oolite of this area. They are well seen in
some of the cuttings of the Great Northern Railway,
and on the top of the Inferior Oolite Limestone quarries
at Ketton, Clipsham, and Casterton. As described by
Mr. Judd, there are in these strata 'bands of sandy
stone with vertical plant markings and layers of shells,

1 'Geology of Rutland,' &c. J. W. Judd, p. 92, 'Memoirs of the
Geological Survey.'

Physical Geography. 193

sometimes marine, as Pholadomya, Modiola, Ostrea,
Necera, &c. ; at other times fresh- water shells, as Cyrena,
Unio, &c., and he correctly states that ' all the cha-
racters presented by the beds of the Upper Estuarine
Series, point to the conclusion that they were accumu-
lated under an alternation of marine and fresh-water
conditions, such as takes place in the estuaries of rivers.'
These strata between Northampton and Grrantham are
rarely more than about 25 feet in thickness.

When we think of the meaning of these phenomena,
it is evident that, while from Gloucestershire to the south
coast, all the strata from the base of the Lower Lias to
the top of the Oolitic series are marine, in the middle
area of Northamptonshire, Eutland, and Lincolnshire, a
set of conditions prevailed in the time of the deposition
of the Lower Oolites that indicated filling up of the area,
and temporary elevation of the old marine deposits, in
places, quite above the level of the sea, so that swampy
terrestrial surfaces were formed, through which wandered
minor streams inhabited by fresh- water shells. Further
north this fact becomes still more plain.

After crossing the Humber, and passing the uncon-
formable overlap of the Cretaceous rocks of the Yorkshire
Wolds, a series of Liassic and Oolitic strata appears in
the North Eiding, forming a great tract of beautiful
hilly country, the sections of which are best seen on the
coast cliffs that lie between the mouth of the Tees and
Filey Bay. That part of the cliffs of which the strata
are of Oolitic age, more or less includes representatives
in time of all the so-called formations from the Inferior
Oolite to the Kimeridge Clay inclusive. The lithological
characters, and mode of formation, of all the strata that
are presumed to lie between the horizon of the base of
the inferior Oolite and the Cornbrash, are, however, of a

o

194 Yorkshire Oolites.

very different nature from those of the equivalent
strata in the south of England, and though I have ex-
amined these sections from end to end, I shall quote
from the measured sections of Mr. Etheridge, and give
the latest information.

Kesting directly on the Alum shales of the Upper
Lias, there are sands intermingled with bands of shale,
the whole being about 50 feet thick. All the fossils,
which are generally scarce, are of marine species,
and the whole of the strata are known to palaeon-
tologists as the zone of Ammonites Jurensis, and
it is generally considered to be the equivalent of
the Midford Sands of the South of England, or the
Sands of the Inferior Oolite, as named by William
Smith.

Above these come strata, locally known as Dogger,
consisting of about 30 feet of brown sands, which are
sometimes ferruginous and red. They are inter stratified
with shaley sands, and the whole contains numbers of
the marine fossils of the Inferior Oolite.

On these there lie about 200 feet of sandstone,
destitute as far as known of the remains of any kind of
life, except a few land plants. Then comes about 25
feet of sandy limestone, known as the Millepore Bed,
full of fossils common in the Inferior Oolite of the
south. This is succeeded by about 80 feet of shales
interstratified with sandstones, as yet destitute of the
remains of molluscs, but what is of especial interest,
there are at least eight distinct bands of coal, inter-
stratified chiefly with the shales, and several other lines
of carbonaceous matter more interrupted and broken.
What adds to the importance of this fact is, that the
coal-beds have not been formed of drifted vegetation,
for underneath each bed there occurs an underclay or

Yorkshire Oolites. 195

old soil, charged with the roots of those plants, the
decay of which on the spot formed the thin beds of coal,
just in the manner that coal-beds were formed during
the Coal-measure epoch, but, in the case of these Oolitic
coal-beds, on a much smaller scale.

Above these fresh-water and terrestrial strata, there
occur beds of < grey limestone ' and shales. It is often
called the Scarborough Limestone, and is full of marine
shells, &c., common in the ordinary Inferior Oolite.
Finally, on the top of this, there are strata of sand-
stones and shales, often called the upper series, to
distinguish them from the lower sandstones and
shales that lie below the grey marine limestone. Like
the lower series, they seem to contain no mollusca of any
kind, and, indeed, the only fossils that have been found
in them are the remains of plants scattered through
the rocks, accompanied here and there by streaks of
coaly matter. On the whole, such evidence as there is,
tends to show that these also are fresh-water or at
most estuarine strata.

Overlying these sands, there is a persistent band of
impure limestone, generally from 3 to 6 feet thick,
which is considered to represent the Cornbrash of
more southern areas, where, it will be remembered, it
lies directly on strata of the Great Oolite series. It is
certain that in its fossils it is intimately related both to
the Great and the Inferior Oolite, including the Fuller's
Earth. If, therefore, we take the Lower Oolites as a
whole, the most philosophical method of regarding them
is to consider them as one. Owing to minor changes in
the physical geography of the sea bottom, and of the
neighbouring land, this formation was, during the pro-
gress of deposition, locally broken up into a series of
subformations, now of limestone, now of clay, now of

o2

1 96 Physical Geography.

sand, and, according to locality, of marine, estuarine,
fresh-water, and even terrestrial origin ; marine in Dorset,
Somerset, and Gloucestershire, partly passing into
estuarine and fresh-water strata in Northamptonshire, at
the very time, for example, that the marine sediments
of the Stonesfield Slate, had washed in among them,
from the neighbouring land, plants, insects, and mar-
supial mammals. Still further north, in Yorkshire, the
equivalent of great part of the Inferior Oolite actually
constitutes a coal-field, on a miniature scale, quite
comparable, in its sandstones, shales, underclays, and
beds of coal, to the broad and thick deposits of the
Coal-measures, and showing the same kind of alter-
nations of terrestrial and aquatic conditions, indicating,
repeated filling by sediments of a certain area, its
conversion into land, and its subsequent depression to
receive new accessions of sands and shales.

These circumstances seem to me to agree, in a strik-
ing manner, with what may be surmised to have been
the state of the geography of the neighbouring lands.
In the south of what is now England the seas were
broad and comparatively shallow, during all the time of
the deposition of the Lower Oolites, and the islands
round which these seas flowed (including Wales) were
comparatively small. But further north we come to a
fragment of a much larger land, formed of Palgeozoic
rocks, that in those days formed a mountainous country
extending from the hills of Derbyshire far away to the
northern extremity of Scotland, and how much further
entire, or broken into islands, no man yet knows. In
spite of disturbances of upheaval of later date than
these Oolitic times, it may also very well have been
that this old land was much higher than the highest
Highland mountains of the present day, seeing the vast

Physical Geography. 197

amount of waste and degradation that they have under-
gone since that ancient time, and we may be sure that
it was surrounded by seas of this lower Mesozoic epoch,
for fragments of the Oolitic strata still surround the
island. This was the larger land, from which the
rivers flowed that deposited the fresh-water sands de-
scribed above. On the low banks of these rivers grew
many a plant now represented merely by indistinct

impressions —

' Their meaning lost,
Save what remains on stone, or fragments vast '—

in which the relics of species of Araucaria, Cycas,
Zamia, Screw Pine, and numerous other forms, to-
gether with gigantic Equisetums which grew in the still
waters on their borders, while Marsupial mammals on
the shores, and Trigonise and Terebratulse in the seas?
help us to realise that the physical characteristics of
the time in some degree resembled that of Australia
in our own day, a circumstance first noticed by
Professor Owen.

This state of affairs was at length partly brought to
an end by a gradual submergence, during which the
Oxford and Kimeridge Clays were deposited in open
seas, but the sinking of the area was not by any
means so great as to swallow up the old islands
round which the strata were formed, and which still
remain, much changed, as the most lofty portions of
Great Britain. Such fragments of the Jurassic strata
as still remain on the coasts of Scotland throw some
light on this question.

On the east of Scotland, at and near Brora, in
Sutherland, the Liassic and Oolitic strata have been
long known, and were first described in the Journal
of the Geological Society in 1858 by Mr. (afterwards)

198 Lias and Oolites of Scotland.

Sir K. Murchison. In 1859 I accompanied him
during a tour in Scotland to that district, and mapped
the strata with all its faults and dislocations, but
never published the results. The region was afterwards
investigated by Mr. Judd, and the results published
in great detail in the < Journal of the Geological Society,'
for 1873. At the base lie Keuper sandstones, &c., with
Stagenolepis (a crocodile) and Telerpeton (a land lizard),
&c., above which are beds of sandstone and conglome-
rate, which may possibly represent the Bhsetic beds.
These are succeeded by about 400 feet of sandstone and
shale, with plant remains and seams of coal (terrestrial),
with pectens in the overlying strata. These are overlaid
by limestones and beds of blue micaceous clay, both full
of Lias fossils ; the whole is well seen on the shore near
Dunrobin. Of later date, in the same district, the
Lower Oolite consists partly of marine and partly of
fresh-water strata, with Oysters, Perna, Unio, Cyrena,
Cypris, &c., and land-plants and coal seams, one of
which is 3J feet thick, and has been worked. The
Middle Oolites of the district are considered by Mr.
Judd to represent the whole of the English strata from
the 'base of the Oxford Clay to the Coral Eag inclusive.
They are full of marine shells of the usual genera and
species, and occasionally contain plants and bands of
lignite. The whole series is perhaps nearly 1,000 feet
thick, and consists to a great extent of sandstones, with
occasional limestones, conglomerates, and shales. The
Upper Oolite, which is supposed to represent the lower
part of the Kimeridge Clay, and all the higher beds,
are marine, with occasional remains of land plants.

As a whole, the Liassic and Oolitic series of Brora
dip east and north-east along the shore between Dun-
robin and Helmsdale, the older parts of the series being

Lias and Oolites of Scotland. 199

afc Dunrobin, and the younger at and near Helmsdale
A great fault, nearly 20 miles in length, runs along the
shore, and throws the secondary strata down against the
older Palaeozoic rocks on the north-west. Interstrati-
fied with the black shales near Helmsdale, there are
occasional beds of brecciated conglomerate. The shales
contain thin layers of plants and many broken shells,
and the breccias contain angular and subangular
blocks, chiefly of Old Red Sandstone, with a mixture of
the older rocks of the Highlands, sometimes 6 or 8 feet
in diameter, in fact, boulder beds, which long ago
suggested to me the action of floating ice. Mr. Judd
suggests that they may be due to river ice, floated on
streams flowing from the west, at a time when the larger
part of the gneiss of the Highlands was covered by Old
Red Sandstone, since denuded.

In the Inner Hebrides, the Lias, Inferior Oolite,
Middle Oolite and Oxford Clay occur in the Island of
Skye. The Lias, as described by Geikie, consists of beds
of limestone, sandstone, conglomerate, and shale. It
contains the usual fossils. The rocks are much dis-
turbed, and the limestones have been metamorphosed
into crystalline marble accompanied by the intrusion of
syenite. The section at Loch Staffin, given by Edward
Forbes, is as follows: —

Oxford Clay. Inferior Oolite.

Estuary Shales. Lias.

Middle Oolite.

Between the Middle Oolite and estuary shales, a bed
of columnar basalt is intercalated, and the whole is
overlaid by amygdaloidal trap, which breaks through
and overspreads the strata. These igneous rocks are
intrusive and of Miocene age. The estuary shales con-
tain Oysters, Unios, Cyrenas, Paludinas, &c., distinct

2OO Lias and Oolites of Scotland.

from those of Brora and of the English Purbeck strata.
In Mull, Lias and Oolites occur, ranging from the Lower
Lias to the Upper Oolitic series, overlaid by Lower
Cretaceous strata. They are traversed by many dykes
and intrusive sheets of basalt, formerly considered as of
Oolitic age, but now, as described by Professor Greikie,
of Miocene date.

201

CHAPTER XIII.

PURBECK AND WEALDEN STRATA.

AFTER the discovery by Dr. Mantell of the fresh-water
nature of the Hastings Sands and Weald Clay, it became
customary with some geologists, led by Edward Forbes,
to consider the PURBECK BEDS as forming the topmost
subdivision of the Oolites, and the Wealden strata as
belonging to the Cretaceous series ; but as, in reality, the
interval between the marked marine series of the Oolitic
and Lower Cretaceous epochs is, in Britain, bridged
over by the terrestrial and fluviatile episode of the Pur-
beck and Wealden beds, it is more convenient, and, in
the chief part of the British area, more philosophical, to
treat of these formations as marking one great local
epoch.

For the stratigraphical arrangement of these strata
in the Isle of Purbeck, see fig. 75, p. 347.

I here use the term Lower Cretaceous, in the sense
in which it has been applied to the Atherfield Clay and
Lower Greensand ever since the days of Dr. Fitton, at
the same time being well aware, that all the Wealden
strata above the Purbeck beds, and up to the top of the
Lower Grreensand, are the geological equivalents in time
of the marine Neocomian strata of the Continent of
Europe, though with us it happens, that the lower
and middle subdivisions of these beds are represented
by fresh-water strata in the south of England.

2O2 Pur beck and Wealden.

I have now to describe a series of deposits that were
formed at the mouth of a river in a large delta, com-
parable in size to the largest deltas of the living world,
and consisting of the following subdivisions, the oldest
being placed at the bottom :

Purbeck r Weald Clay.

and < Hastings Sands and Clays.

Wealden Series. I Purbeck Limestone Marls and Clays.

The events that brought about the formation of
these strata seem to have been as follows :

By the deposition of that series of beds of limestone
and shales that constitute the Oolitic strata, a great
marine area was more or less filled with sediments, the
last of which is the Portland Limestone. Probably
aided by partial upheaval of the flat-lying strata, a por-
tion of this area was invaded by the waters of a large
continental river, the rise of land having been sufficient
to unite Britain with the Continent of what is now
Europe, which, however, at that time presented very
different contours from those of the present day. We
must now conceive the old islands, which I described in
the last chapter, as forming groups of hills and moun-
tains, rising out of vast plains, the surface of which con-
sisted of horizontal or nearly horizontal Upper Oolitic
strata, through which, from some far-off unknown sources,
a long and broad river ran. The earliest strata of the
Purbeck Beds must have been formed in open, clear, fresh
water, in the broad mouth of this river, for near Tisbury in
Wiltshire, they pass gently into each other, the marine
strata of the Portland and Purbeck Limestones being
firmly united in the same quarries. The lowest beds of
the Purbeck strata are of fresh-water origin, and on the
whole the transition from the uppermost marine beds
of the Portland, to the lowest fresh-water strata of the

Piirbeck Beds. 203

Purbeck series, is sudden. These are about 8 feet thick,
and contain fresh-water remains of the genera Cyclas,
Valvata, Limncea, Physa and Cypris.

Near the base of the Purbeck rocks, in the Isles of
Portland and Purbeck (figs. 39 and 75), lie three beds,
known as the 'dirt beds,' which, from their colour
and earthy character, were clearly ancient soils. They
are full of the silicified stems and stools of coniferous
trees, the former procumbent and the latter with roots
attached, standing in the soil in the position in which
they grew. Plants (Cycadites microphyllus, &c.)
allied to the modern Cycas and Zamia are also found
in them. In the Isle of Purbeck the whole of the Pur-
beck strata are about 360 feet thick in their largest
development. They consist chiefly of limestones and
marls, principally of fresh-water origin, with inter-
stratifications of marine, brackish-water, and terrestrial
bands. According to the sections of the Government
Geological Survey, by Bristow, there are indications of
four terrestrial surfaces, eleven sets of fresh-water beds,
four brackish water, and three marine bands, the last
containing Pectens, Modiolas, Aviculas, and Thracias.
One of these, the ( cinder-bed ' of the quarrymen, is
about 1 2 feet thick, and is composed almost exclusively
of oysters (Ostrea distorta). Along with these, spar-
ingly, was found a Perna and an Oolitic genus of Hemi-
cidaris, H. Purbeckensis. The fresh-water shells of
the various beds are chiefly species of Paludina, Lim-
ncea, Planorbis, Physa, Valvata, and Unio, and
Cyclas, and along with these are several species
of small fresh-water bivalve Crustacea of the genus
Cypris. The celebrated Purbeck marble, so largely used
in the palmy days of Gothic architecture for the decor-
ation of churches, lies near the top of the Upper Pur-

204

Purbeck Beds.

beck Limestone. It is chiefly formed of remains of the
delicate fresh-water univalve, Paludina fluviorum.
Many fish have been found in the Purbeck strata ;
among these, Lepidotus minor, Pholidophorus ornatus,
Microdon radiatus, Ophiopsis breviceps, Hybodus,
and Aster acanthus, are the most characteristic.

Numerous wings, elytra, and other fragments of
insects (Coleoptera, Orthoptera, Hemiptera, Neuro-
ptera, and Diptera), occur in thin bands in the Pur-
beck Limestones. Some of these (dragon-flies, &c.) are

FIG. 41.

Physa Bristovi.

Unio compressus.

Ostrea distorta.

Cyrena media. Cypris Valdensis. Paludina fluviorum.

Group of Fossils from the Purbeck and Wealden beds.

such as would live on the marshy banks of rivers.
Among the reptiles are Crocodilia — viz., Goniopholis
crassidens, and Macrorhynchus ; Lacertilia; fresh-
water Tortoises, and Turtles — viz, Pleurosternon con-
cinnum, P. emarginatum, P. ovatum, &c.

In 1854, portions of the jawbone of a small mar-
supial insectivorous mammal, Spalacotherium tri-
cuspidens, were found by Mr. Brodie at the base of
the middle Purbeck beds. At the close of 1856, Mr.
Beckles commenced a further search in the same bed,

Hastings Sand and Weald Clay. 205

which was rewarded by the discovery of about twenty
species of mammals, belonging to the genera Spalaco-
therium^ Amblotherium, Peralistis, Achyrodon, Pter-
ospalax, Peramus, Stylodon, Bolodon, Triconodon,
Triacanthodon, and Plagiaulax. They are altogether
marsupial, and probably this Mesozoic mammalian
life was flow, insignificant in size and power, adapted
for insect-food, for preying upon small lizards, or on
the smaller and weaker members of their own low
mammalian grade ' (Owen). This mammalian fauna,
as far as it goes, at once suggests comparison with
the existing fauna of Australia, and the flora of the
time has in part like analogies.

Overlying the Purbeck Limestone, in the Isle of
Purbeck, there are thick accumulations of interstratified
sand and clay, which belong to the geological horizon of
the Hastings Sand and Weald Clay. They are well
seen on the coast cliffs of Swanage Bay, and as far as I
know have yielded no fossils excepting fragments of
fossilised wood (fig. 75, p. 347).

In the Isle of Wight, strata of the same general age
lie on the south-west coast, between Cowleaze Chine and
the neighbourhood of Compton Bay. In these there
occur Cyrena and Cypris and fragments of lignite, and
similar strata with the same kind of fossil remains are
found at the northern end of Sandown Bay.

But the largest area of these estuarine beds now
exposed at the surface in England, is that of the Weald
of Kent and Sussex, which, between the North and
South Downs and the Lower Greensand, extends from
the great shingle banks of Dungeness on the east, to the
neighbourhood of Petersfield on the west, embracing an
area of about 80 miles in length, by about 25 miles in
breadth where its width is greatest. For the strati-

206 Section at Battle.

graphical order of these strata, in this area, see diagrams,
Nos. 71, 72, and 73, pp. 337-343.

In this area, near Battle, the lowest strata rise to
the surface, being the fresh- water Purbeck Limestone,
interstratified with beds of clay. For long in this area
they were known as the Ashburnham Beds, but the
fresh -water shells and other fossils found in them during
the progress of the experimental boring already men-
tioned, clearly proved them to belong to the Purbeck
Series. They are there about 180 feet thick, and over-
lie about 110 feet of shales, somewhat sandy, with
chert, which may perhaps represent the Portland beds.
In the Purbeck strata, at a depth of i 30 feet, 35 feet
of gypsum more or less pure were penetrated, a mineral
much more sparingly developed in the lower strata of
the Isle of Purbeck, and which I consider indicates,
that these strata were not laid down in the sea, but
probably in a lagoon temporarily separated from the
main current of the river. Beneath the so-called Port-
land beds about 921 feet of Kimeridge Clay were
pierced, followed by 985 feet of Coral Eag and Oxford
Clay, when, for want of funds, this interesting expe-
riment was stopped at a total depth of 1,906 feet
from the surface.

The HASTINGS SANDS and WEALD CLAY are almost ex-
clusively fresh-water beds, and must be considered as a
continuation of the deposits formed at the mouth of the
great river, which commenced with the deposition of
the Purbeck limestones and shales. The name Wealden
applies to the whole group above the Purbeck rocks,
and the term originated from the circumstance that
these fluviatile beds are largely developed in the Weald
of Kent and Sussex. Their true character was first
discovered by Dr. Man tell. As a whole, the Hastings

Hastings Sand and Weald Clay. 207

sands form the lower portion, though they are largely
interstratified with beds of clay, and sometimes, by
changes of character, the sands and clays of the series
pass into each other. In the various beds are found
Ferns of the genera Alethopteria, Otopteris, and
Sphenopteris, the latter sometimes standing erect, as if
in the position of growth. Coniferous wood and
Cycadeous plants also occur. With rare exceptions, the
shells are of fresh-water genera, viz. ten species of Unio,
five species of Cyrena, besides Cyclas, Melanopsis,
Melania, and Paludina, together with Cypris, C.
Valdensis, and the strata containing these are sparingly
interstratified with beds containing Ostrea, Corbula,
and Mytilus. Several remarkable reptiles occur in the
Weald, of the order Dinosauria, belonging to the genera
Hylceosaurus, Megalosaurus, Iguanodon, Plesio-
saurus, and Pterodactylus, together with nine species
of Crocodilia, of seven genera. The Iguanodon was first
described by Dr. Mantell as an herbivorous reptile of
gigantic size. Its teeth were serrated like those of the
modern Iguana, but unlike them it masticated its food.
Various fish, of the Placoid and Granoid orders, also occur
in the Wealden. The strata composing the Hastings
Sand series are about 700 feet thick.

The overlying beds of Weald Clay are of about
equal thickness, and spread in a broad plain, or series
of low undulations, all round the more hilly country
of the sands. They lie between these sands and the over-
lying Atherfield Clay and Lower Grreensand. It is in
this clay that thin bands of the well-known Sussex
marble occurs, so much used in old times for monu-
mental purposes in churches, good examples of which
may be seen in Westminster Abbey. It is formed
chiefly of the agglomerated shells of Paludina fluvi-

208 Physical Geography.

orum. Interstratified with the Weald Clay there are
a few thin bands sparingly charged with the remains of
marine shells.

Enough has now been said to prove the fresh-water
and estuarine character of the Purbeck and Wealden
beds, and also, considering the broad spread of these
formations in England, that they must have been depo-
sited near and at the mouth of a large river. But to
estimate the possible dimensions of this Delta we must
go further afield.

It has been customary to estimate the area occupied
by these deposits by measuring their length from west
to east, between the Vale of Wardour and the Boulonnais
in France, and from north-west to south-east, from Hamp-
shire to Vassy, or in some cases taking a shorter di-
ameter to Beauvais, and the respective diameters given
of these lines are in the first case 320 miles and in the
second 200 miles.1 Even if these measurements were
correct, which they are not, this method seems to me
to be erroneous, for the measured diameters run too
much in the same direction, whereas, as much as possible,
they ought to be measured at right angles to each other.
The real measurement from west to east, between the
Vale of Wardour and the Boulonnais, is about 200
miles, and a line drawn nearly at right angles to this,
between the south side of the Isle of Wight, where the
Weald Clay occurs, and Quainton, in Buckinghamshire,
where we find the most northerly outlier of the Purbeck
beds, is about 100 miles in length. This would give an
area for the Delta of about 20,000 square miles.

Kigidly to adhere to this measurement, as an accu-
rate account of the size of the ancient Delta, would,

1 See Lyell's « Student's Elements of Geology,' p. 304, second
edition.

Physical Geography. 209

however, be very erroneous. In the first place there is
no reason to believe that the outliers in Buckingham-
shire, near Aylesbury and Quainton, mark the original
limits of the Purbeck strata, for the whole country has
suffered so much by denudation, that we may be sure
that these beds originally spread further. Again,
on the south, the Wealden strata of the Isle of Wight
are thick, and dip northerly between Cowleaze Chine
and Compton Bay, and originally must have spread to
some unknown distance beyond the coast cliffs, and,
indeed, we may be sure that they now occupy part of
the bottom of the sea beyond the coast line. Crossing
the Straits of Dover to the Bas Boulonnais, we find the
Weald Clay much attenuated, but passing under the
Cretaceous strata for some unknown distance. Taking
all these points into account it would probably not be
too much to add one-half to the 20,000 square miles, as
being nearer the original area of the Delta, or 30,000
square miles in all. The area of the Delta of the
united great rivers of the Granges and Brahmaputra,
from the sea to the latitude of Rajmahal, is usually
estimated at about 40,000 square miles, and therefore
it would probably be under the mark to estimate the
size of our old river as being quite as large as the
largest of these great rivers of India. At the very
least it must have been as extensive as the Delta of the
Quorra in Africa, the area of which has been estimated
at 25,000 square miles.

Facts such as these are sufficient to prove that
this ancient stream was, in its day, a first class conti-
nental river. Away to the west of a great plain, through
which it flowed, lay the granite hills of Devonshire,
separated by a broad flat valley from what are now the
mountains of Wales. The old Mendip Hills, which, as

p

2 1 o Physical Geography.

hills, were much older than the Oolitic series, then lay
buried deep beneath the uppermost Oolitic strata, and
all the ground between Wales and the high tracts of
the North of England formed part of the vast plain
that bordered the river ; while far away, on the north,
rose the majestic mountains which we now call the
Highlands of Scotland, then much higher than now,
for ever since that time they have been undergoing
waste and degradation. We have probably no actual
knowledge of the mountain vegetation of the period,
but on the flats by the river there were Equisetums in
the marshes, and ferns, coniferous trees, Zamias, and
Cycas on the drier ground ; crocodiles, turtles, and fish,
swarmed in the waters ; small marsupial mammals lived
upon the flats, along with great reptiles, the Iguanodon,
Hylceosaurus, and the gigantic Megalosaurus, while
the winged Pterodactyle preyed on the insects that
flitted through the air of a climate, probably as warm
as that of the Delta of the Granges.

How far to the west this old flat land spread no man
can tell, but I have no doubt that Wales stood in the
midst of it, for the Oolites passed out on the south
through the area of what is now Bristol Channel, and
on the north across the country now occupied by the
estuaries of the Mersey and the Dee, and it is also
very likely that at that period the whole of Ireland
may have formed part of that old land. On the east
our territory was undoubtedly joined to a great continent,
which, after undergoing many revolutions, is now modern
Europe, but it is hard to discover the details of its physical
geography. Of this, however, we are sure, that the Scan-
dinavian mountains were then loftier than at present, for
they are certainly of older date than the deposition of the
Old Ked Sandstone, and probably older than the Upper

Physical Geography. 2 1 1

Silurian series, and have suffered degradation ever
since ; that the chain of the Ural was in existence, for
it is of older date than the Permian strata ; that the
mountains of the Schwarzwald then rose high into the
air, for they are older than the New Red Sandstone ;
but the Alps, the Pyrenees, and some other mountain
chains, if they existed at all, were in the rudimentary
stage of comparatively low lands, feebly indicated by
the occasional occurrence of fresh-water beds amid the
Oolitic and Purbeck strata, and by such phenomena
as the occurrence of Pterodactyles, and the long-tailed
Archceopteryx macrura,1 in the Solenhofen state of
Bavaria.

That a broad low-lying land existed at that time,
amid which rose groups and ranges of mountains in
what is now Europe, there is no reason to doubt, and
how that phase of physical geography came to an end
will form part of the subject of next chapter.

1 A bird with a long vertebrated feathered tail.

^ o<

2T2

CHAPTER XIV.

CRETACEOUS SERIES.

WHEN the continent described in last chapter had en-
dured for a long period of time, submergence of the
area began to take place, accompanied by the deposition
of the purely marine CRETACEOUS SERIES, which in
England is as follows, the oldest beds being placed at
the bottom :

t Chalk with flints.

Chloritic marl, Chalk marl, and Chalk without flints.
uPPer1 Upper Greensand.

(Gault.

T ( Lower Greenland.

Br \Atherfield Clay.

I may here mention that in parts of the Continent
of Europe, there are certain marine formations inter-
mediate in position and date between the Oolitic and
Cretaceous rocks, which are known as the Neocomian
beds, so called from Neocomium, the ancient name of
Neuchatel, in Switzerland, where they are well de-
veloped. The assumption that the Hastings Sands and
Weald Clay are the fresh-water equivalents in time of
the lower and middle parts of these continental beds, is
undoubtedly correct, the Lower Grreensand of English
geologists being the British representative of the Upper
Neocomian strata.

Mr. Judd has shown that at the south end of Filey

Atherfield Clay. 213

Bay, in Yorkshire, we have the actual marine represent-
atives of the continental Neocomian strata. These
Yorkshire beds were formerly called Speeton Glay,
and lie between the uppermost Oolitic strata of the
district, called by Mr. Judd, Portlandian, and the Red
Chalk or Hunstanton Limestone, which, according to
that author, cannot be of later age than the Upper
Greensand, and may be as early as the Gault.1

The area occupied by the Purbeck and Wealden
strata underwent a long period of slow depression, during
which these fresh- water strata with occasional marine
interstratincations were deposited ; and by sinking still
further, the purely marine beds of the Atherfield Clay
began to be formed. In fact, but for the presence in it of
marine fossils, it is hard to draw any line between the
Wealden and the Atherfield Clays, and no doubt the mud
that formed the latter was at first carried seaward by the
same great river, in the manner, for example, that muddy
sediments are now deposited at and near the mouth of the
Amazons on the east coast of South America.

The Atherfield Clay takes its name from Atherfield,
on the south-west coast of the Tsle of Wight, where it is
well seen overlying the Weald Clay, and is overlaid by
the Lower Greensand. Its lowest beds form a kind of
passage from the fresh-water strata of the Weald into
the overlying marine beds of the Lower Greensand, both
in the Isle of Wight and in the Wealden district, round
which it circles at the edge of the Lower Greensand ; for
at Atherfield there seems to have been a depression of the
fresh-water area and an influx of the sea, accompanied
by the appearance of Cerithium carbonarium, accom-
panied by Pinna and Panopcea standing vertically in
the position in which they lived. Many other shells
1 ' Journal of the Geological Society,' 1868, vol. xxiv., p. 218.

214 Lower Greensand.

are scattered through the clay, including the well-
known Perna Mulleti, Trigonia caudata, Gervillia
aviculoides, Areas, Pectens, Oysters, Rostellaria Par-
kinsoni, and Hemicardium Austeni, &c. &c.

THE LOWER G-KEENSAND, of which the Atherfield Clay
is a subdivision, comes next in succession, in the Isle
of Wight, beginning with a bed of sandstone containing
Gryphcea sinuata and many other shells, succeeded by
29 feet of clay, vulgarly called the 'lobster bed,' from
the presence of Meyeria magna, formerly called
Astacus, together with Ammonites Deshayesii, &c.,
overlaid by nodular bands with Gervillia aviculoides,
&c., above which, clay is repeated, with the same
Meyeria. Above this, sands and clays alternate to the
top of the series, with many fossils, among which may
be mentioned as characteristic, Terebratula sella, T.
Gibbsii, T. biplicata, Limas, Gryphceas, Gervillia
solenoides, Ammonites, Nautili, and other remarkable
Cephalopoda of the genera Crioceras, Ancyloceras,
and Hamites. The whole of these strata overlying
the Wealden beds occur in magnificent sections along
the southern cliffs of the Isle of Wight, dipping north-
erly under the Gault, Upper Greensand, and Chalk,
which in a high ridge stretches across the island from
Culver Cliff to Alum Bay. Overlaid by the Gault, and
reposing on the Weald Clay, the Lower Green sand also
sweeps round the whole Wealden area from Sand gate to
Guildford and Haslemere, and from thence to the coast
north of Beachy Head. Between Guildford and Hasle-
mere it forms high scarped terraces. The sands are
sometimes quite soft, with intercalated hard bands, and
they are frequently ferruginous. A good building
stone, very fossiliferous, being sometimes an impure
limestone, called the Kentish rag, lies in the lower part

FIG. 42.

Perna muileti. Tecten cinctus. .

Group of Alherficld Clay and Lower Greensand Fossils.

2i6 Lower Greensand.

of the formation, on the north side of the Weald
at Maidstone. It rests on the Atherfield Clay. The
general grouping of the fossils in all this area corre-
sponds with that of the Isle of Wight. In Dorsetshire
and part of Somersetshire, at the south end of the
western escarpments of the Cretaceous rocks, the Lower
Grreensand is absent, and the Upper Grreensand rests
directly on the Lias and New Eed series. Further
north, the Lower Grreensand reappears in Wiltshire,
near Chapmanslade, about three miles east of Frome,
and in a long narrow band follows the direction of the
escarpment of Chalk, as far as the neighbourhood of
Devizes, where it widens for a space, and runs north
in a projecting tongue as far as Farringdon, where it is
known as the Sponge gravel.

Beyond the Farringdon area, it is for a space of
twelve miles overlapped unconformably by the Grault,
to reappear a little south of Abingdon in a broad patch,
that extends eastward about six miles to Chiselhampton,
where it is again overlapped by the Grault, to reappear
in a narrow strip between Great Hazeley and the
neighbourhood of Thame. Several small outliers of
Lower Grreensand lie on the Purbeck strata, south, west,
and north of Aylesbury. At Leigh ton Buzzard it
appears in great force, covering all the country for
miles round Woburn, from whence it trends away to the
north-east, and disappears under the alluvium of the
Fens of Cambridgeshire, and runs along the east side of
the Wash, where, crossing under sea, it reappears in
Lincolnshire, and following the line of the chalk
escarpment runs in a NNW. line to the Humber. As a
whole this formation may be described as consisting of
yellow, grey, white, and green sands.

In the Weald country and on the north-west

Lower Greensand.

217

side of the great Chalk escarpment, between Devizes
and the Wash, the Lower Greensand is often ferruginous,
and has been worked for iron ore both in ancient and
modern times. Fossil wood is of frequent occurrence,
perhaps of Coniferous trees, and all the evidence tends
to show that, in the English area, the strata were
deposited in comparatively shallow seas not far from
shore.

The general characters of the fossils of the series are
as follows : — Echinoderms of the genera Salenia, Car-
diaster, Diadema, Discoidea, Echinobrissus, together
with Pentacrinites, are found in it. Terebratulce and
Rhynchonellce are of frequent occurrence, with a few
other Brachiopoda. Among the Lamellibranchiate
molluscs are numerous Limas, Gervillias, Perna,
Oysters, Pectens, and Pinnas, together with shells of
the genera Cardium, Venus, Trigonia, Myacites,
and Nucula. Gasteropoda are not generally numer-
ous. Cephalopoda of remarkable forms are character-
istic ; for, in addition to several species of Ammonites,
Nautili, and Belemnites, there are Crioceras, and
Ancyloceras, like Ammonites half unrolled, Crioceras
Bowerbankii, Ancyloceras gigas, A. grande, and A.
Hillsii. Fishes are scarce, and only three reptiles
have hitherto been described, one Chelonian. Protemys
serrata, a Plesiosaurus, and a crocodilian saurian
Polyptychodon continuus, said also to occur in the
Lower Chalk.

Out of about 300 Lower Greensand species, 18 or
20 per cent, pass into the Upper Cretaceous series.
Partly for palseontological considerations, and also
because the Gault seems sometimes to lie, as it were,
unconformably on the eroded surface of the sand, the
dissimilarity in the grouping of fossils is so great, that

2 1 8 Gault.

it has been considered advisable to draw a marked line
between the two groups ; the Atherfield Clay and the
Lower Greensand, when the term Neocomian is not
applied to them, meaning Lower Cretaceous, and all
above them to the topmost beds of the Chalk being
considered as Upper Cretaceous strata.

The GTAULT forms the base of the Upper Cretaceous
series — or of the Cretaceous series, for those who choose
to call the Lower Ghreensand Neocomian. It is a stiff
blue clay, about 300 feet thick in its thickest develop-
ment, but sometimes it is hard to separate it lithologi-
cally from the Upper Greensand. It appears in the
Isle of Wight, overlying the Lower Grreensand all across
the Island ; and ranges round the escarpment of the
Weald in the same position, with occasional signs of a
kind of unconformable erosion between them ; and in
the centre of England, from the neighbourhood of
Devizes to the Wash in Norfolk, the Grault occasionally
completely overlaps the Lower Grreensand in an un-
conformable manner. In proof of this unconformity,
occasional outlying patches of the Lower Grreensand
occur north of the Chalk escarpment, without any
visible signs of it immediately at the base of the neigh-
bouring Upper Cretaceous strata, which there ought to
be, if these formations lay everywhere conformably on
the Lower Grreensand.

Many Foraminifera have been found in the Grault,
and a few Corals, Cyclocyathus Fittoni, Trochosmilia
sulcata, and Caryophyllia Bowerbanldi. Its sea-urchins
are of the genera Cidaris (C. Gaultind), Hemiaster
(H. Asterias, H. Bailey i\ and Diadema tumida. It
contains many Crustaceans, such as Astacus, Etyus
Martini, Diaulax Carteriana, Palceocorystes Stokesii,
&c. Among the Brachiopoda and Lamellibranchiate

Gault.

219

molluscs the following are characteristic : — Terehratula
biplicata, Rhynchonella sulcata, Oysters, Pectens,
Plicatula pectinoides, Pinna tetragona, &c. ; Gervillia
solenoides, Inoceramus sulcatus, &c. ; Lima paral-
lela, Cucullcea, Area, Nucula pectinata, &c. It also
yields Gasteropoda of the genera Dentalium, Solarium,
Scalaria, Natica Gaultina, Pleurotomaria Gibbsii,
Rostellaria carinata, &c., and many Cephalopoda, such

FIG. 43.

Inoceramus sulcatus.

Natica Gaultina.

Rostellaria carinata.

Lima parallela.

Nucula pectinata. I'licatula pectinoitles.

Group of Gault Fossils.

as Belemnites minimus, &c. ; Nautilus inequalis, &c. ;
Ammonites splendens, A. dentatus, A. interruptus,
A. lautus, &c. &c. ; Ancyloceras spinigerum, Hamites
attenuatus ; H. rotundus, &c. Traces of the Grault
may probably be found along the lower outskirts of
the Chalk all the way to Filey Bay in Yorkshire,
where the Eed Chalk has by some been considered
to be its equivalent, or, at all events, to be of a

22O Upper Greensand.

geological date, not later than its successor the Upper
Greensand.

It would be a great comfort to a proportion of the
geological population, if the different formations were
as clearly distinguishable on the ground, as they are on
a map, by different colours, aided by numbers or letters
for the use of the colour-blind. If to this, in the
economy of Nature, it had so happened that no species
had been permitted to stray from its own formation
into the next in succession, the benefit would have been
much enhanced, for to those with keen eyes for form,
the finding of any single fossil would be sufficient to
mark the place in the geological scale of any given for-
mation. Then we should have a perfect and orderly
symmetrical accuracy of detail, so that he who runs
may read. But it so happens that this is not the case,
for Nature loves variety, and performs her functions in
various ways, and thus it happens that in certain cases
the dividing lines between two formations, if we follow
them far enough, are sometimes difficult to determine.
Of these unruly formations in England the Upper
Greensand forms one, in its occasional physical rela-
tions to its neighbours, the Gault below and the Chalk
above.

THE UPPER GREENSAND in the West of England
appears in great force, forming part of the strata that
extend from the coast between Lyme Regis and Sid-
mouth, northward to the Black Down Hills, south of
Taunton. West of the estuary of the Exe, it forms, in
two outlying patches, the broad-topped hills of Great
Hal- don and Little Hal-don, and south of the angle of
the Teign, near Newton Bushell, there is another outlier
on Milber Down. These lie so near the main mass, and
approximately are so much on the same level, that they

Upper Greensand. 221

are obviously the work of ordinary denuding agencies
on a broader area of Greensand. It is, however, at first
sight somewhat surprising, to meet with a small outlier
of Upper Grreensand, only a few acres in extent, nearly
fifty miles to the west of Black Down, at Orleigh Court,
three miles south-east of Bideford Bay. This patch is
mentioned by De la Beche, in his Eeport on the Geology
of Cornwall, Devon, and West Somerset, and of late its
existence as a solid outlier has been doubted. There
is, however, so much angular chert on the spot, that
sufficient material remains to show that the Greensand
once spread westward so far, and in my opinion pro-
bably much farther.

Throughout these areas, the Upper Greensand may
be briefly described as consisting of yellowish brown
sand, partly compact, partly soft, with layers and
detached pieces of chert, and towards the base it is
partly green with specks of silicate of iron. The sands
are often coarse, and contain layers of shells, frequently
broken and fragmentary. The whole is little more than
200 feet in thickness.

East of Lyme Regis, this Greensand appears near
Abbotsbury, on the southern and western flanks of the
Chalk Downs at Whitehill. West of Chideock outlying
patches lie on the marlstone of the Middle Lias,
between Chideock and Bridport on the sand that
underlies the Inferior Oolite, at Abbotsbury Castle on
the Forest Marble, and from thence stretching north
and west, at Shipton Beacon they lie on the Fuller's
Earth. Beyond this the Cretaceous strata make a
great curve east of Poorstock and Beaminster, lying
generally on the Fuller's Earth. East of Cheddington,
for some miles the Greensand lies on the Oxford Clay,
then for a short space on the sand of the Calcareous

222 Upper Greensand.

Grit, then from Buckland Newton, in Dorsetshire, to
the neighbourhood of Shaftesbury, on Kimeridge Clay.

Near Shaftesbury the Gault comes on in force, and
separates the Upper Greensand from the Oolitic rocks
as far as the neighbourhood of East Knoyle, on the
north side of the mouth of the Vale of Wardour. Be-
tween East Knoyle and Chapmanslade in Wiltshire,
the Grreensand lies chiefly on the Coral Rag, but partly
on the underlying Oxford Clay, and the Grault, if present
at all, is so thin that it cannot be mapped. It is pro-
bable that when the Grault was deposited elsewhere,
this part of the Oolitic area was above the sea-level.
P\om Chapmanslade, the Greensand, underlaid by
Grault, runs along the lower part of the Chalk escarp-
ment in an ENE. direction, by Westbury to Urchfont
and Devizes, and from thence, lying nearly flat, the strata
form the surface of a broad tract of country, eighteen
miles in length from west to east, bounded on both
sides by Chalk, the whole forming a low anticlinal
north and south curve. Still further east, at Shalbourne
and Sidmonton, near Kingsclere in Hampshire, two
other tracts of Upper Greensand rise through the Chalk
to the surface in anticlinal curves of an oval form.

Between Devizes, the Fens of Cambridgeshire, and
the east coast of the Wash, the Upper Greensand runs
to the north-east, in a long somewhat sinuous line, and
nearly all along the strike it forms the lower part of
the bold escarpment of the Chalk, which overlooks the
great plain or table-land of Oolitic strata that runs
across England from the coast of Dorsetshire to the
Humber. North of the Humber, it is marked in
ordinary maps as skirting the Chalk Wolds, first to the
north and then to the east, as far as Filey Bay, but if
such be the case, its sandy character is not always

Upper Greensand. 223

easily recognisable, which, indeed, is also the case much
further south.

In the south-eastern part of Dorsetshire, the Upper
Greensand crosses the Isle of Purbeck from west to
east in a narrow line, overlying the well-known Pun-
field beds, and overlaid bj the Chalk of the long and
imposing ridge of Purbeck Hill, Knowl Hill, Nine
Barrow Down, and Ballard Down. The Greensand itself
makes no feature in the landscape. Fig. 75, p. 347.

Striking east under the sea, the Upper Grreensand
barely escapes forming part cf the great sea-cliff of
chalk, that runs from Sun Corner near the Needles, to
Compton Bay below Afton Down, from whence, over-
lying the Grault, it crosses the Island to the sea close
under Bembridge Down. In this course, wherever the
Chalk Downs are narrow, owing to the high angle of
northern dip, there the line of Upper Greensand is
also narrow, but where the angle of inclination is com-
paratively low, there both Chalk and Greensand spread
over a broad space, between Mollestone Down and
Carisbrook. A large outlier of Upper Greensand,
capped by two outliers of Chalk, overlooks the sea on
the south side of the Island between Chale Bay and
Chine Head, the strata being nearly flat.

In the area of the Weald of Kent and Sussex (fig. 72),
the Upper Greensand at the base of the escarpment of
the Chalk, sweeps round the vast oval, from East Wear
Bay, near Folkestone, to East Meon, near Petersfield,
and from thence to the sea at Eastbourne, near Beechy
Head, but not with absolute certainty all the way, for
only here and there can the Greensand be faintly
discovered, between the sea and Chevening, along a line
of about fifty miles in length. Beyond this point it
begins to get more distinct, and the malm-rock, fire-

224 Upper Greensand.

stone, and other lithological varieties, can be traced
all along by Westerham, Merstham, GKiildford, the
Hog's Back, Farnham, and the extreme west of the
area in the country round Binstead, Selbourne, and the
ground about two miles west and south of Petersfield,
where, as far as colour goes, it might often be taken for
chalk.

On the south side of the Wealden area, the Upper
Greensand maintains the same general character by
Cocking and Barlavington as far as Steyning, where its
lithological character begins to change, and the beds
pass into ' sandy marl and marly sand,' and near East-
bourne the strata are decidedly sandy.

Important deductions are to be drawn from the
consideration of the lithological changes that take place
in the character of the Upper Greensand, which will
afterwards appear. A gradual change may be traced
all the way from Devonshire to Cambridgeshire and the
east end of the Wealden area, which throws some light
on the physical geography of the time, especially when
taken in connection with the circumstance, that out of
more than 200 species of fossils in the Gault, about 46
percent, pass onward into the Upper Grreensand.1 The
Upper Greensand is often fossiliferous, containing
Cycads and Coniferous woods; Sponges, Siphonia
pyriformis, &c. ; a few Foraminifera ; Corals, Trochos-
milia tuberosa, Micrabacia coronula; many Echin-
oidea, the chief of which belong to the genera
Cidaris, Cardiaster, Echinus, Pseudo-diadema,
Salenia* &c. Brachiopoda are common, Terebra-
tulce and Rhynchonellce (T. biplicata, RTi. latissima,

1 For much information on the Upper Greensand of the
Wealden area see ' Memoirs of the Geological Survey, Geology of
the Weald,' by W. Topley, 1875.

Upper Greensand.

225

&c.). In Lamellibranchiate molluscs it is even richer
than the Lower Greensand, abounding especially in
species of the genera Inoceramus, Gryphcea (lcevigata\
Lima, Pecten asper, Astarte, Trigonia, Cucullcea,
Cyprina, and Cytherea. It is also rich in Gasteropoda,
such as Turritella, Pleurotomaria, Natica (N. Gentii),
&c., and yields many species of Ammonites, Nautili,

FIG. 44.

Rhynchonella latissima. Selenia personata. Siphonia pyriformis.

Group of Upper Greensand Fossils.

Hamites, Baculites, Scaphites, and Belemnites. Crus-
tacea, Hoploparia longimana, Necrocarcinus Bechii,
&c. Probably three species of Eeptilia belong to
this formation, Plesiosaurus pachycomus, a Crocodile,
and a Turtle.

THE CHALK, from its familiar characters and general
uniformity of structure, is the most easily recognisable

Q

226 Chloritic and Chalk Marl.

of all the British formations. From west to east it
stretches from the neighbourhood of Beaminster in
Dorsetshire, to Beachy Head and the North Foreland,
and passing beneath the Eocene formations of the Hamp-
shire and London basins it spreads northward to Speeton,
in Yorkshire.

The Chloritic Marl indicates a passage from the
Upper Grreensand into the Chalk. It consists of a
chalky base specked with green grains, and varies from
a few inches to a few feet in thickness. It is highly
fossiliferous, abounding in Ammonites, Nautili (N.
Icevigata), and a small Scaphite (S. ccqualis\ besides
Oysters, Trigonias, Holaster, &c., and many other Echi-
nodermata.

The Chalk Marl, which lies above the Chloritic
Marl when both are present, is merely chalk with a
slight admixture of argillaceous matter, and with its pre-
decessor by no means deserves to be considered as a sepa-
rate formation. The whole, therefore, may be massed as
The Chalk. It consists of a soft white limestone,
generally much jointed where exposed in quarries, and
but for lines of flints, the bedding would often be
scarcely distinguishable. On minute examination with
the microscope, much of the Chalk is found to consist of
the shells of Foraminifera, Diatomacese, spiculse and
other remains of Sponges, Polyzoa, and shells, highly
comminuted. Somewhat similar deposits are now
forming in the open Atlantic at great depths, chiefly of
Foraminifera of the genus Grlobigerina, Polycystina and
Diatomacese, and spiculse of Sponges. In the Pacific,
also, from Java to the Low Archipelago, over an area of
about 4,000 miles in length, all the deep-sea deposits are
of fine, white, calcareous mud, like unconsolidated chalk.
In its thickest development in England the Chalk is

The Chalk. 227,

about 1,200 feet thick in Dorsetshire, Hampshire, &c.
The Lower Chalk usually contains no flints and, as already
stated, is somewhat marly at the base, while the Upper
Chalk is interstratified with many beds of interrupted
flints. These are of irregular form, and lie in layers in
the lines of bedding. A great proportion of them are
stated by Dr. Bowerbank to be silicified Sponges, which
often inclose other organic bodies, such as shells, fragr
ments of Belemnites, &c.; others of large size, called
Paramoudras, which are rare, stand vertically across the
beds. These sometimes resemble, in general formr the
large cup-shaped sponges of the Indian Ocean Alcyonium,
or Neptune's cup.

As a whole, the Chalk dips gently from its western
escarpment to the east and south, and round the Wealden
area to the south and north, underlying the Tertiary strata
of the Hampshire and London basins, and reappearing
with precisely the same characters on the coast of
France. Its area in Europe and Asia is immense. In
the north of Ireland, between Belfast and the Giant's
Causeway, there are patches of very hard Chalk on the
coast, overlaid by columnar basalt of Miocene age.
The great superincumbent pressure of these masses of
igneous rocks has hardened the chalk, and therefore
they have not, as is usually supposed, been altered by
the heat of overflowing lavas, except possibly for an
inch or two at the immediate point of junction, but
this is somewhat foreign to our present subject.
Traces of Chalk and Upper Greensand occur at Bogin-
garry, &c., in Aberdeenshire. These consist partly of
chalk flints, partly of sandstone, possibly in place, and
sufficient to show that Cretaceous rocks, which have
been removed by denudation, probably once spread over
that country. Cretaceous strata, discovered by Mr.

Q2

228 The Chalk

Judd, also occur in the Island of Mull beneath the
Miocene basalts.

About half the genera, and a considerable number of
Chalk species, are identical with those of the Grault and
Upper Grreensand, but it contains a far greater number,
nearly 800, most of which are peculiar to itself.
Plants are few, as might be expected in a wide deep-sea
deposit. A great many Sponges have been described,
chiefly from flints. Among the most numerous are
species belonging to the genera Ventriculites, Cephalites,
Spongia, and Siphonia. A large number of genera
and species of Foraminifera are also described, among
which Globigerina bulloides, Dentcdina gracilis, and
Rotalina ornata, are common. Of Corals about 15
species are known, several of which belong to the genus
Parasmilia (centralis, &c.), CaryophUlia Icevigata,
&c. Echinodermata are very numerous, among others
including the genera Ananchytes, Cardiaster, Cidaris,
Cyphosoma, Diadema, Echinopsis, Galerites and
Echinobrissus, Holaster, Micraster, and Solenia, &c.
Among its starfish are comprised the genera Arthraster,
Goniaster, and Oreaster. Of these Groniaster is exceed-
ingly characteristic. In addition it has yielded an
Ophiura, and several Crinoids, Bourgueticrinus el-
lipticus, Marsupites Milleri, &c. On shells, &c., found
in the Chalk, are frequent Serpulse. It also yields
Cirripeds and a few Crustaceans, Enoplodytia Sussex-
ensis, &c. Polyzoa are numerous, of many species.
Like other members of the Cretaceous rocks, its Brachio-
poda generically resemble those of the Oolites, including
Rhynconella, Terebratulina, and Terebratula. The
Lamelli branchiate molluscs of the Chalk are in some
cases specifically identical with those of the Grault and
Upper Grreensand; and, generically, they bear the

FIG. 45.

Scaphites aequalis.

Lima spiuosa.

Globigerina bulloides.
Group of Fossils from the Chalk.

230 The Chalk.

strongest resemblance, consisting, among others, of
many species of Inoceramus, Lima, Pecten, Oyster,
Spondylus, Radiolites, Trigonia, &c. Being a deep-
sea deposit, it is poor in Gasteropoda, but rich in
Cephalopoda, especially in Nautili (AT. elegans, &c.),
Ammonites (A. Rothomagensis, &c.), and Turrilites
(T. costatus}, besides Baculites, Hamites simplex,
Scaphites (S. cequalis), and Belemnites.

Numerically as individually, though still very
characteristic, Cephalopoda are less numerous in the
Cretaceous than in the Oolitic and Liassic strata,
though the latter contain fewer genera. In the Lias
and Oolites there are nearly 300 species of Cephalopoda,
most of which are Ammonites. In the Cretaceous
rocks less than 200 species are known, about 70 of
whith are Ammonites. More than 80 species of fish
are known in the Chalk, including all the four orders of
Agassiz, . Placoids, Granoids, Cycloids, and Ctenoids.
Many of the Placoids are Cestraciont fish, numerous
species being of the genus Ptychodus. Ten genera of
reptiles are known, two of which are allied to the
Crocodilia, Acanthophilis horridus, and Leiodon
•anceps ; the great Mosasaurus, 3 species ; Plesiosaurus,
2 species, Ichthyosaurus and Pterodactyle, one of
which is said to have measured eighteen feet across the
expanded wings. Several Turtles occur in the Chalk,
Chelone Benstedi, &c.

Having thus briefly described the Upper Cretaceous
strata of England, I shall next endeavour to show
what inferences may be drawn with regard to the
physical geography of the British area, during the time
occupied by their deposition.

We have already seen that, during the deposition of
the Purbeck and Wealden strata, England formed part

Physical Geography. 231

of a great continent, and that, during the formation of
the Lower Greensand, this land suffered partial sub-
mergence, but by no means to such an extent that the
Oolitic strata, which then extended far to the west,
round Wales, were entirely sunk beneath the sea in
which our Lower Greensand was deposited.

As a whole, the Lower Grreensand, being a coarse
and sandy formation, was deposited in shallow water,
and great part of it was in the long run tranquilly
heaved out of the sea, to undergo terrestrial waste
and denudation before the deposition of the Gault
began.

The deposition of the Grault in our area, first took
place on a surface of country that was being gradually
submerged, and part of the sediment was laid on the
Lower Greensand, and part on various members of the
Oolitic strata, from which the Lower Greensand had
been removed by denudation. This Gault Clay is,
however, so difficult to separate from the Upper Grreen-
sand in the eastern part of England, and the Upper
Greensand is so difficult to separate by any clear line from
the Chalk, that it now becomes necessary to consider
the question of the mode of deposition of all three, if,
indeed, except as local developments of different sedi-
mentary character, they ought not to be considered, on
a broad scale, as only one formation. Right or wrong,
the origin of this idea was first declared by Mr. Godwin-
Austen, whose large giasp of questions in physical
geology, (to be found only in scattered memoirs, and un-
fortunately often only spoken in accidental remarks,) is
by no means so well known as it would have been, had
he printed all his stores of geological knowledge in
consecutive form. All that I know of this subject with
respect to these Cretaceous formations, is in the first

232 Physical Geography.

instance derived from him, subsequently aided by
personal observation on the ground.

The story revealed by these various strata is this :
When, after the temporary upheaval of the Lower Green-
sand, the land gradually sank in part beneath the sea,
it happened that the Upper Greensand was being
deposited far in the west on a sea-bottom that now forms
an eastern part of Devonshire. Not far from its margin,
a fragment of the old greater land, in our day known in
a modified form as the granite hills of Dartmoor, stood
high above the level of the sea, and at the same time,
on the opposite side of what is now the Bristol Channel,
Wales also formed high land. The pebbly shore of the
lower land near Dartmoor, has long ago been destroyed
by denudation, but the sediments laid down not far
from the shore still exist in the coarse sandy strata that
form the Upper Greensand west and east of the river
Exe. As we go eastward from that area towards
Devizes, the Upper Greensand still continues to be com-
paratively coarse, and by degrees in Buckinghamshire,
and Bedfordshire, and on into Cambridgeshire, it gets
finer and finer, and at length becomes white, calcareous,
and marly, and, as it were, seems to mingle with the
Gault beneath and the Chalk above, and the Gault,
indeed, in a lithological point of view, sometimes seems
to disappear altogether.

In like manner, at the western end of the Wealden
area, and along the base of the South and North Downs,
the Upper Greensand for many miles consists of fine,
white sand, and in the Malm-rock is somewhat chalk-like
and calcareous, till going further east towards Folkestone,
it gradually becomes untraceable as a special formation,
and merges into the underlying Gault and the over-
lying Chalk.

Physical Geography. 233

The meaning of this is, that distinct coarse Upper
Greensand strata were deposited not far from shore in
the west, gradually getting finer towards • the east,
because the finer and lighter material was drifted further
from shore. At the very same time, in the farther east
of what is now England, the sediments were still finer,
and depositions akin to Chalk, and even the Chalk itself,
had begun to be formed in a deeper sea, far removed
from land, so that according to this view, part of the
lowest strata of the Chalk, in the eastern and south-
eastern parts of England, were deposited contempora-
neously with the coarse Upper Greensand of eastern
Devonshire. On no other hypothesis that I know than
this of Godwin-Austen's, can the phenomena connected
with the Gault, Upper Greensand, and the lower strata
of the Chalk, be rationally accounted for, and I believe
that hypothesis to be true.

The upper strata of the Chalk consist of nearly
pure chalk with lines of flint, and as it accumulated,
the sinking of the western and northern fragments
of the old continent steadily continued, till at length
they almost, if not entirely, sank beneath a sea,
broad and silent, except when roused by storms, like
the Atlantic of our own time, for though the Echini and
shells found in our chalk, show that the sea of those
days was not so deep as the present Atlantic, yet the pre-
valence of prodigious numbers of Globigerina and other
Foraminifera shows that the old and the new seas are
akin in the nature of their organic sediments. If the
whole of the older land was not submerged, (making an
allowance for the lowering of the mountain lands by
subsequent subaerial waste,) even then we can only
suppose that a few insignificant islets rose above a waste
of waters, that spread not only over Britain, but also

234 Physical Geography.

over a very large part of the Europe of the present day,
long before the Alps and the Pyrenees rose into moun-
tain chains, and only a few islands formed of Palaeozoic
rocks stood above the waves. This surely was a striking
phase of an older physical geography, which affected
areas far wider than Europe alone, but which in the
course of time came to an end in a manner which we
shall presently see. To do so thoroughly we must con-
sider the rocks of the continent for a little.

A vast lapse of time took place between the close of
the deposition of the uppermost Cretaceous strata of
England, and the commencement of the deposition of
the succeeding Eocene formations, for in England we
have no deposits of intermediate age. What, however,
helps to prove this great hiatus is, that on the Meuse, at
Maestricht, there is a calcareous formation about 100
feet thick, which lies unconformably on the Chalk, the
line of unconformity being marked by a line of water-
worn flint pebbles. Some of the fossils are of the same
species with those found in the Chalk, and Cephalopoda
of the genera Baculites and Hamites, not yet known in
strata younger than the Cretaceous rocks of Europe,
are found in the Maestricht beds. On the other hand,
Volutes, and other genera of Tertiary type, are found in
the strata, so that this marine fauna may be said to be
of a type intermediate to those of the Cretaceous and
Eocene epochs.

Extending for great distances round Paris, there are
numerous small patches of pisolitic limestone, once
united, but now separated by denudation. These contain
some Cretaceous species, but many others are more
Eocene than Cretaceous in their affinities.

At Faxoe also, in the Isle of Seeland, in Denmark,
there is a yellow limestone so full of corals that it was

Physical Geography. 235

probably a coral reef. It contains among other shells
many univalves which are unknown or rare in the Chalk,
such as Cyprcea, Oliva, &c., and along with these
Baculites and Belemnitella, both unknown in European
Eocene strata, though the latest intelligence from
Australia tells of a Belemnite in certain late Tertiary
strata there. Overlying the common white Chalk, this
Faxoe formation by its fauna also seems to be inter-
mediate in date to the ordinary Cretaceous and Eocene
strata.

But without such data as these it is evident to any
reflective mind, that a great gap in time, unrepresented
by any sedimentary formations in England, took place
in our area between the deposition of the latest bed of
English Chalk, and that of the earliest Eocene stratum,
for, excepting a few Foraminifera, the species found in
the Chalk seem all to have been remodelled before our
Eocene epoch began, in so far that palaeontologists
recognise none of the species as identical, and before the
days of Darwin they would generally have been spoken
of as new creations.

CHAPTER XV.

EOCENE FORMATIONS.

THE EOCENE STB ATA, to which we have now come in
this epitome of British geological history, form the
oldest members of the Tertiary or Cainozoic series. It
ought, however, to be remembered, that the terms
Palaeozoic or Primary, Mesozoic or Secondary, and
Cainozoic or Tertiary, are mere terms of local conveni-
ence, unfit even for minor territories such as Europe, as
the notice of strata intermediate to the Chalk and
Eocene beds shows at the end of last chapter. I cannot
enter on the details of this subject here. Readers must
work it out for themselves, and there is no lack of
printed matter from which to do so.

The EOCENE ROCKS of England lie in two basins,
those of London and Hampshire. Both are surrounded
and underlaid by the Chalk. The London basin extends
westward from the mouth of the estuary of the Thames
to the neighbourhood of Marlborough, and northward
till it is lost beneath the drift of Suffolk and Norfolk.
The north boundary of the Hampshire basin runs from
Beachy Head to the neighbourhood of Salisbury and
Dorchester. The Chalk Downs near Newport, Isle of
Wight, form its southern boundary. In both areas the
Chalk and Tertiary strata are little disturbed, except in
the Isle of Wight and at Purbeck, where for a space
they have been heaved nearly on end. The Lower

Eocene Basins. 237

Eocene rocks lie sometimes on upper beds of Chalk,
and sometimes on beds lower in the series. They are,
therefore, highly unconformable to each other, and this
alone marks a great interval of time, unrepresented in
England by the deposition of strata. The subject is
evidently connected with the nearly total break in
succession of evident species between the Cretaceous
and Eocene formations ; for, great continental areas
of Chalk were heaved above the sea and remained
as dry land for a period of time so long, that, when
they were again submerged, the life of Cretaceous
times had mostly been remodelled by slow evolution,
and newer forms, in time became the legitimate suc-
cessors of their long-buried ancestors.

When critically examined, it soon becomes evident
that the strata of the basins mentioned above were
not originally deposited in two distinct basin-shaped
hollows, but that they were once united, and formed
one great area of Eocene age. Long after, a disturb-
ance of the Secondary and Lower Tertiary strata took
place, which threw them into broad anticlinal and
synclinal curves. One long and broad anticlinal curve
passes along the Wealden area from east to west, and
still further on through part of the Chalk. South of this
we find the synclinal curve of the Hampshire basin,
bounded on the south by the Cretaceous strata of the
Isles of Wight and Purbeck, and on the north by the
Chalk of the Salisbury, Winchester, and Brighton area,
while north of the Weald, the Eocene rocks of the
London basin bounded by Chalk lie in a similar
synclinal curve, broad at its east or seaward end, and
narrow at its western end towards Marlborough. When
still more closely examined, it is found that many beds
of our Eocene strata were deposited in fresh and in

238 Eocene Series.

brackish water, and others in the sea, and the con-
clusion to be drawn from this is, that they largely
consist of sediments that were thrown down at the
mouth of a great river.

When we consider the original extension of these
Eocene river beds, it is also remarkable that they lie
within the same general limits as those of the older
fluviatile deposits of the Purbeck and Wealden strata,
as if, after a long interval, geological history were
repeating itself in the same area. In our own day,
occupying part of the same district, we have yet a
third estuary, that of the Thames, small, but in some
respects of more importance to the living world than
many an estuary of fifty times its size.

The various subdivisions of the English Eocene
strata are given in the Table of British Formations
(p. 30), in which the classification of Professor Prest-
wich is used, which is also that adopted by Sir Charles
Lyell in his Manuals. As far, however, as England is
concerned, it is more philosophical, as it is certainly
more convenient, to divide them into three groups, as

follows :

rHempstead beds.
Upper Fresh- water J Bembridge „
and Estuarine. 1 Osborne „
v-Headon „
r Upper Bagshot Sand.
Marine J Middle Bagstiot. f Barton Clay.

" ] Lower Bagshot. 1 Bracklesham bed 5.

L London Clay.

Lower Fresh-water, r Woolwich ^ Readi bedg
Estuarine, and I Thanet gand>
Marine. L

This classification has the merit of simplicity, being
founded on circumstances relating to variations in the
physical geography of the time in our area, while the

Thanet Sand. ' 239

other seems to be more arbitrary, being founded on con-
siderations of a purely palseonfcological kind. It will
at all events be most easy in this book to treat of the
strata as consisting of a lower fresh- water and estuarine, a
middle marine, and an upper fresh-water and estuarine
series.

The Thanet Sand, absent in the Isle of Wight, is
so named by Professor Prestwich because it is so well
developed in the Isle of Thanet on the Thames. It
lies at the base of the Eocene strata of England, and
consists of fine, light-coloured, quartzose sands, partly
mixed with clayey matter. It usually lies on a layer
of Chalk flint, of an olive-green colour externally, and
which probably represents the effect of the waste of the
carbonate of lime of the chalk which was carried away
in solution as bicarbonate, through the infiltration of
rain-water after the deposition of the sands, the associated
silica having been concentrated and deposited in this
band. These sands range from the Isle of Thanet
westward to the neighbourhood of London, varying
from about 50 feet thick, in parts of Kent, to 4 feet,
at East Horsley, where they disappear, being over-
lapped by the Woolwich and Eeading beds. They are
quite unknown in the Hampshire basin.

The fossils of this subformation are entirely marine,
and embrace about 70 known species. Among these are
a shark of the genus Lamna, Pisodus, and others ; a
Nautilus ; Gasteropoda, such as Fusus tuberosus,
Scalaria Bowerbankii, Natica, Aporrhais, &c. ; a con-
siderable number of Lamellibranchiata, such as Nucula
Thanetania, &c.; Pholadomya Koninckii &c.; Corbula,
Cardium, Ostrea Bellovacina, &c. &c. ; Crustacea,
Hoploparia, andPalceocorystesi spines of Echini (rare),
a coral, a few Foraminifera, and land-plants. In the

240

Thanet Sand.

Paris basin, so celebrated for its Eocene strata, the
Sables de Bracheux are the equivalents of the Thanet
Sand, in which the skull of a carnivorous quadruped
(Arctocyon primcevus) was found.

More than 20 species of shells found in the English
Thanet Sand are also known in the Woolwich and

FIG. 46.

Natica depressa. Corbula Regiilbiensis. Aporrhais Sowerbyi.

Group of Fossils from the Thanet Sand.

Reading beds, and in the London Clay, and Barton
and Bracklesham beds. The Thanet Sands are, indeed,
so like those of the Woolwich and Reading beds,
that, but for their position, it is sometimes difficult
to distinguish between them, and they were formerly

tt.

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ii

pq W

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242 Woolwich and

looked upon as a portion of the Woolwich and Reading
series, which partly consists of a few saltwater beds,
interstratified with a preponderance of fresh-water
deposits. Excepting that the Thanet Sand is alto-
gether marine, it is possible that it might have con-
tinued still to be classed simply as one of the minor
marine portions of the Woolwich and Heading series.

The Woolwich and Reading beds, formerly called
the Plastic Clay (Argile plastique of the Paris basin),
overlie the Thanet Sand, and rest directly on the Chalk,
when, as in the greater part of the London basin, and
in Hampshire and the Isle of Wight, the Thanet Sand
is absent. They may be broadly described as consisting
of many wedge-shaped interstratitications of mottled
clays, light-grey sands, and pebble-beds, made of chalk
flints, which are sometimes loose and gravelly, and
sometimes hardened into conglomerates. From west to
east the strata vary from 15 to 90 feet thick in the
London basin. In the Hampshire basin they are still
less developed (fig. 47), and the whole consists of
mingled marine, estuarine, and often of purely fresh-
water strata, marking the first obvious signs of the
influx of a great river, formed by the drainage of a con-
tinent, the result of the upheaval above the sea of
large areas of Chalk and other older rocks in what is
now Britain and the nearest parts of France. There
can be no doubt, however, that the Thanet Sands are
the result of the same set of conditions, only they were
deposited further from shore in a comparatively open sea.

More than 100 species of fossils are known in the
Woolwich and Reading strata, including an herbivorous
mammal of the genus Coryphodon, allied to the modern
tapirs of South America, which live on the banks of the
Amazons and other great rivers, also the bones of a bird,

Reading Beds.

243

turtles, and the scutes of a crocodile ; several fish of the
genus Lamna (L. contortidens, &c.), Lepidosteus ,
LepidotuSy and Myliobatis ; marine Gasteropoda, such
as Cerithium funatum, &c. ; Fusus latus, Hydrobia
Parkinsoni, Melanopsis brevis, &c. ; Natica, Neritina,

FIG. 48.

Pitharella Rickmanii. Cerithium funatum. Ostrea tenera.

Cyrena telenella. Hoploparia gammaroides. Panopoea intermedia.

Group of Fossils from the Woolwich and Beading Beds.

and others. Lamellibranchiata, not very numerous as
genera and species, but plentiful as individuals, occur
both in the sands and clays, including species of Area,
Cardium, Corbula, Cyprina Morrisii, Cyrena cor data,
&c., Modiola elegans, Ostrea edulina or Bellovacina,

R2

244 Oldhaven Beds.

0. elegans, &c. ; Pectunculus, Psammobia, &c. ; Crus-
tacea (Hoploparia, gammaroides) and Foraminifera
also occur.

A few land-plants have been found, as might be ex-
pected in estuarine strata, viz. Dryandroides Prest-
wichi, figs, laurels (L. Hookeri), Grevillia Heeri, and
Robinia Readingensis ; also great numbers of fresh-
water shells in true fresh-water strata, such as Paludina
Lenta, &c. ; Planorbis Icevigatus, &c. ; and several of
the genera Cyrena (G. cordata, &c.) and Unio, together
with the small bivalve Entomostraca, Cypris and
Cythere.

Taken as a whole, the estuarine, and especially the
fresh-water character of so many of the strata of this
series, make the strongest impression on anyone engaged
in mapping them.

The Oldhaven beds, formerly included by Mr.
Prestwich in the basement bed of the London Clay, lie
between the above-named strata and the London Clay,
and consist of fine sand containing water-worn pebbles
of flint. They are of inconsiderable thickness, but very
constant in their occurrence. With the rarest excep-
tions the fossils are marine ; and they are numerous,
consisting to a great extent of the same molluscous
genera as those found in the Eocene strata below, with
additions, and a proportion of the species are also found
in the overlying London Clay. Their chief importance
in this sketch is, that the sand with water-worn pebbles
seems to indicate some oscillation of level, accompanied
by stronger currents, in an estuary which carried flint-
pebbles onward, toward the mouth of this old river.

The London Clay (fig. 47, p. 241), is a marine de-
posit, in the sense that the strata now forming in the
broad estuary of the Amazons is marine. It usually con-

London Clay. 245

sists of brown and bluish-grey clay, with occasional
bands of calcareous concretions (septaria). In the
London basin it varies in thickness from 50 feet in the
extreme west, at Newbury, to 480 feet in Essex. In the
Isle of Wight, at Alum Bay, it is only 200 feet thick
(fig. 47) ; in Whitecliff Bay, 295 feet ; and at the west
extremity of that basin, in Dorsetshire, it dwindles away,
being barely distinguishable except to well-accustomed
eyes. The chief fossiliferous locality in the Hampshire
basin is at Bognor in Sussex. In the Isle of Wight
fossils are scarce in this formation. Eound London they
occur at Highgate, and in other places far to the west.
The Isle of Sheppey has long been famous for its fossils,
being found there chiefly because of the frequent
landslips from the cliffy slopes that overlook the estuary
of the Thames. The plants have long been celebrated,
consisting of various Palm-nuts, Nipadites ellipticus,
and N. umbonatus, and other fruits ; Conifera?, many
leguminous plants, laurels, figs, junipers, and plants of
the citron tribe, are also common, all of extinct species.
Eemains occur of birds allied to the vulture (Lith-
ornis vulturinus) and king-fisher (Halcyornis toliapi-
cus\ and a small swimming-bird, described by Owen,
with tooth-like serratures on the bill ; turtles and river
tortoises are numerous of the genera Chelone (breviceps,
&c.), Emys (Conybeari, &c.), Platemys, and Trionyx]
also a crocodile (Crocodilus champsoides) and snakes
(Palceophis toUapicus and P. longus). Terrestrial
mammals also occur — a Marsupial (Didelphis Col-
chesteri), a Bat, and Hyracotherium cuniculus ; also
Miolophus planiceps, Pliolophus vulpiceps, and
Coryphodon eoccenus, which are tapir-like animals, in a
distant way allied to the tapirs now found on the
banks of South American rivers.

246

London Clay.

Plants, birds, reptiles, and mammals all tell of the
immediate neighbourhood of land, and the marine
fossils now to be mentioned seem in fact to have lived
at the mouth of a great river.
FIG. 49.

Cardita Brongniarti. Cassidaria striata. Nipadites ellipticus.

Group of Fossils from the London Clay.

Nearly 60 genera of fish have been noted from
the London Clay alone, including species of Lamna

London Clay. 247

and many species of Rays (Myliobatis). Of the Cepha-
lopoda, Nautilus (N. Sowerbyi, &c.) is common, to-
gether with Cephalopode, Belemnosis plicata, Belosepia
sepioidea, and Beloptera Levesquei. Ammonites and
Belemnites, genera common in the Cretaceous strata
have disappeared. Gasteropoda occur in vast profusion,
the most prominent genera being Fusus (F. regularis,
F. Iceviusculus, &c.), Murex (M. crista,tus, M. coro-
natus, &c.), Pleurotoma (P. Helix, P. Keelii, &c.),
Voluta (V. nodosa, &c.), Pyrula (P. Smithii, &c.)
Cyprcea (C. oviformis), and Eostellaria (E. ampla,
&c.). Lamellibranchiata, though common, are less
numerous, including among others the genera Pinna
(affinis, &c.), Pholadomya (Dixoni, &c.), Area, Avi-
cula, Pecten, Cardium, Cyprina, Nucula, &c.
The Brachiopoda are only represented by Lingula
tenuis and Terebratulina, striatula, and there are a
few Polyzoa. Crustacea are exceedingly numerous,
especially crabs (Brachyura and Anomura), including
the genera Xanthopsis, Hoploparia, &c. ; and of
Entomostraca, Cy there is common of many species.
Among the Echinodermata we have Hemiaster Bower-
bankii, &c. ; Goniaster, Cidai is, Astropecten Colei, &c. ;
Ophiura Wetherellii, and Pentacrinus, and there are
also a few Corals. Many of the fossils of the London
Clay are found in other strata both above and below that
formation, but a larger proportion is common to the
overlying than to the lower formations.

Looked at in a comprehensive way, an accurate
observer cannot fail to be struck with the fact that the
assemblage of fossils found in the London Clay point in
this direction, viz., that the whole of these strata were
deposited in the estuary of a great continental river
comparable to the Amazons and the Ganges. The Palm-

248 Bagshot and Bracklesham Beds,

nuts and the host of other plants help to prove it, and
the remains of river tortoises, crocodiles, snakes, mar-
supial, and several tapir-like mammals, all point in
the same direction. The estuarine conditions, begun
during the deposition of the Woolwich and Beading
beds, were still going on when the London Clay was
thrown down, with this difference, that by sinking of
the area, the estuary had become longer, wider, and
deeper, but still remained connected with a vast con-
tinent, through which the Eocene river flowed.

The Bagshot and Bracklesham Sands and Clays,
fig. 47, succeed the London Clay. These are well shown
on Bagshot Heath, and on the coast of Hampshire. On
Bagshot Heath, they consist of light-brown and yellow
sands, with beds of clay, which, in a rude way, form the
middle part of the strata, thus dividing them into Lower
and Upper Bagshot sands, the whole, where thickest,
being about 300 feet thick. The sands are very sparingly
fossiliferous, but the clay, in places, contains a few
species. In the Hampshire basin, at Bracklesham and
other places, the lithological character of these strata is
very inconstant, but they consist of the following series
of strata, which are partly quite local : —

Upper Bagshot Sands, &c.
Barton Clay (quite local).
Bracklesham shells, sands, and clays.

Lower Bagshot Sands and Clays, with occasional lenticular beds
of pipe-clay containing leaves, <fec.

These strata have yielded about 200 species of fossils,
mostly distinct from those of the London Clay. Many
of the Gasteropoda have a tropical aspect, such as
Cyprcea Boiverbankii, Murex minax, and Conns
diver siformis. Gasteropoda, of these and other genera,
are exceedingly numerous, viz., Pleurotoma, Valuta,

and Barton Clay. 249

Natica, Ancillaria, Turritella, &c., &c. A large
Oyster (0. picta), various Pectens, a great Cardita (C.
planicosta), Cardium, Cytherea, Solen, Sanguinolaria,
&c., are common in England in the Bracklesham series,
and a foraminifer, Nummulites Icevigatus. In the
same set of rocks there have also been found a serpent
Palceophis Typhceus, 20 feet in length, and P. porca-
tus ; a turtle, Chelone trigoniceps ; a crocodile, Gavialis
Dixoni ; and a tapiroid mammal, Lophiodon minimus ;
and fish, including Sharks and Sword-fish. The Bag-
shot Sands form the highest Eocene beds of the London
basin. In the Hampshire basin, however, there are
many newer formations.

The Barton Clay, on the coast west of Lymington
in Hampshire, is quite a local deposit, and both on
stratigraphical and palseontological grounds is assumed
to be the general equivalent of the clays that lie be-
tween the Upper and Lower Bagshot Sands. It is espe-
cially fossiliferous, containing a few fish, a crocodile ( C.
Hasting sice), and more than 200 described species of
marine shells. These have in general a tropical cha-
racter, as if in the course of time the climate of our
area had become warmer, due possibly to astronomical
causes, which I need not here stay to describe. Among
them are large Nummulites., various large and small
Volutas ( V. athleta, V. ambigua, V. luctatrix, &c.) ;
Murex minax, Rostellaria ampla, and others ; Bucci-
num, Triton, Turritella, Natica, and many more.
Numerous Lamellibranchiate molluscs also occur, in-
cluding Oysters (0. flabellula, &c.) ; Chama squamosa^
Pectunculus deletus, &c. ; Area duplicata, &c. ; Car-
dium porulosum, &c. ; Cardita, Panopcea, Cytherea,
Corbula, &c , &c. Near Poole Harbour land-plants
occur in these strata in lenticular beds of pipe-clay,

FIG. 50.

Chatna squamosa. Cardium porulosum.

Fusus longasvus. Voluta athleta. Phorus agglutinans.

Group of Fossils from the Bracklesham and Barton Beds.

Headon Hill Sands.

251

such as Oaks, Yews, Cypress, Spindle-trees, Dryandra,
Laurels, Limes, Figs, Senifas, &c., &c., but all of
extinct species. In this assemblage of plants we have
ample evidence of the vicinity of land, and though
modern crocodilia have no special objection to salt-
water in the mouths of the Granges, yet they are not in
the habit of pursuing their game into the open ocean,
and we may therefore more than suspect, that even this
part of the Eocene series was deposited within the
ocean mouth of a great river such as the Amazons.

The Bagshot series, including all the strata men-
tioned above, form the highest part of the Eocene
strata, which exclusively contain marine mollusca.

We now come to the undoubtedly Upper Fresh-
water and Estuarine deposits.

The Headon Hill Sands (fig. 47), including the
clays of Hor dwell Cliffs, come next in succession. These
form the lowest part of the great fluvio-marine deposits,
which constitute the remainder of the Eocene rocks of
Hampshire and the Isle of Wight, for none of these
strata are found within the area of the London basin.
Some of the marine shells of Hordwell are common to
the Barton beds. Its marine strata contain sharks'
teeth, Murex, Buccinum, Ancillaria, Valuta, Margin-
ella, &c., Oysters, Pectens, Corbula, Balanus, &c.,
Fusus porrectus, Oliva Branderi, and Nummulites
Icevigata. The brackish-water strata have yielded Ceri-
thium mutabile, C. cinctum, Potamomya plana, &c.,
and the fresh- water rocks contain Paludina lenta, Pla-
norbis euomphalus, Limncea caudata, Cyclas, several
species of Cyrena, Unio Solandri, Melania, &c., be-
sides land-shells of the genus Helix, and of vegetable
remains, two species of Carpolithes (a conifer), and
Char a Wrightii. In the Hordwell Cliffs and elsewhere,

252 Osborne and Bembridge Beds.

numerous reptiles have also been found, including two
serpents Palceryx depressus, and P. rhombifer, Turtles,
and seven species of Trionyx ; Crocodilus toliapicus,
and Alligator Hantoniensis. Among the mammals of
the same beds have been found Palceotherium annectens,
a three-toed animal somewhat like a tapir ; Anoplo-
therium commune, having affinities both with pigs and
ruminants ; Chceropotamus Cuvieri, somewhat like the
river-hog ; Dichodon cuspidatus and Microchcerus eri-
naceus ; also a bird, Macrornis tanaupus.

The Osborne Beds (fig. 47) succeed the Headon
series, and are well seen on the coast near Osborne, and
at Nettles! one in the Isle of Wight. Different sections
vary in lithological character, but they may be gene-
rally described as consisting of sands and clays, from
60 to 80 feet thick, containing fresh-water shells, such
as Cyrena obovata, Achatina costellata, Limncea lon-
giscata, Melania costata and excavata, Melanopsis
brevis, Paludina lenta in great numbers, first known
in the Woolwich and Eeading series, and P. globuloides,
Planorbis euomphalus. and five others, and a Unio.
Entomostraca (Crustacea) also occur, viz., Candona
Forbesii, Cyiheridea Mullerii, and Cythereis unisul-
cata, with fresh -water plants Char a Lyellii and C.
medicagulina. A land-shell, Helix occlusa, and a
Cerithium are also found, the latter of which may have
Kved in brackish water, but the general assemblage is
entirely fluviatile.

The Bembridge Beds (fig. 47) overlie the Osborne
series in the Isle of Wight, and ' spread over the greater
portion of the surface of the island which is occupied
by Tertiary deposits.' They are fluvio-marine, and
consist at the base of soft cream-coloured fresh-water
limestone, sometimes 20 feet thick, overlaid by an Oys-

FIG. 51.

Voluta Rathieri.

Helix occlusa.

Paludiua orbicularis.

Palseotherium magnum.

Limnaea longiscata. Bulimus ellipticus.

Planorbis euomphal

Chara medicagoliua.

Cerithium Sedgwicki. Cytherea incrassata.

Group of Fossils from the Headon and Bembridge Beds.

254 Hemp stead Beds.

ter band, which is succeeded by about 40 feet of marls.
The limestone is a remarkable stratum, containing
numerous nuclei of Chara, fresh water shells, viz. Lim-
ncea longiscata, Paludina globuloides, Planorbis, Me-
lania, and of land-shells, five species of Helix, Buli-
mus ellipticus, Pupa perdentata, and Cydotus cine-
tus. Above this bed is a characteristic oyster-band
with Ostrea Vectensis, and this is succeeded by marls in
different bands highly charged with Paludina lenta,
Limncea longiscata, Bulimus, Melania, Unio, Cyrena
semistriata, C. obovata, and other fresh and brackish
water shells. In the Bembridge beds there has also
been found the Anaplotheroid mammal Dichobune cer-
vinum, and five species of Palceotherium, viz. P. eras-
sum, curium, magnum (fig. 51 ), medium, and minus ;
the nearest living analogues of which may be said to
be the tapirs of the South American rivers.

The Hempstead Beds . form the uppermost portion
of the British Eocene strata. The Bembridge beds be-
low pass gradually into them, and the fossils throughout
the lower part of the Hempstead series are in great
measure identical with those of the Bembridge marls,
containing Paludina lenta in profusion, Planorbis ob-
tusus, Limncea, Cyrena semistriata, Unio, Melania,
&c., and at the very top is a marine band containing
Corbula pisum, and Oysters. The mammalia Hyraco-
therium leporinum and Hyopotamus bovinus and H.
Vectianus (Suidse) occur in these strata. These
Hempstead beds were first clearly described by Edward
Forbes, who considered them to be of Upper Eocene
age. Sir Charles Lyell, however, following Mr. Pen-
gelly, because of certain land plants, considered these
uppermost strata to be Lower Miocene. Plants afford
a more uncertain test of geological age than mollusca,

Physical Geography. 255

and in the genera of plants alone, it would be as allow-
able to refer the Cretaceou* flora of Aix-la-Chapelle
to the Miocene age, as it is to refer the Hempstead
beds to that epoch. The genera of mammalia, also of
the Hempstead strata, are truly Eocene, for Hyopotamus
is found in the Headon series, and Hyracotherium in
the London Clay. The Hempstead beds, in fact, merge
gradually into those below, and the uppermost stratum
of all is marine, containing Corbula pisum, which is
a well-known Eocene species, found in various sub-
formations as low as, and including, the Barton Clay.
The series may be said to be unfinished, and seems quite
naturally to belong to the Eocene epoch. In old times,
what kind of strata, if any, may have lain above the
Corbula bed, no one knows.

In Hampshire, the same general series of fluvio-marine
strata occurs, with variations in lithological character,
but only as high as the Bembridge beds, the Hempstead
strata having been removed by denudation.

If we now review the whole of the circumstances
relating to the English Eocene strata, we find that in
their lower and upper divisions they are decidedly of
fresh-water and estuarine character, the fresh- water
beds having been laid down in the broad mouth of a
great river, so near the sea, that the area was liable by
slight oscillations of level to intermittent influxes of the
salt water, which produced minor marine inter stratifi-
cations both in the Woolwich and Reading beds below,
and in the upper strata, from the Headon to the Hemp-
stead beds inclusive. But this is not all. Though,
technically, the London Clay and the Bracklesham
Barton and Bagshot beds are marine, as far as sea-
shells are concerned, yet no one is likely to believe that
these shell-fish lived and died in an open ocean. On the

256 Physical Geography.

contrary, taken as a whole, all of the British Eocene
formations may, in the widest sense, be spoken of as es-
tuarine, for even the London Clay was evidently depo-
sited in the broad mouth of a river like the Amazons
or the Ganges ; and nearly all the strata more or less
contain evidence of the neighbourhood of land, in the
bones of terrestrial and river mammalia, crocodiles, and
gavials, serpents, birds, and numerous land plants.
Pine cones, pods of acacia, fruits (Nipadites ellipticus),
figs and laurels, lie thick in the London Clay of the Isle
of Sheppey, and remind the beholder of the Nipa fruti-
cans, a palm-nut that floats in the arms of the Delta
of the Granges.

The same kind of story is told in the Isle of Wight,
in the beds of lignite found in the Bagshot and Brack-
lesham beds of Alum Bay. There, where the strata
stand nearly vertically, it sometimes happens that each
stratum can be accurately examined, and when last I did
so, I observed under each bed of lignite a clay with
rootlets in it, playing the same part to the Eocene
lignites that the underclays do to the beds of coal of
the Coal-measures, thus telling of marshes in the broad
flats of the Eocene Delta, where vegetation growing and
decaying formed beds of peat, that subsequently,
buried under newer strata, became converted into
lignite.

Strata in many ways similar to the Eocene rocks of
England occur in France, in what is called the Paris
basin, and in Belgium. It is not unlikely that with
part of these estuarine strata, there may have been a
direct connection with those of England, but whether or
not, as yet I know of no data that tend to show from
what direction this continental Eocene river flowed, or,
in other words, what were the general shape and bearings

Physical Geography. 257

of this vast Eocene continent. Of this, however, we
may be sure, that somewhat altered in form and somewhat
lowered by waste, the old Silurian lands of Wales, the
north of England, and the Scottish mountains formed
part of the Continent that gave birth to the Eocene
river. The Eocene formations of the London basin
all thin away as we pass from east to west, and it
seems as if originally there had been a landward edge
to the estuary in that direction, and possibly, but quite
uncertainly, the river may have flowed through wide
lands that stretched far to the west and north-west, or, on
the other hand, it may have flowed through broad tracts
of what is now part of the Continent of Europe. However
that may be, I have no doubt that tributary streams
poured into it from the west and north-west, for to my
mind it is certain, that beyond the original edge of
these Eocene formations, the Chalk spread far to the
west, till it abutted on and probably rose high on the
sides of the mountains of Wales, and passing westward
on the south through the area of the present Bristol
Channel, and on the north, across the space now occupied
by the estuaries of the Dee and the Mersey, the Chalk
of England formed a broad undulating plain, united to
the Chalk of Antrim and the Cretaceous rocks of what
is now the Western Isles of Scotland, which then formed
part of the mainland, long before those volcanic erup-
tions took place that overspread the Chalk of Antrim
with sheets of basalt, and gave rise to the present
mountain scenery of the Inner Hebrides. If so, these
upraised Cretaceous strata must have spread westward
into areas now covered by the Atlantic, but of its actual
extent nothing is certainly known.

Such is a general sketch of what I believe to have
been the state of the Physical Geography of Britain

s

258

Physical Geography.

during the Eocene epoch, when our land formed part of
a continent differing in many great details from modern
Europe, which, in its physical geography, underwent
most important modifications, both before and during
the deposition of the Miocene strata. Other great
local changes afterwards brought the Miocene epoch to
a close. I use such terms as these for want of better,
for since the beginning of geological time, no epoch had
either a definite beginning or a definite end, and, in a
world- wide scale, the various epochs merged into each
other like the colours in a rainbow, or the so-called
epochs of the history of nations, which have only a local
significance, when they are taken in connection with the
history of the whole human race.

259

CHAPTEE XVI.

MIOCENE EPOCH.

THE MIOCENE STKATA in England play a very unim-
portant part, in a physical point of view, excepting that
the remains of many land plants which they contain
give a high interest to these deposits from the light
they throw on the climate of the time.

These strata lie not far from the mass of granite
that forms the high ground of Dartmoor Forest, the
highest point of which, called Yes Tor, is about 2,050
feet above the sea. At the foot of this mountain
land there is a plain, of a kind of pear-shaped form,
stretching, about seven and a half miles in length, be-
tween the neighbourhood of Bovey Tracey and Aller
Mills, near Newton Abbot. It is about three miles in its
greatest width from Blackpool to Knighton, two miles
south-west of Chudleigh.1

1 For these and some other details I am indebted to Mr. Horace
B. Woodward, of the Geological Survey, who lately re-mapped the
Bovey Tracey district, and also to the joint work of Mr. William
Pengelly F.E.S. and the well known botanist, Professor Oswald
Heer of Zurich, whose masterly description of the plants of the Bovey
beds threw the first clear light on the geological age of the strata.
See Woodward's ' Geology of England and Wales,' and ' On the
Lignite Formation of Bovey Tracey,' by Messrs Pengelly and Heer,
' Philosophical Transactions,' 1862. The expense of the production
and republi cation of this work was defrayed by the Baroness
Burdett Coutts, who thereby conferred a boon on all students of
Tertiary Geology,

82

260 Miocene Strata.

The surface of the plain, according to Mr. Pengelly,
consists of sandy clay, which contains a large number of
angular and subangular stones lying unconformably on
the Miocene strata, which consist of numerous beds of
sand, clay, and, in the northern part, of lignite. Accord-
ing to Mr. Horace Woodward, the total thickness of
these strata may be from 200 to 300 feet. The whole
of these Miocene beds give the impression that they
were originally deposited in a lake hollow, the sands
and clays having been derived from the waste of the
neighbouring Greensand and the granite of Dartmoor,
while the vegetable matter that now forms the lignites
consisted of stems and leaves of trees, fruits, ferns,
&c., which were drifted by the streams of the time into
the lake, where they got water-logged and sank, to be
buried in the gradually accumulating strata.

In the northern part of the area, where the Bovey
coal (lignite) occurs, near Bovey Tracey, the beds, ac-
cording to Mr. Pengelly, dip at an angle of 12J-0, about
15° south of west, while according to Mr. Woodward, fur-
ther south they dip much in the same direction about 5°.
The lignite division of the strata is separated from the
more southern clayey part of the area by a fault, pro-
bably of about 100 feet. In the opinion of Mr. Pen-
gelly and Mr. Woodward, the strata south and east of
the fault belong to an upper part of the series, which
originally spread over that part of the strata in which
the beds of lignite are found, having since been removed
by denudation.

When we consider the effect of the fault, and also of
the inclination of the strata, it is evident that the
formation as originally deposited, must have spread
beyond its present limits in the direction of the sur-
rounding hills, and that the old lake probably washed

Bovey Tracey. 261

the base of the granite hills of Dartmoor on one side,
and the slopes of Greensand on the other. Of this
there can be little doubt, that the fine clays, often
light-coloured, which form so much of the series, were
derived from the disintegration of the felspar of the
granite of Dartmoor, and the sands, where pure, were
probably partly made from the quartz of that granite,
and partly from the waste of the neighbouring Upper
Grreensand hills, then no doubt more extensive and
higher than now.

The climate of the period is unmistakably indi-
cated by the plants, of which fifty species have been
described by Heer, from these Lower Miocene beds.
Some of these are ferns, including Lastrcea stiriaca, and
L. Bunburii, Pecopteris lignitum and P. Hookeri, and
of the Order Conifers we have the branches, fruits, and
seeds of the lofty Sequoia Couttsice, a genus that
abounded in the Miocene epoch, and probably formed
the most common tree in the woods that surrounded
this lake. The nearest living analogue of this tree is
the Sequoia gigantea of California, the Wellingtonia
of our parks and gardens. Various grasses have been
found, and fragments of a Palm-tree, Palmacites Dce-
monorops, probably resembling the living Rotang-
palm, and leaves of Oaks, Quercus Lyellii, of which,
says Heer, ' similar species are still living in Mexico.'
Three species of Figs and two of Grapes have been de-
scribed, together with Laurels, Cinnamons, Birches,
Willows, Waterlilies, &c., all of extinct species accord-
ing to Heer, and eleven of which are common to the
Miocene flora of Switzerland, both ' manifesting a sub-
tropical climate.'

' If,' says Professor Heer, ' from the relics of the
Bovey plants, we attempt to represent the vegetation of

262 Miocene, Bovey Tracey.

Bovey as it existed in the Tertiary period, we sLall have
to sketch it somewhat in the following manner : — The
woods which covered the slopes which surrounded the
beds of lignite, consisted mainly of a huge coniferous
tree {Sequoia Couttsice\ whose figure resembled in all
probability its highly admired cousin, the Sequoia
( Wellingtonia) gigantea of California. It had just the
same graceful slender form in its vernal shoots, thickly
studded with leaflets ; and the similarity continued in
the older shoots and branches, which were clothed with
scales. But it presented a distinct character in its
shorter leaves, which were even more closely appressed
to the shoots, and in its smaller cones. The leafy trees
of most frequent occurrence were the cinnamons (Cinna-
momum lanceolatum and C. Sckeutchzeri) and an ever-
green oak (Quercus Lyelii) like those which now are
seen in Mexico. The species of evergreen figs were
rarer, as were also those of Anona and Gardenia.
The trees of the ancient forest were evidently festooned
with vines, beside which the prickly Rotang-palm
(Palmacites Dcemonorops) twined its snake-like form,
In the shade of the forest throve numerous ferns, one
species of which, Pecopteris ligriitum, seems to have
formed trees of imposing grandeur ; besides which there
were masses of underwood belonging to various species of
the genus Nyssa, which is at present confined to North
America. On the surface of the lake, in which were
formed the deposits of clay and sand that lie between
the lignite beds, were expanded the leaves of those
water-lilies, the ornate seeds of which are preserved for
our examination.'

A description so vivid needs no comment, and of this
we may be sure, that this fragment of a flora only
represents a small part of that of a vast continent, to

Antrim and Scotland. 263

which the British Islands were united, and which,
embracing Iceland, spread far to the north and west into
the area of what is now the Atlantic, and on the south
was united to Africa, when as yet the Mediterranean had
no existence.

In those days our British mountain lands formed of
palaeozoic rocks were mountainous then as they are now,
but higher ; and elsewhere, especially after the close of
the formation of the Eocene strata, the Alps, the Car-
pathians, and the Pyrenees, first rose into prominence as
mountain chains, at the foot of which in Switzerland
were great lakes, from the collective strata of which
Professor Heer has numbered 900 species of plants and
nearly as many insects, all such as must have lived in a
subtropical climate, probably warmer than that of our
Devonshire area, if we may judge by the fossilised
remains of date-palms.

When, however, we travel northward from Bovey
Tracey, the case is different, and to make this plain, I
must lead you for a moment through the Western Isles
of Scotland, and far beyond, among the islands of the
Arctic Sea.

In Antrim, the island of Mull, and on the mainland
opposite, and in Staffa, Rum, Eigg, Canna, and Skye,
the Miocene rocks consist chiefly of the lava-flows and
ashes of great terrestrial volcanoes. These, as they
accumulated, overflowed and filled up the undulating
valleys of chalk in Antrim, of Oolite and of Silurian
gneiss in what is now the west of Scotland, and in the
intervals of eruptions, lakes were sometimes formed,
and terrestrial soils accumulated on the sides of vol-
canoes, some of which, according to Mr. Judd, grew by
accretion of volcanic matter till they rivalled Etna in
height, and seemed as if they might last for ever, but

264 Miocene of Midi and Arctic Regions.

being diminished by central subsidence and long-con-
tinued sub-aerial waste, the mountain of Beinn More in
Mull is now only 3,172 feet in height.

No shells of any kind have yet been found in the
Bovey beds, nor have any been seen in the Hebrides, but
in Mull, at the headland of Ardtun, the Duke of Argyll
discovered in 1851 three thin leaf-bearing beds of
shale, intercalated among beds of basaltic lava, and
tufas or volcanic ashes. These vegetable remains con-
sist of a conifer, Sequoia Langsdorfii, together with
Corylus Mac Quarrii, a plane tree, Platanus aceroides,
and a fern, Filicites hebridica, as yet only found in Mull.
These, and I believe also the Flora of Antrim, are partly
considered to belong to a more northern type of vegeta-
tion than the plants of Bovey Tracey, and two of the
species, the Coryllus and Platanus, are also found in
Iceland.

Associated with the volcanic rocks of Skye and
the Faroe Islands, similar phenomena occur, with an
analogous but still more northern flora, and the early
volcanic eruptions of Iceland date back to the Miocene
period. There, in beds of lignite called Surturbrand,
are found the remains of Pines, Poplars, Elms, Plane-
trees, Maples, Oaks, Tulip-trees, and Vines, in latitudes
where nothing larger than dwarf-birches now grows.
Only two of the Iceland species, as stated above, occur in
Britain, and even the genera are distinct from those of
Bovey, with the exception of Sequoia and an Oak. In
Spitzbergen a similar flora of Miocene age occurs, and
also in Greenland, far north of the Arctic Circle.

It may seem remarkable that, within the broad area
of the British Islands, no mammalian remains have been
found in the Miocene strata, for surely a land covered
with a wealth of trees, grasses, and other plants could

Miocene Mammalia. 265

not have been destitute of animal life of -many kinds,
both in the waters and on the lands. But on reflec-
tion it is not to be wondered at that such remains are
absent. In the first place there are no great river
deposits of Miocene age remaining in Britain, in which
such kinds of organic remains might lie buried, and the
only lacustrine strata preserved lie in a small area of
a few miles in length at Bovey Tracey. Neither is it
likely that bones of mammalia should be found in the
thin local soils, of a few inches in thickness, that were
formed during the intervals of eruptions on the sides
of lofty volcanoes. If, as I believe, a populous
mammalian fauna lived and died and left their bones
on the land of that old area, these bones decayed,
unburied in sediments, and helped to nourish the
luxuriant vegetation. But on the adjacent land, of
what is now the Continent of Europe, there is no lack
of mammalian and other bones to tell us what may
have been the kinds of animals that inhabited our
now insular area, for in the shallow near-shore deposits
of the Faluns of Touraine, we find the Dinotherium,
the elephantine Mastodon, Rhinoceros, Hippopotamus,
Dichobune, and Deer, and in the fresh-water Miocene
strata of the banks of the Rhine, between Bingen and
Basle, a similar assemblage occurs.

In Switzerland, between the Alps and the Jura,
besides fresh-water shells and spiders, and all the tribes
of insects of familiar genera, we find Salamanders,
Frogs and Toads, Lizards, Crocodiles, Serpents,
Tortoises, and Birds. Of the mammalia in the Swiss
strata, thirty-eight genera and fifty-nine species are
named by Heer, which approach more closely to the
Eocene fauna than to that of the present day. Of these,
twenty-nine are extinct, and of the remainder only

266 Miocene Mammalia and

Deer, Wild boar, and Squirrels still occur in Switzer-
land. Of the others, the Lagomys, a hare-like rodent,
inhabits the temperate zone in Asia and North America,
while five are denizens of warm and torrid zones, viz.
the Gibbons in India, the Opossums in South America,
the Rhinoceros and Musk-deer in India and Africa, and
the Tapirs in India and South America. We may,
therefore, believe that the climate was warm. Some of
the details of this very interesting fauna are as
follows : —

In the Miocene rocks of Switzerland there is found
an Opossum, Didelphys Blainvillei, Palceotherium
Schinzii, a Tapir T. Helveticus, and Listriodon
splendens, closely allied to the Tapirs. Also two
species of Mastodon, M. tapiroides and M. turicen-
8i89 nearly allied to Elephants, and Dinotherium
giganteum, somewhat allied to the Mastodon. Five
species of Ehinoceros are known besides Anchithe-
rium Aurelianense, a mammal of equine affinities,
and Hipparion gracile, which may be described as a
three-toed horse, having on each side of the middle hoof
two smaller toes which did not touch the ground. Six
generas and eleven species of swine-like animals are
known, two of which belong to the existing genus Sus,
while the others are of extinct genera, but some of them
closely allied to those still living. Of ruminant animals
we find the Chalicotherium antiquum, allied to the
Eocene Anoplotheria, and as large as the Indian Ehino-
ceros, together with two species of ruminants, smaller
than a rabbit, Microtherium Renggeri, and M . Cartieri.
Besides these there are found fossil, two species of
Musk-deer, Moschus Aurelianensis, and M. aquaticus,
and Dorcatherium Naui, somewhat allied, but differing
in having seven molar teeth in the lower jaw, while the

Physical Geography. 267

Musk-deer has only six. Of true Deer there are seven
species.

Of Rodentia, there are Squirrels, Hares, Chinchillas,
and Beavers, and the hare-like rodents Lagomys cenin-
gensis and L. Meyeri. Six species of Carnivora have
been found of the genera Hycenodon, Amphicyon,
Potamotherium, Trochictis, and Galecynus. The
second of these is related to the Dog, the third to the
Otter, the fourth to the Weasel and Badger, and the
last unites some of the characters of the Dog and the
Civet cat.

In the Swiss Miocene series the upper jaw of an
Ape was found in the lignite of Elgg, and named
Hylobates antiquus, by Lartet. It is most nearly
related to the Indian Gibbon. Besides this, two other
Apes are known in ground not far off, at Sausan and on
the Swabian Alp. They have been named Dryopithecus
Fontani, and Semnopithecus pentalicus, the former of
which equalled the Orang and the Chimpanzee in
stature, and appears to have come near the Gibbons,
while the latter belonged to the group of long-tailed
Indian monkeys.1

No one will suppose that the species described as
occurring in the Miocene rocks of Switzerland, repre-
sent more than a fragment of a much larger fauna
that inhabited that and other regions of the old
continent, of which our own area then formed part,
and it is impossible to believe that with a teem-
ing fauna in the- lands to the east and south, a
portion of it, now changed into the British Islands,

1 This epitome of the Miocene fauna is condensed from * The
Primaeval World of Switzerland,' by Professor Heer, of the University
of Zurich, edited by James Heywood, M.A., F.R.S., a most interest-
ing book and worthily translated.

268 Physical Geography.

should have been destitute of all mammalian life, for it
seems more than absurd to suppose, that none of these
animals should have found their way into our area,
while they swarmed in regions so near as Switzerland,
France, and the Ehine, where, however, at that time no
Rhine existed. On the contrary, I, for one, take it for
granted that some of them must have inhabited the
southern ground of our British area, where the old lake
of Bovey Tracey lay in a latitude not two degrees further
north than that old lake of the Valley of the Ehine,
which in those days, between the mountains of the
Black Forest and the Vosges, stretched all the way
from Basle to Mayence and the neighbourhood of Bin-
gen. The banks of that lake were inhabited by the same
mammalia that inhabits the adjoining area of the great
Miocene Swiss lakes, and we may readily believe that,
in the physiography of the south British area, there
was nothing inimical to the thriving of such species,
for its climate was then warm, and its great plains,
tablelands, valleys, and mountains, were doubtless
clothed with a rich vegetation. This, however, we may
assume, that, just as we pass northward, the vegetation
of the day assumed a more northern type, so in the
mountain land of that older Scotland, and on its west-
ern flanks, where lofty volcanoes were growing, the fauna
would get mingled with northern forms, all of which
seem to be lost to us even in a fossil state, the physical
conditions of the British area having been of a kind,
that no bi'oad and thick sediments were deposited in
which the bones of mammals could be preserved.

It is, however, possible, and indeed probable, that we
get a glimpse of part of this mammalian life preserved
in a curiously mingled fauna, the remains of which lie
buried at the base of various members of the Crag. I

Physical Geography. 269

have, therefore, gone into the subject of the Miocene
fauna of the Continent in a way that at first sight may
seem out of place in this book, but which in reality is
not so, for it throws a reflected light on the assemblage
of animals which there is good reason to believe partly
inhabited our area during the same epoch.

270

CHAPTER XVII.

PLIOCENE STRATA.

THE PLIOCENE STRATA, or Newer Tertiary beds, form the
succeeding division of the Tertiary series, and in Eng-
land are represented by the various subdivisions of the
CRAG of Suffolk and Norfolk. Resting, as these strata
generally do, on an eroded surface of the London Clay, or
more rarely, on the Chalk, their lower boundary is suf-
ficiently clear ; but the same is not the case with the
upper limit of the Crag series, about which diversities
of opinion exist, arising, no doubt, from the circumstance
that it is absolutely indefinable, there being a kind of
passage from the uppermost beds of Crag into over-
lying strata partly of drifts and glacial detritus. The
whole series of Crags and disputed Crags is, indeed,
probably not more than from 120 to 150 feet thick,
and they make no decided mark on the physical geo-
graphy of the country, though important in other points
of view. After much consideration I incline, for the
present, to restrict the term Crag to the following
subdivisions : —

Norwich Crag : fluvio-marine.
Bed Crag. "lSuffolk.

Coralline Crag.J

The Coralline or White Crag lies on the London
Clay in Suffolk, and consists of a few patches found in

Coralline Crag.

271

an area of about 20 miles in lengtjj, between the Kiver
Sfcour and Aldborough. It is generally not more than
60 feet in thickness. It consists in places almost
entirely of Polyzoa (formerly called Corallines, whence
the name, Coralline Crag), and elsewhere, in great part,
of broken and entire shells, fragments of Echini, &c.
Only four genera of Corals are known, all, according
to the lists of Mr. Etheridge, of extinct species, and the
same authority gives about 140 species of Polyzoa. The
genera of Mollusca are almost entirely recent. The
general character of the climate seems to have been
milder than at present.

According to the researches of Mr. Searles Wood,
modified by Mr. Gwyn Jeffreys and Prof. Prestwich, the

FIG. 52.

Fasciolaria aurantia. G lycimeris angusta. Terebratula grandis.

Group of Coralline Crag Fossils.

Coralline Crag contains 316 species of Mollusca, only 5
of which are Brachiopoda, Argiope cistellula, Lingula
Dumontieri, Orbicula lamellosa, Terebratula grandis,
and Terebratulina caput-serpentis. Of the Lamellibran-

272 Coralline and Red Crag Species.

chiata 151 species, of the Gasteropoda 160, and 1 Ptero-
pod, Cleodora infundibulum. Of the 316 species only
52 are said to be extinct, or about 1 6 per cent, or, in
other words, 84 per cent, are still living. Sixteen
species of Echinodermata are known, 6 of which still
live ; and fish are found identical with living species
of Cod, Pollack, and Whiting, together with large
teeth of a shark, Carcharodon megalodon, Otodus,
Raia antiqua, &c. It is quite possible that the Coral-
line Crag beds may be approximately of the same age
with the marine shell beds of the Faluns of Touraine,
in France, commonly called Miocene.

The Red Crag is chiefly a ferruginous sand, often
crowded with shells entire and broken, very irregularly
bedded, in a manner which shows that it was deposited
partly in shallow seas, with strong tidal currents near
shore, and, indeed, was partly accumulated between the
high and low water lines.

At Felixstow the Red Crag is well seen on the sea-
cliff, lying directly on the London Clay. It is crowded
with shells, many of them broken, and was evidently
deposited in shallow water. At Walton-on-the-Naze,
where it also lies on London Clay, the sea was deeper,
the shells being often unbroken, and in the state in
which they died.

A hundred -and-forty species are common to the
Red and Coralline Crag. In 234 species of shells, 150
now live in British seas, while ' 32 are now restricted to
more southern and 23 to more northern seas ' (Prest-
wich). In all about 92 per cent, of the Mollusca are
said to be still living. In 25 species of corals, 14 still
inhabit our coasts. Among its characteristic shells are
Trophon antiquum (Fusus contrarius), and various
species of Murex, Valuta, Buccinum, Natica, Purpura,

Red Crag Fossils.

273

&c. Lamellibranchiate shells are«etill more common,
such as Mactra, Tellina, Cyprina, Astarte, Pectuncu-
lus, Pecten, Cardium, &c. It is not unlikely that

FIG. 53.

Cassidaria bicatenata. Buccinum Dalei.
Trophon antiquum. Voluta Lamberti.

Cardium Parkinsoni. Pectunculus glycimeris. Carcharodon megalodon.

Group of Ked Crag Fossils.

some of the shells may have been derived from the
waste of the Coralline Crag.

At the base of the Coralline Crag, in a pit by
the Church near Felixstow, and in other places, there

T

274 Fish and Mammalia.

is frequently a stratum full of phosphatic remains,
and known as the Coprolite bed. In it are found
many sharks' teeth, vertebrae of fish, and many ear-
bones and occasional vertebrae and other bones of
whales. The sharks' teeth have often been derived
from the London Clay, and the whales' bones are al-
ways very much water-worn, and have altogether a
much more ancient appearance than that of the
ordinary fossils of the Crag.

Among them are the bones and teeth of land mam-
malia of extinct species, Castor veterior (beaver), Cer-
vus dicranoceros (deer), Equus plicidens (horse) and
Hipparion, Hyaena antiqua and Felis pardoides. Mas-
todon Arvernensis, M. tapiroides and Elephas Merid-
ionalis, Rhinoceros Schleiermacheri and Sus anti-
quus. Similar phosphatic remains, though fewer in
number, have been found with bones of whales at the
base of the Coralline Crag at Sutton. In both cases,
many of the bones, &c., are worn and mineralised, and
the question is, whether or not the greater part of
these terrestrial mammalia belonged to the Crag
epoch ?

So plentiful are these, that to separate them from
the Crag, for the manufacture of manure, forms a pro-
fitable branch of commerce.

There are many reasons for believing that during
the later part of the Eocene and all through the Miocene
epoch, the area now called Britain was joined to the
Continent. The physical geography of the country
was different, with, however, a general identity in so far
that, as already shown, the Palaeozoic mountainous re-
gions now were mountainous then, while between them
lay broad plains of secondary formations. In late
Miocene times mammalian races must have inhabited

Norwich Crag. 275

our region, and their bones been scattered on the surface.
A partial submergence of the country took place, so
that Britain became for a time an island, and the
marine Crag beds were deposited over part of our
eastern area, the relics of which still remain in Norfolk
and Suffolk. Some of the mammalia survived this
partial submergence, and continued to inhabit the island
during Pliocene times, and getting associated with
varieties and new species, the bones of some of the ex-
tinct species may have been mingled with others then
living, and all were washed into the basement beds of
the above-named Crag formations during various oscil-
lations of level.

The Mammaliferous or Nonvich Crag consists of
sand, gravel, and shells, generally only a few feet in
thickness, and which, in Norfolk, lie upon the Chalk.
From the nature of the fossils of the Norwich Crag, it
is believed to have accumulated near the mouth of a
river. It is never seen in contact with or overlying
either the Coralline or Eed Crag, and it is considered by
Mr. Prestwich to be of the same age with the Eed Crag,
having been accumulated in an area partly estuarine, and
separated from the purely marine area of the Red Crag
by an emerged district consisting of the Coralline Crag.

In the Norwich Crag 139 species of marine Mollusca
are known, of which 87, or 56 per cent, are common
to the Coralline Crag, 137, or 88 per cent, to the Red
Crag, and 93J per cent, are still living. ' Comparing
the three Crags the proportions of extinct species of
marine Mollusca are, Coralline Crag 1 6 per cent. Red
Crag, 7*7 per cent, and Norwich Crag 6*5 per cent.'
(Prestwich). The latter contains about 20 species of
land and fresh-water shells, such as Helix, Planorbis,
Paludina (P. lenta, &c.\ Pupa, Limncea, Cyclas, Cy~

T 2

2 j6 Chillesford Beds.

rena, &c., most of which are of living species. Besides
these, there are found in it the bones of Mastodon Ar-
vernensis, Elephas meridioncdis (?), E. antiquus,
and Hippopotamus major (?) together with the Horse,
Equus fossilis, Castor fiber (beaver), the common Otter 9
Deer, &c.

The Chillesford Clay and Sand are generally con-
sidered to form part of the Norwich Crag series of
strata. In the Chillesford district, which is inland, the
Clay may lie to some extent unconformably on the Eed
Crag at Chillesford, and on the Coralline Crag near
Slid bourne. In the Norwich district, it is a somewhat
inconstant bed, or set of wedge-shaped beds, which,
according to Mr. Horace Woodward, occur at different
horizons in the Norwich Crag series. It is a very
insignificant subformation, as regards thickness, and its
marine fossils found in the sands are almost all of
living species. The Bure valley beds, characterised
by the presence of Tellina Balthica, may possibly
form an upper part of the Norwich Crag series.
They lie on the well-known Forest bed of Cromer,
and together these may connect the uppermost Crag
beds with the succeeding Glacial epoch.

It is frequently impossible to identify these minor
subdivisions in areas even a small distance apart, for
their identity is assumed to rest on the occurrence of
certain assemblages of shells, and opinions on some
points are so conflicting, that while some geologists
consider the Forest bed to be older than all of the
Norwich Crag deposits, others maintain that it is
newer.

The last great Glacial epoch, Bone caves, Eiver
gravels, &c., will be treated of in succeeding chapters.
These, less or more, belong to the age of human history,

History of Geological Opinion. 277

and are thus intimately relatefl to the physical
geography of the time in which we live.

Thus ends my brief sketch of the geographical range
of the geological formations of Britain, in which, for
obvious reasons, I have largely directed the attention of
the reader to the subject of the Physical Geography of
the British area during the epochs in which they
were deposited.

It took a long time, by analyses of the order of de-
position of stratified rocks and their contents, for geo-
logists to establish the facts and reasonings now generally
accepted, and the chief advances have been made in the
last eighty years, beginning with the work of Hutton
and William Smith. Notices occur in the pages of
Herodotus, Aristotle, Strabo, and Pliny, which scarcely
amount to geological ideas, but which show that they
were cognisant of the occurrence of shells far inland,
and high on the mountains ; and they also reasoned on
the mutability of the relative levels and positions of sea
and land.

In the fifth century, Orosius, a Spanish divine, re-
cognised the true nature of fossil shells, but referred
them to the Deluge ; and this opinion for long prevailed
among such men as Lister (1683), Burnet (1690),
Woodward (1695), and many more besides. Others in
Italy (Olivi, 1584, Scilla, 1670, &c.), France, and
England (Dr. Plot, 1677), held the absurd opinion that
they were ' sports of nature,' the result of the fermen-
tation of a ' materia pinguis, or fatty matter ' ; or that
4 petrified shells were stones in disguise, formed by the
influence of the heavenly bodies.' A few remarkable
men held more correct views on the subject. In 1580,
6 a potter,' says Fontenelle, ' who knew neither Latin

278 Palissy, Mitchell, and Ficchsel.

nor Greek, was the first who dared assert in Paris,
and to the face of all the doctors, that fossil shells were
true shells, deposited formerly in the sea in the places
where they are found, . . . and he stoutly defied all
the school of Aristotle to attack his proofs. This man
was Bernard Palissy, Saintongeois, as great a physician
as unassisted nature can produce.' In 1669, Steno
published his remarkable treatise De Solido intra So-
lidum naturaliter Contento, in which he demonstrated
that plants, shells, and teeth found in rocks are truly
organic; and that they were buried in marine sedi-
ments, in the same manner that the remains of plants
and marine animals are now entombed in modern sea
bottoms. Hook, in his Discourse of Earthquakes
(1688), maintains like opinions; and he inferred the
extinction of species, and the introduction of varieties,
consequent on changes in physical geography. Still
further, he speaks of the ' records of antiquity which
nature has left as monuments and hieroglyphic charac-
ters of preceding transactions ; . . . and though it is
very difficult to read them, and to raise a chronology
out of them, . . . yet 'tis not impossible.' This is
the earliest distinct hint of the principle of succession
of life in time.

In 1760, Mitchell, in his Memoir on Earthquakes, in
the 'Philosophical Transactions,' shows a clear perception
of an order of superposition in strata, but he does not
combine it with the fact of a parallel succession of life.
About this time matters begin to become more definite,
and a physician of Eudelstadt, George Christian Fuchsel,
showed a remarkable knowledge both of the succession
of stratified formations and of the succession of life
in time, and his writings contain even more than the
germ of many of the truths that, during the present

Werner and Hutton. 279

century, have given so rapid an imfmlse to the science.
In his system he distinguishes, resting on primitive
schists, thirteen subformations, which in modern phrase,
range between the rothe todte l and the Muschelkalk,
each being characterised by a distinctive assemblage of
fossils, or peculiarities of marine and fluviatile deposi-
tion, the carbonaceous strata being attributed to exotic
plants of marshes and forests, the accumulation of
which, by means of river floods, has produced coal.2 As
these formations contain remains of land plants and
animals, the seas in which the strata were formed must
have surrounded an ancient continent, which at an
earlier date was also formed of strata after the manner
of those he described, and this again by a continent
older still, for he taught that the physical phenomena
of the earth are constant and unchangeable.

Eather later, Werner, by his enthusiasm, eloquence,
and skill as a mineralogist, also lent some aid to the
cause ; but his ignorant and bigoted adherence to the
dogma that all rocks are aqueous, did much to retard
the advance of truth. His far greater opponent,
Hufcton (1788), in his Theory of the Earth, expounded
the true doctrine, which may be summed up as fol-
lows :—

1st. That, in the known geological history of the
world, the course of events has never been disturbed by
universal paroxysmal catastrophes, but that the course
of change has been similar to that of the existing
economy of nature.

1 The passage is a little obscure : the words rothe todte would
seem to imply that the strata are of Permian age, while the state-
ment that the strata lie beneath the formation houillere, would
bespeak strata perhaps equivalent to our Old Red Sandstone.

2 * Journal de Geologic,' 1830, p. 192.

280 Hutton.

2nd. That we know of no set of igneous rocks that
can be proved to be of generally older origin than the
earliest stratified deposits, but that they may often be
proved to be of posterior origin.

3rd. That the stratified masses were formed from
the waste of pre-existing rocks, mingled with organic
exuvice.

4th. That such strata afford a measure of the amount
of pre-existing land destroyed to afford materials for
their formation.

5th. That there may be a progressive formation of
rocks in the bottom of the sea, contemporaneous with
great and repeated alterations of lower strata, that
approach the regions of internal heat (metamorphism).

6th. That all strata being derivative, and a ma-
chinery existing capable alike of erecting and destroy-
ing rocks, in the whole course of visible nature ' we find
no vestige of a beginning — no trace of an end.' 1

1 In these modern days very few persons read Hutton, and those
who trouble themselves about old geology are in general more familiar
with Playfair's delightful ' Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory '
than with Button's great original work, in which the philosophy of
igneous, stratigraphical, and metamorphic geology was described in
a manner that excited the admiring wonder of a few who in those
days were able to appreciate his generalisations. One of these was
the celebrated Dr. Black, Professor of Chemistry in the University
of Glasgow, who thus wrote to the Princess Daschkow. ' In this
system of Dr. Hutton there is a grandeur and sublimity by
which it far surpasses any that has been offered. The boundless
pre-existence of time and the operations of nature which he
brings into our view, the depth and extent to which his imagina-
tion has explored the action of fire in the internal parts of the
earth, strike us with astonishment. And when we consider the
view he gives us of a great river, such as that of the Amazons,
descending in a thousand streams from the country of the Andes, <
and forming those immense and level plains through which it flows
in a great part of its course, the mind is expanded in contemplating

William Smith. 281

To the Jess precise generalisations of Fuchsel,
William Smith added the complete proof of the suc-
cession of life in time, proving, as he did, in England,
a clear succession of strata, each more or less char-
acterised by its own suite of fossils ; and this gave, to a
great extent, a perfect clue to the reading of that
chronology on which Hook so vaguely speculated. To
effect his object, Smith traced the English formations
from end to end of the country with unwearied devo-
tion, and at length, in 1815, produced his great
geological map of England. He struggled long, almost
unrecognised in his labours, but when they were well
nigh at an end, men began by degrees to recognise that
a master was among them, and in 1831, the first
Wollaston medal was awarded to him by the council
of the Geological Society, while in his annual address,
Professor Sedgwick hailed William Smith as 'the
father of English geology.' He died in 1839, and
surely his name will last as that of a great original
observer, even though it may be surmised that the time
was ripe for that discovery, which, unknown to Smith,
had been partly forestalled by Fuchsel.

The doctrines of Hutton and Smith combined gave
the key to great part of the modern system of geology,
and later works have carried out and improved upon
their conclusions, in a series of masterly investigations

so great an idea, and the length of time which the change thus
imagined (I may say demonstrated) must have required.' I am in-
debted to Professor Young of Glasgow for this extract from a
manuscript volume of Dr. Black's letters preserved in the Hunterian
Museum. Dr. Black was born in France in 1728. In 1756 he was
appointed Professor of Chemistry in Glasgow, and in 1766 he was
transferred to fill the Chair of Chemistry in the University of Edin-
burgh. He died, at the age of 71, in 1799. He was therefore the con -
temporaryof Hutton, who died in 1796, and they were intimate friends.

282 Modern Geology.

that now entitles geology fairly to take its place among
the exact sciences. Few persons now study the old
prophets and fathers in geology, and therefore I have
thought it well to give the foregoing imperfect sketch
of the slow progress of the steps by which at length
men have become able to analyse the order of d eposition
of formations, and of their fossilised contents, as abridged
in the foregoing chapters.1

1 The words formation, epoch, series, period, are in this book
only used as convenient terms. When analysed they often imply
that certain links, chapters, or whole books are missing in geological
history, epochs in fact unrepresented in given areas by stratified
formations. If I were to write a complete history of the British
rocks, I would endeavour to explain the special meaning of each of
these unrepresented gaps in time. A thorough-going physical
geologist, working in concert with a thorough palaeontologist, might
even hope to form a fair notion of the nature of the missing life of
the unrepresented epochs.

CHAPTER XVIII.

THE PHYSICAL STRUCTURE OF SCOTLAND THE HIGHLANDS

THE GREAT VALLEYS OF THE FORTH AND CLYDE — THE

LAMMERMUIR, MOORFOOT, AND CARRICK HILLS.

I NOW come to that part of the subject in which it will
be my duty to explain the connection between the
geological phenomena of Britain and the nature of its
modern scenery. In this chapter I shall briefly describe
the most mountainous part of Britain, and tell why great
part of Scotland is so rugged. In another chapter I
shall have to show that there is a strong contrast be-
tween the physical features of Scotland, and those of
the middle and east of England, and to explain why
the conformation of these two districts, and those of the
east and west of England, are essentially so distinct.

In Scotland gneissic rocks and granites are exten-
sively developed. The north-west coast of Sutherland,
and the outer Hebrides, chiefly consist of the oldest known
formation, called Laurentian, as already stated in Chap-
ter V. Above them, in Sutherland, there are unaltered
red or purple Cambrian sandstones and conglomerates,
which lie unconformably on the Laurentian gneiss. In
fact, the Laurentian strata were disturbed, metamor-
phosed, and much wasted by denudation, before the de-
position of those Cambrian strata began, and fragments of
the denuded gneiss help to make up the conglomerates.
The Lower Silurian rocks come next in the series, and

284 Physical Structure and

form about nine-tenths of the Highlands of Scotland
north of the Grampians. They consist chiefly of gneiss
and mica-schist, with numerous bosses of granite, and
near their base are partly formed of thick masses of
quartz-rock, interbedded with two bands of crystalline
or semi-crystalline limestone, containing Lower Silurian
fossils, by which their age has been ascertained.

Next, on the north-east coast, we have the Old
Eed Sandstone, the Upper Silurian rocks, which form
such an important part of the English strata, being
absent.1

Farther south, above the Old Ked Sandstone, lie
the Carboniferous rocks, consisting of Calciferous sand-
stone, limestone, and Coal-measures, the limestone
forming in Scotland but a very small intercalated part
of the series. These strata lie in the great valley be-
tween the Old Eed Sandstone of the Ochil range on the
north, and the Old Eed and Silurian rocks of the Lam-
mermuir, Moorfoot, and Carrick hills, on the south.
Besides these formations, there are others in some of
the Western Islands, such as Skye and Mull, and in
the east and south of Scotland, and elsewhere. These
consist of various members of the Lias, Oolitic, and
Miocene strata in the Isles, and a little Permian in
the south, which, however, form such a small part of
Scotland, that only in the Isles and a small part of the
mainland at Ardnamurchan, and on the hills that over-
look the Sound of Mull, do the Miocene igneous rocks
seriously affect its physical geography. Therefore I
shall chiefly confine myself to the mainland of the
north Highlands, for I wish specially to treat of the

1 This order for the north of Scotland was first established by
Sir K. Murchison. See ' Siluria.'

Geography of Scotland, Sutherland, &c. 285

facts connected with the greater physical features of
Scotland, omitting minor details.

In the extreme north of Scotland, in Sutherland
and Caithness, the manner in which the strata gene-
rally lie is shown in the following diagram. (See Map,
line 4.)

FIG. 54.

I have already mentioned that, in some of the
Western Isles, from the Lewes to Bara, and in the north-
west of the mainland of Scotland, from Cape Wrath to
Gairloch, the country, to a great extent, consists of
certain low tracts formed of Laurentian gneiss (No. 1 ),
twisted and contorted in a remarkable manner. Upon
this old gneiss the Cambrian rocks (2) lie, rising often
into mountains, which face the west in bold escarp-
ments, and slope more gently towards the east. These
strata frequently lie at low angles very unconformably
upon the old Laurentian gneissic rocks ; the meaning
of this being, that the latter were disturbed, contorted,
and extremely denuded, before the deposition of what I
believe to be the fresh-water, the Cambrian strata that
lie upon them. The bottom beds of the latter consist
of conglomerates of rounded pebbles, partly derived
from the waste of the Laurentian gneiss, which, there-
fore, is so old, that it had been metamorphosed and
was land before the deposition of the Cambrian beds.
Upon these unaltered Cambrian rocks, and again quite
unconformably, the fossiliferous Lower Silurian strata
(3) lie, sometimes in the manner shown in the diagram ;
and conclusions, regarding upheaval and denudation,
may be drawn from this second unconformity, similar

286 Sutherland and Caithness.

to those that have been mentioned respecting the un-
conformity of the Cambrian on the Laurentian rocks.
In both a great interval of time is indicated un-
represented by stratified formations. The bottom
beds of the Lower Silurian strata consist of quartz-
rock and two beds of limestone (3), the latter so
altered that the fossils are sometimes with difficulty
distinguishable, even by those most skilled in the
determination of genera and species. Above the
upper limestone we have a vast series of beds of mica-
schist and gneissose rocks (4), mostly flaggy in the
north-western region, but, in the eastern parts of Suther-
land and Aberdeenshire, often so highly contorted and
metamorphosed that they are, in some respects, similar
to the more ancient Laurentian gneiss.

Now these metamorphosed Silurian rocks, here and
there associated with bosses of granite and syenite (g\
form by far the greater part of that rocky region known
as the Highlands of Scotland, which stretches over
brown heaths and barren mountain ranges, all the way
from Loch Eribol on the north shore, far south across
the Grampians, to the Firth of Clyde on the west, and
Stonehaven on the east.

In Sutherland, as a whole, the Silurian strata dip
eastward, and in Caithness we have the Old Eed Sand-
stone (5) lying quite unconformably upon the Silurian
gneiss, and dipping towards the sea. At its base the
Old Red Sandstone consists of conglomerate, not
formed merely of small pebbles, like those of an ordinary
shingle-beach, but frequently of huge masses, suggestive
of ice-borne boulder-beds, mingled with others of
smaller size. All of them have evidently been derived
from the partial destruction of those ancient Silurian

Grampian Mountains. 287

gneissic rocks (4) that underlie ^he Fig> 55
Old Red Sandstone.

Again, if we examine the map of
Scotland, we find a broad band of Old
Red Sandstone running from Stone-
haven on the east coast to Dumbarton ^
on the west, and there also masses of §

PH • ' / V*

conglomerate lie at the base, as in .* j j |^ ^
No. 2, fig. 56. Overlooking this broad g
band, the Grampian mountains No. 1 g
rise high into the air, still reminding 1
the beholder of the ancient line of
coast of a vast inland lake, against
which the waves of the Old Red Sand-
stone waters beat, and from its partial
waste, aided by glaciers and the work
of coast-ice, formed the boulder-beds
that now make part of the con-
glomerates. We are thus justified in
coming to the conclusion that the £
North Highlands generally formed W
land before the time of the Old Red 3
Sandstone, the Grampian mountains, o
even then separated from the Scandin- ^ b

avian chain, as a special range forming
a long line running from north-east to ^yj

south-west, the bases of its hills being §
washed by the waters which deposited •*
the Old Red Sandstone itself. |

What amount of denudation the fl xTO
gneissic mountains of the Highlands '&
underwent, before and during the g
deposition of the Old Red Sandstone, ^
it is impossible to determine, but it

288 Older Mountains.

must have been very great. I consider it certain, that
from these mountains glaciers descended through
ancient valleys, now lost, and indeed that other sub-
angular conglomerates of the Old Eed Sandstone in
various parts of Britain consist of stratified moraine
matter. All the ordinary influences of terrestrial
waste — rain, rivers, frosts, snow, ice, wind, and waves —
were at work sculpturing the surface of that old land,
and on the very same land they have been at work
from that day to this. What was the precise form
of the highlands that bordered this Old Eed Sand-
stone lake, it is now impossible to know, except that it
was mountainous; but this is certain, that after the
early disturbances of the strata, the general result of
all the wasting influences, acting down to the present
day, has been to produce the present scenery. Thus it
is certain that all the Cambrian and Laurentian rocks
of the north-west of Scotland, were once buried deep
beneath Lower Silurian gneiss thousands of feet thick ;
that on the west these Silurian strata have been, in
places, almost utterly worn away, and the Cambrian
rocks, as in Suilven, have thus been exposed and moulded
into an outlier by subsequent waste. Some of these
mountains in Sutherland now form the grandest and
most abrupt peaks of the north-west Highlands, stand-
ing, steep-sided and high like Suilven, isolated, on
a broad raised platform of Laurentian gneiss. And just
as a railway navigator leaves pillars of earth in a railway
cutting, to mark how much he has removed, so the
great excavator, Time, has left these mountain land-
marks to record the greatness of his operations.

It is at first hard to realise these facts, but observa-
tion and reflection combined lead to this inevitable
result.

290 Lammermuir Hills.

If we again examine the Map, we find that a large
tract of country, forming great part of the Lowlands,
stretches across Scotland from north-east to south-west,
including the Firths of Tay and Forth, and all the
southern and eastern shores of the Firth of Clyde.
This area is occupied by Old Ked Sandstone and rocks
of Carboniferous age (Nos. 2 and 3, fig. 55), mostly
stratified, but partly igneous. To the south lie the
heathy and pastoral uplands known as the Carrick,
Moorfoot, Pentland, and Lammermuir Hills, marked 1',
which, like the Highlands, are also chiefly formed of
Silurian rocks, but much less altered, and rarely
possessing a gneissic character. These plunge beneath
the Old Eed Sandstone, and rise in the Grampian
mountains on the north changed into quartz-rock, mica-
schist, and gneiss. The unaltered Carboniferous and Old
Eed Sandstone rocks thus lie, as a whole, in a hollow,
between the Grampian and the Lammermuir ranges, the
coal-bearing strata chiefly consisting of alternations of
shale, sandstone, limestone, and coal, mingled with
volcanic products of the period.

I have already explained, in Chapters VIII. and IX.
how these Old Red and Carboniferous rocks were formed,
showing that the latter consist of strata partly of fresh-
water and partly of marine origin, for not only are the
limestones formed of corals, encrinites, and shells, but
many of the shales also yield similar fossils, while some
strata are charged with fresh -water shells. Beds of
coal are numerous, and under each bed of coal there is
a peculiar stratum, which often, but not always, is of the
nature of fire-clay, and is sometimes called c underclay,'
this in England being a miner's term, on account of its
position beneath each bed of coal. As already explained,
the ' imderclays ' were the soils on which land plants

Hills of Igneous Rocks. 291

grew, and from this it is plain tffat the conditions
attending the deposition of the Carboniferous strata,
were in great part terrestrial.

In the Scottish Coal-measures there are in Edin-
burghshire over 3,000 feet of coal-bearing strata, so that
the lowest bed of coal may be nearly three thousand feet
below the highest bed, in the centre of the basin, where
the strata are thickest. Most of the beds rise, or * crop,'
as miners term it, to the surface somewhere or other,
this ' outcrop ' being the result of disturbance of the
strata and subsequent denudation, and it is by means
of this disturbance and denudation that we are enabled,
by an easy method, to estimate the thickness of the
whole mass of strata, and to prove that one bed lies
several thousands of feet below another.

In the Scottish area, during the formation of part
of the Old Red Sandstone and of the Coal-measures,
many volcanoes were at work ; and thus we have dykes
and bosses of felspathic trap and greenstone, and
interstratifications of old lava streams, and beds of
volcanic ashes mingled with common sedimentary strata.
These, being often harder than the sandstones and shales
with which they are interbedded, have 'more strongly
resisted denudation, and now stand out in hilly ranges,
like the Pentland, Ochil, and Campsie Hills, the
Renfrewshire and Ayrshire Hills on the Clyde, or in
craggy lines and bosses, like Salisbury Crags, the
Lomond s of Fife, and the Garlton Hills in Haddington-
shire, which give great diversity to the scenery, without
ever rising to the dignity of mountains.

Having thus briefly rehearsed the mode of formation
of the more important Scottish formations, we may al-
ready begin to perceive what is the cause of the moun-

u 2

292 A nalysis of the

tainous character of the Highlands, and of the softer
features of the Lowlands. It is briefly this : that, in
very ancient geological times, before the deposition of
the Upper Silurian series and Old Red Sandstone, the
Lower Silurian rocks, which form almost entirely the
northern half of Scotland, had already been raised high
into the air, metamorphosed, and greatly disturbed.
Such metamorphic rocks, though, as a whole, difficult of
destruction, yet consist of intermingled masses of
different degrees of hardness, whence the great variety
of their outlines is the result of the softer rocks having
been most easily worn away. In the south of Scotland,
from Galloway to the coast of Berwickshire, the same
strata, forming the upland of the Carrick, Moorfoot,
and Lammermuir hills, have been equally disturbed,
though perhaps not originally raised to the same height,
but being comparatively unmetamorphosed, they are
generally somewhat less hard, and have therefore been
more wasted by denudation, whence their average lower
elevation. Though the mountains of these southern
Highlands cannot compare in height with those of the
north, they are sometimes both striking and picturesque
in outline, especially where associated as gneiss and other
metamorphic rocks with great bosses of granite and
quartz-porphyries, in Wigtonshire, Kirkcudbrightshire,
and Selkirkshire, in the south of Scotland. These
gneissose lines run in the general strike of the strata,
all the way from Lauderdale, to the cliffs of the Rhinns
of Gralloway that bound St. Patrick's Channel.

Nothing can be more impressive, in its way, than
the noble amphitheatre of hills that surround the sombre
moorland basins of Loch Doon, Loch Finlas, and the
smaller lakes and tarns that lie further south and west
of the Rhinns of Ketts, the highest granitic peak of

Scenery of Scotland. 293

which has an elevation of 2,668 feet above the sea.
Magnitude is not always essential to grandeur, and as
in human, so in nature's architecture, proportion of parts
often strikes the mind with a sense of majesty which is
wanting in larger bulks.

If we take the area of these southern Highlands, it
amounts to about 6,000 square miles, in which the
greater hills vary from 1,300 to 2,695 feet in height,
in the east the highest being Seenes Law 1,683 feet,
further west Black Hope Scaur, 2,136 feet, still further
west Whitecombe Edge in Berwickshire 2,695 feet, and
further west still, the Ehinns of Ketts 2,668 feet. In
the whole district, more than half the area is under
1,000 feet in height, by far the larger part of the
remainder between 1,000 and 2,000 feet; and all
the remainder, above 2,000 and under 2,668 feet,
occupies a small area of about 75 square miles.

If we turn to the true Scottish Highlands, there we
find more than a dozen of mountains the heights of
which exceed 3,000 feet, including Ben Klibreck 3,157
feet, Ben Hope 3,061 feet, and Ben More 3,281 feet in
height, all in Sutherland. In Koss there are Ben
Dearig 3,551 feet, Ben Wyvis 3,720 feet, and Sleugach,
said to be 4,000 feet in height. In Inverness-shire, Ben
Attowe, also 4,000 feet high ; while south and south-east
of the string of lakes in the Great Glen, of which Loch
Ness is one, there are Ben Voirlich 3,180 feet, Ben
Lomond 3,192 feet, Glas Mhiul 3,501 feet, Ben Dearg
3,918 feet, Ben Lawers 3,984 feet, Cairn Gorm 4,090
feet, Ben Mac Dhui 4,296 feet, and Ben Nevis 4,406 feet
in height. If next we take the whole area of the Lower
Silurian rocks of the Highlands, between the Great
Glen and the south-eastern slope of the Grampian
Mountains, it appears that not one-third of the country

294 Analysis of the

is more than 500 feet above the sea, of the remainder
less than a quarter ranges between 500 and 1,000 feet
in height, while of the rest a large part ranges between
1,000 and 2,000 feet; and after that, about as much
remains between 2,000 and 4,406 feet in height, as
would cover half the area of the Lower Silurian hills,
of what I have called the south Highlands, between
Berwickshire and Wigtonshire.

Beyond Glen More and the Caledonian Canal, as far
as the north coast of Scotland, the Highlands have the
same general character, though the amount of ground
above 2,000 feet in height is comparatively less in the
total area, and this amount gradually decreases in pro-
portion the further north we go. Section No. 54, page 285,
gives an idea of the general contours in north Sutherland.
There, on the flanks of the mountains in Caithness, the
Old Eed Sandstone, lying in comparatively flat strata,
forms an undulating plain consisting of conglomerates
on the west, and chiefly of sandstones from thence to
Sinclair Bay, where it slips under the sea, while further
south, between Noss Head and Bervie Ness, high cliffs
overlook the sea.

South of Strath Ullie or Helmsdale, the same Old
Eed Conglomerates and Sandstones skirt the Silurian
rocks, crossing the Firths of Dornoch, Cromarty, and
Inverness, and Beauly Basin, and stretching south to
the noble mountain of Meal four vounie, 3,060 feet in
height, from whence, crossing Loch Ness, it skirts the
country in a broad band beyond the mouth of the Spey.
In all this area a large part of the strata consists of
conglomerate, and where this rock occurs, because of its
occasional hardness, and the very considerable disturb-
ance of the rocks, some of the country ranges between
800 and nearly 1,500 feet in height. In no part of

Scenery of Scotland. 295

Scotland that I know, are the conglomerates (made of
the waste of the older Silurian mountains) more strik-
ing than in this region, and the glacial origin of some
of them to my mind is unmistakable, especially on the
shores of the Beauly Firth near Drynie. All the em-
bedded stones have been derived from the old Silurian
mountains, some of them are from four to five feet in
diameter, and many of them are subangular in shape,
just like the boulders in much of the glacial detritus
of what is ordinarily called the Glacial epoch.

In time, the Old Eed Sandstone period came to an
end, and above that series — for it consists of two
members, the upper member of which lies unconform-
ably on the lower — the Carboniferous rocks were formed.
The whole were then again disturbed together — a dis-
turbance not confined to Scotland only, but embracing
large European and other areas.

But before the deposition of the Old Red and Car-
boniferous series, there is reason to believe that a wide
and deep valley already existed between the Grampian
mountains and the Carrick, Lammermuir, and Moorfoot
range ; and in this hollow the Old Red Sandstone was
deposited, partly derived from the waste of the Silurian
hills on the north and south. But by-and-by, as depo-
sition progressed, the land began to sink on the south,
and the upper strata of Old Red Sandstone overlapped
the lower beds, and began, as it were, to creep south-
wards across the Lammermuir Hills, which, sinking still
further, were in turn invaded by the lower Coal-mea-
sures and Carboniferous Limestone series. It appears,
therefore, from a consideration of all the circumstances
connected with the physical relations of the strata, that
the Coal-measures once spread right across the Lam-
mermuir range, and were united to the Carboniferous

296 Analysis of the

strata that now occupy the north of England, thus, with
part of the Old Eed Sandstone, covering great part of
the Silurian strata of the south of Scotland. This un-
conformable covering has, however, in the course of re-
peated denudations, been removed from the greater
part of that high area, and now the Carboniferous strata
are only found in force in the great central valley
through which flow the rivers Forth and Clyde.

This will be easily understood by referring to the
section, fig. 55, across the central valley of Scotland,
from the Grampian mountains to the Lammermuir
hills, in which the following relations of the various
formations are shown.

The gneissic rocks of the Grampian mountains (No.
1), with bands of Limestone marked + , pass under the
Old Red Sandstone (No. 2), and rise again, highly dis-
turbed, but not much metamorphosed, in the Lammer-
muir hills (I'). On these the lower conglomerates of
the Old Red Sandstone (No. 2) lie unconformably,
adjoining and overlying which, there is a series of beds
of red sandstones which generally dip SE. for a space
about ten miles in breadth, as seen, for example, on
either side of Strath Earn and the Tay above Perth.
These are succeeded by an upper series of Old Red
Sandstone rocks, which run from the neighbourhood of
Stirling to the estuary of the Esk, near Montrose, on the
east coast, and to Cupar and the mouth of the Firth of
Tay, at Ferryport. The lower part of this upper series
is often inter stratified with volcanic lavas, ashy breccias,
and conglomerates of a felspathic nature. These being
hard and dipping south-easterly from the Forth to the
mouth of the Tay, generally form a high escarpment,
the steep-scarped front of which faces to the north-west,
in accordance with a law that, on a great scale, rules the

Scenery of Scotland. 297

0

mode of formation of such slopes, the more gentle in-
clines being in the direction oi the dip, and the steep
scarp sloping at right angles to the average inclination
of the strata. (See fig. 55, p. 287).

Let anyone who wishes to see this effect, walk to the
summit of the Ochil Hills, and there, from the edge of
the scarp, he will see in the main a gentle slope to the
south-east, while below, on the north-west, the delighted
eye ranges across the fertile plains and undulations of
the Teith, Strath Allan, and Strath Earn, while, far
beyond, this almost unrivalled view is bounded by the
lofty chain of the Grampian Mountains. Let the reader
also understand that the whole of the Lower Old Red
Sandstone as far as the Grampians was once buried deep
under this upper series, and he will then begin to realise
the prodigious amount of denudation that the region
has suffered before it assumed its present aspect.

Above and merging into the Old Red Sandstone come
the Carboniferous rocks No. 3, fig. 55, lying in a wide
faulted and denuded synclinal curve,1 but with many a
high boss of basalt standing out in bold relief in the
midst. Such are the Lomonds of Fife, Bunker Law,
and Bishop Hill, north of the Forth, while south of that,
estuary Arthur's Seat forms a well-known example, and
the pastoral tract of the Pentland Hills, formed of
Upper Old Red Sandstone, mingled with contem-
poraneous igneous rocks, stand in high relief above the
fertile plains of Midlothian and Dalkeith.

I have already stated that the southern continuation
of the Upper Old Red and Carboniferous strata once
spread over the Lammermuir Hills in a kind of anti-
clinal curve, in the manner shown by the dotted lines
No. 3', on the diagram fig. 56.

1 The diagram is, however, too small to show these breaks.

298 . Old Red Sandstone and

Now why is it that the Carboniferous and Old Eed
Sandstone rocks have been specially preserved in the
great valley, and almost entirely removed from the
upland region of the Lammermuir hills ? The reason
is this : —

When strata have been thrown into a series of anti-
clinal and synclinal curves, it has frequently happened
that those parts of the disturbed strata that were thrown
downwards, so as to form deep basin-shaped hollows,
were by this means saved, for long periods of time, from
the effects of denudation, while the upper parts of the
neighbouring anticlinal curvatures, being exposed to all
the wasting influences of the air, rain, rivers, and the
sea, were denuded away.

In other words, some widely extended portions of
the strata lay so deep that no wasting influence had
access to them, and they have escaped denudation, and
the basin — as geologists term it — remains. This is the
reason why so many coal-fields lie in basins. It is
not, as used to be supposed, that the Carboniferous beds
were deposited in basins, but that by disturbance part
of the strata were thrown into that form, and saved from
the effects of denudation. Such basins are, therefore,
equally common to all kinds of formations ; though,
because they rarely contain substances of economic
value, they have not met with the same attention that
Coal-basins have received.

In the case now under review it happens that the
Old Eed Sandstone and Carboniferous rocks lie in the
hollow, and, though much worn away and fragmentary,
they have been to a great extent preserved ; while the
continuation of part of the same formations that lay
high in an anticlinal form, and originally spread over
the Lammermuir hills (3'), has been almost all removed

Carboniferous Strata. 299

by denudation. The reason of this is, that during fre-
quent oscillations of land, relatively to the level of the
sea, the higher ground was much more often above
water than the lower part, and therefore exposed to
waste and destruction. To understand this thoroughly,
let us suppose that the whole of the formations now
forming this area were, in an ancient epoch, underneath
the sea, and then let parts of it be raised, more or less
above that level, well into the air. Part of the area
now known as the Lammermuir Hills, then covered by
Old Red Sandstone and Coal-measures, rose above the
water, and was immediately subjected to the wear and
tear of breakers on the shore, and of rain, rivers, frost,
and other atmospheric influences ; while, on the other
hand, that portion that lay deep in the synclinal curve
was beneath the level of the sea, and thus escaped
denudation, because no wasting action takes place in
such situations.

By geological accidents such as these, the greater
features of Scottish scenery have been produced. The
Highlands are mountainous because they are composed
of rocks much disturbed, metamorphosed, and mostly
crystalline, and intermingled with great and small
bosses of hard granite. All of these rocks having been
often and long above water, have been extremely de-
nuded : such denudations having commenced so long
ago, that they date from before the time of that ex-
tremely venerable formation, the Old Ked Sandstone,
probably indeed ever since what, for want of better words,
we term the close of the Lower Silurian epoch, and the
waste has been going on, more or less, down to the
present day.

Being formed for the most part of materials of
great but unequal hardness, and associated with masses

3OO Highland Mountains and Denudation.

of granite, the high land has been cut up into innu-
merable valleys by the repeated action of rain, rivers,
and glaciers, whence their mountainous character ; for
the special outlines of mountains, as we now see them,
are rugged, less by disturbances of strata, than by the
scooping away of material from greatly elevated tracts
of country. By mere elevation and disturbance of
strata, the land might rise high enough ; but as moun-
tain regions now exist, it is by a combination of dis-
turbance of strata with extreme denudation, going on
both while and after slow disturbance and elevation
was taking place, that peaks, rough ridges, ice-worn
surfaces, and all the cliffs and valleys of the Highlands
in their present form, have been called into existence.
They are undergoing further modification now.

Let anyone go to the western part of Sutherland
and climb Suilven, and he will get a clear idea of what
is meant by a considerable amount of denudation. The
mountain is based on a wide, low, undulating plateau of
Lauren tian gneiss, dotted with unnumbered lakes and
tarns. From this plateau it rises abruptly into the air,
like a little Matterhorn, 2,396 feet in height, and its
sides are as steep as those of the noble Swiss mountain.
They are formed of horizontal Cambrian purple con-
glomerate and grits, cut by nature into great terraced
steps, on which by devious courses the climber reaches
the summit. From thence let him turn to the east, and
there, five miles distant, set on the same plain, he will
descry the steep-sided Canisp, formed of the same
Cambrian strata once united to those of Suilven, and
Coulmore. Here is ' a monstrous cantle ' cut out of these
strata, and yet if the reader, for the whole, would
multiply that by a hundred, he would probably not

Lammermuir Hills. 301

exaggerate the amount of denudation that these ancient
rocks have suffered in the Highlands.1 Fig. 56, p. 289.

Farther south the different nature, both of the Silu-
rian and newer rocks, coupled with other geological ac-
cidents, have produced the great valleys of the Forth
and Clyde, and the tamer but still hilly scenery of the
Southern Highlands, as they are sometimes called
These consist mainly of the Lammermuir, Moorfoot,
and Carrick Hills, now often massed under the name of
the Lammermuir range. But they are not a range.
They consist in reality chiefly of a tableland, or old
pldin of denudation, older for the most part than the
Old Red Sandstone and Carboniferous rocks ; which
plain, after being long buried, was subsequently again
exposed by denudation of the overlying strata.

The present scenery of hill and valley in the
southern part of Scotland is therefore, in great part, the
result of the waste of this old tableland, and the scoop-
ing out of valleys and lake-basins, by rain, rivers, and
old ice, which, as a great ice-sheet, at one time covered
the whole of Scotland and much more besides. The
effects of this were, in later times, modified by minor
glaciers, during those oscillations of temperature that
marked what we now call the Glacial epoch, and all the
ordinary water produced by rain and rivers is modifying
the scenery now.

1 For cases in point see my memoirs on « The Geology of North
Wales,' and ' On the Denudation of South Wales and the Adjacent
Counties,' < Memoirs of the Geological Survey,' vol. i., 1846.

102

CHAPTER XIX.

RECAPITULATION OF THE GENERAL ARRANGEMENT OF THE
STRATIFIED FORMATIONS OF ENGLAND.

THE geology of England and Wales is much more
comprehensive than that of Scotland, in so far that it
contains many more formations, and its features there-
fore are more various. England is the very Paradise
of geologists, for it may be said to be in itself an
epitome of the geology of almost the whole of Europe,
and much of Asia and America. Very few European
geological formations are altogether absent in Eng-
land. On the Continent, however, some have a larger
importance than in England, being more truly oceanic
deposits in some cases, and more thoroughly developed
lacustrine or terrestrial deposits in others. In some
countries larger than England the whole surface is
occupied by one or two formations, but in England
nearly all the formations shown in the column (p. 30)
are more or less developed. Those of Silurian age
lie chiefly in England, in Cumberland and Westmore-
land, and in the west, in Wales (fig. 57, p. 304).
Above them lie the Old Red Sandstone and Devonian
rocks, occupying large areas in Herefordshire, Wor-
cestershire, South Wales, and in Devonshire and Corn-
wall. Above the Old Red Sandstone come the
Carboniferous strata, which form large tracts of
Devonshire, Somerset, and part of Gloucestershire,

English Formation^. 303

and in South Wales skirt the Bristol Channel, and
stretch into the interior in Pembrokeshire, Glamor-
ganshire, and Monmouthshire ; while in the north
they border North Wales, and form a broad backbone
of country that reaches from the borders of Scotland
down to North Staffordshire and Derbyshire. Other
patches, here and there, rise from below the Secondary
strata into the heart of England. (See Map.)

The general physical structure of England, from
the coast of Wales to the Thames, will be easily under-
stood by a reference to fig. 57, p. 304, and to the fol-
lowing descriptions; and this structure is eminently
typical, explaining, as it does, the physical geology of
the greater part of England south of the Staffordshire
and Derbyshire hills.

The Lower Silurian rocks of Wales (No. 1) consist
chiefly of slaty and solid gritty strata, accompanied
by, and interbedded with, numerous felspathic lavas
and beds of volcanic ashes, marked -f ; and mingled
with these there are numerous bosses and dykes of fel-
stone, quartz-porphyry, greenstone (diorite), and the
like. These last, by their superior hardness, give a
mountainous character to the whole of North Wales,
from Merionethshire to the Menai Straits. In part of
north Pembrokeshire also, in a less degree, igneous
rocks are largely intermingled with the Lower Silurian
strata, and these, by help of denudation, now form a
very hilly country.

Without again entering into details, it is here
sufficient to state that the Cambrian and Lower Silurian
epoch was ended in the British area by disturbance and
contortion of the strata, and their upheaval into land.
This disturbance necessarily gave rise to long-continued
denudations of this early English land, both by ordinary

304

English Formations.

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English Formation*. 305

atmospheric agencies, and also by the action of the
waves of the sea of a younger Silurian period, the
evidence of which is seen in the conglomerates of the
Upper Llandovery beds, which, mingled with marine
shells, lie unconformably on the denuded edges of the
Cambrian and Lower Silurian strata of the Longmynd
in Shropshire, like a consolidated sea beach. Slow
submergence then took place beneath the Upper Silurian
sea, in which the Upper Silurian rocks were gradually
accumulated unconformably till, perhaps, they entirely
buried the Lower Silurian strata (2, fig. 57), for in
places they attained a thickness of from three to six
thousand feet.

As shown in Chapter VIII. the uppermost Upper
Silurian beds of Wales pass insensibly into a newer
series, known as the Old Eed Sandstone (3, fig. 57),
formed, if we include the entire formation, of beds of
red marl, sandstone, and conglomerate, which in all the
British areas by the absence of marine shells, and the
occasional presence of crocodilians, land reptiles, and of
fish (whose nearest allies live in the rivers and lakes of
America and Africa, or in the brackish pools of Australia),
seem to have been deposited in lakes. In Wales these
strata again pass upwards into the Carboniferous Lime-
stone, which is overlaid in Wales, Derbyshire, and
Lancashire, by the Millstone Grrit and the Coal-

measures.

In Yorkshire, Durham, Northumberland, and Scot-
land, the Carboniferous Limestone has no pretension to
be ranked as a special formation, for it is broken up
into a number of bands interstratified with masses of

1 This is not shown in fig. 57, but the Carboniferous Limestone No.
4 is shown in fig. 67, p. 330, lying, as it does in North Wales, uncon-
formably on Silurian rocks.

306 English Formations.

shales and sandstones bearing coals. In fact, viewed as
a whole, the Carboniferous series consists only of one
great formation, possessing different lithological charac-
ters in different areas, these having been ruled by cir-
cumstances dependent on whether the strata were
formed in deep, clear, open seas, or near land ; or actually,
as in the case of the vegetable matter that forms the
coals, on the land itself.

The English Carboniferous rocks differ from the
Scottish beds in this, that in general they have not
been mixed with igneous matter, except in North-
umberland and Derbyshire, where, in the last-named
county, the Carboniferous Limestone is interbedded with
ashes and lava, locally in Derbyshire called 'toad-
stones.' In South Staffordshire, Colebrook Dale, the
Clee Hills, and Warwickshire, there is a little basalt and
greenstone, which may possibly be of Permian age,
intruded into, and perhaps also partly overflowing, the
Carboniferous rocks in Permian times ; but in Glamor-
ganshire, Monmouthshire, North Staffordshire, Lan-
cashire, and Yorkshire, where the Coal-measures are
thickest, no igneous rock of any kind occurs. There
and elsewhere in England the Coal-measures as usual
consist of alternations of sandstone, shale, coal, and
ironstone.

Next in the series come the Permian rocks (2, 3, 4,
fig. 30, p. 141), which, however, rarely occupy so great
a space in England, as materially to affect the larger
features of the scenery of the country. They form a
narrow and marked strip on the east of the Coal-
measures from Northumberland to Nottinghamshire,
where they chiefly consist of a long, low, flat-topped
terrace of Magnesian limestone (see Map), interstratified

English Formations. 307

with two or three thin beds of red marl sometimes con-
taining gypsum. The scarped edge of this limestone,
which is sparsely fossiliferous, faces west, and overlooks
the lower undulations of the Coal-measure area.

There are other patches of Permian sandstones,
marls, breccias, and conglomerates, in the South of
Scotland, the Vale of Eden, and the West of Cumber-
land, and they are also here and there present on the
borders of the Lancashire, North "Wales, Shropshire, and
all the Midland coal-fields, and on the Silurian rocks of
the Abberley and Malvern Hills. Throughout all the
districts enumerated above, these Permian strata chiefly
consist of red sandstones, conglomerates, and marls, and
part of them, in the districts of the Malvern and Abber-
ley Hills, near Enville, and at Bromsgrove, consist of
consolidated true Permian glacial boulder-clays.

The Permian beds form the uppermost members of
the so-called Palaeozoic or old-life period — a term
somewhat unphilosophical, in so far that it partly
conveys a false impression of a life essentially distinct
from that of later times. But it is at present convenient,
for all geologists know when the word palaeozoic is
used what formations are meant, embracing all the
strata from those of Permian date down to the
lower Laurentian. During the time they were forming,
this and other parts of the world suffered many oscilla-
tions of level, accompanied by denudations, as shown in
previous chapters.

Before the end of this Palaeozoic epoch, the Per-
mian beds were deposited in great inland salt lakes,
analogous to the Caspian Sea and other salt lakes in
Central Asia, at the present day. That area gives the
best modern idea of the state of much of the world
during Permian times.

x2

308 English Formations.

In the same continental area, and partly on the
Permian rocks, partly on older subjacent strata, the
New Ked Sandstone and Marl of our region were then
deposited in lakes perhaps occasionally fresh, but as
regards the marl certainly salt. These formations fill
the Vale of Clwyd in North Wales, and in the centre of
England range from the mouth of the Mersey round
the borders of Wales to the estuary of the Severn, east-
wards into Warwickshire, and thence northwards into
Yorkshire, along the eastern border of the Magnesian
limestone (see Map). They are absent in Scotland.
In the centre of England the unequal hardness of its
subdivisions sometimes gives rise to minor escarpments
(Nos. 4 and 6, fig. 32, p. 154), most of them looking
west over plains and undulating ground formed of soft
red sandstone. Such escarpments are especially re-
markable in the case of the Keuper sandstone, which
lies at the base of the New Eed Marl. These strata
frequently form a good building stone, often white,
and because of their hardness having better resisted
denudation than the red sandstones below, they stand
out as bold cliffy scarps facing west, with long gentle
slopes to the east. Such are Hilsby Hill, that looks
out upon the Mersey, near Frodsham ; the beautiful
terraced scarps of Delamere Forest, the grand castle-
crowned cliff of Beeston by the Nortli Western Railway,
near Tarporley, and the beautiful heights, often well
wooded, that stretch from thence to the south, and form
the Peckforton Hills. There, among spots that haunt
the memory, in the ancient park of Garden, scarped
by nature and cut into terraced walks and caverns,
among the red and white cliffs grow great rhododen-
drons, which sow themselves in every mossy cleft of the
rocks ; luxuriant brackens, male ferns, lady ferns,

English Formation?. 309

Lastrseas, and others of smaller growth, while all forest
trees attain a goodly growth, and low down in the
flat, deer are grazing up to the gates of the old broad-
fronted timbered Hall. It is indeed a splendid
sight to stand on the edges of these scarped hills and
look across the great rolling plains of New Ked Sand-
stone below, bounded by Moel Famau and all the
mountains of North Wales that surround the beautiful
Vale of Clwyd ; or twenty miles further south, from the
abrupt cliff of Grinshill, to see the tall spires of Shrews-
bury backed by the renowned Caer Caradoc, the Wrekin,
the high line of the flat-topped Longmynd, and the
craggy Stiper Stones.

The New Ked Marl passes insensibly into the Rhsetic
beds, which again pass insensibly into the Lower Lias.
In England there is therefore a gradation between the
New Ked Marl and the Lower Lias.

The Lias series, Nos. 3, 4, 5, fig. 5, consists of
three belts of strata, running from Lyme Kegis on the
south-west, through the whole of England, to York-
shire on the north-east : viz. the Lower Lias clay and
Limestone, the Middle Lias or Marlstone strata, and
the Upper Lias clay. The unequal hardness of the
clays and limestones of the Liassic strata causes some
of its members to stand out in distinct minor escarp-
ments, often facing west and north-west. The Marl-
stone No. 4, forms the most prominent of these, and
overlooks the broad meadow-land of Lower Lias clay
that form much of the centre of England.

Conformable to and resting upon the Lias are the

various members of the Oolitic series (6 to 11, fig. 5).1

That portion termed the Inferior Oolite occupies the

base, being succeeded by the Great or Bath Oolite,

1 See also the < Column of Formations,' p. 30.

3io English Formations.

Cornbrash, Oxford Clay, Coral Kag, Kimeridge Clay,
and Portland beds. These, and the underlying for-
mations, down to the base of the New Ked Sandstone,
constitute what geologists term the Older Mesozoic or
Secondary formations, and all of them, from their
approximate conform ability one to the other, occupy a
set of belts of variable breadth, extending from Devon
and Dorsetshire northwards, through Somersetshire,
Gloucestershire, and Leicestershire, to the north of
Yorkshire, where they disappear beneath the Grerman
Ocean.

FIG. 58.

1. Portland Oolite. 3. Wealden Sands and Clays.

2. Purbeck Limestones and Marls. 4. Cretaceous strata.

When the Portland beds had been deposited (see
figs. 39 and 58), the entire Oolitic series, in what is now
the south and centre of England, and much more
besides in other regions, was raised above the sea-level
and became land. Because of this elevation, there is
evidence in the Isles of Purbeck, Portland, and the Isle
of Wight, and in the district known as the Weald, of a
state of affairs which must have been common in all
times of the world's history. We have there a series
of beds, consisting of clays, loose sands, sandstones, and
shelly limestone, indicating, by their fossils, that they
were accumulated as a delta and in lagoons in an estu-
ary, where fresh water and occasionally brackish water
and marine conditions prevailed at the mouth of a
great continental river. The position of these beds,
with respect to the Cretaceous strata, will be seen in

English Formations. 311

fig. 72, p. 339, marked w, h, proving that they are
intermediate in date to the Oolites and Cretaceous rocks,
for in the Isle of Purbeck, near Swanage, they are seen
lying between the two (fig. 75, p. 348).

This episode at last came to an end, by the complete
submergence of the Wealden area, and of the greater
part of England besides ; and upon these fresh-water
strata, and the Oolitic and other formations that partly
formed their margins, a set of marine sands and clays
were deposited in the south of England, consisting of
the Atherfield Clay and the Lower Grreensand s, d (fig.
72, p. 3M9) is now often classed with the Upper Neoco-
mian beds of the Continent, but in England they have
till lately generally been known as the Lower Cretaceous
strata. The distinction is not important to my present
purpose. Then comes the clay of the Grault, above
which lies the Upper Grreensand. Kesting upon the
Upper Grreensand comes the Chalk (No. 11, fig. 57, and
c. fig. 72), the upper portion of which contains numerous
bands of interstratified flints, which originally were
partly marine sponges, since silicified. The Chalk,
where thickest, is from one thousand to twelve hundred
feet in thickness. The Liassic and Oolitic formations
were sediments spread in warm seas surrounding an
archipelago of which Dartmoor, Wales, Cumberland,
and the Highlands of Scotland formed some of the
islands. But the Chalk was a deep sea deposit, formed
to a great extent of microscopic foraminiferse, and while
it was forming in the wide ocean, it seems probable that
the old islands of the Oolitic seas subsided so completely,
that it is doubtful whether or not even Wales and the
other older mountains of Britain were almost entirely
submerged.

During the period that the Oolitic formations formed

3 1 2 English Formations.

part of the land through which the river flowed that
deposited the Wealden and Purbeck beds, they were
undergoing constant waste, so that in the course of time,
having been previously tilted upwards to the west with
an eastern dip (fig. 59), they were worn into what I
have elsewhere termed a plain of marine denudation
(see p. 497). The submergence of the Wealden area
was followed by the progressive sinking of the Oolitic
and older strata further west, so that, as the successive
members of the Cretaceous formations were deposited,
it happened that by slow sinking of the land, the Upper
Cretaceous strata gradually overlapped the edges of the
outcropping Oolitic and Liassic formations, till at length
they were intruded on the New Eed series, and even on
the Palaeozoic strata of Devonshire itself, as shown in
fig. 59.

The upheaval of the Chalk into land brought this
epoch to an end, and those conditions that contributed
to its formation ceased in our area. As the uppermost
member of the Upper Secondary rocks, it closes the
record of Mesozoic times in England.

This brings us to the last divisions of the British
strata which I shall now name. These were deposited
on the Chalk, and are termed Eocene formations (No.
12, fig. 57, p. 304). At the base they consist of marine
and estuary deposits, known as the Thanet Sand, and
Woolwich and Reading beds, and which are of compara-
tively small thickness, say from 50 to 150 feet. These
lie below the London Clay and form the outer border of
the London basin. The Woolwich and Reading beds
are found in the Isle of Wight, and in part constitute
the Hampshire and London basins. In these we
have in places the same kind of alternations of fresh-

English Formation^.

a .

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3 be ; s

tn £2 !*•

1

314 English Formations.

water and marine shells that I mentioned as occur-
ring in the Weald en and Pur beck strata ; but with this
difference, that though the shells belong mostly to the
same genera, they are of different species — the old fresh-
water life is replaced by new.

Upon the London Clay, which is a marine forma-
tion, varying from 200 to 500 feet thick, the Brackles-
ham and Bagshot beds were deposited. These consist
of marine unconsolidated sands and clays, occurring as
outliers — isolated patches left by denudation around
Bagshot, and elsewhere on the London Clay, and over-
lying the same formation in the Isle of Wight, where
they are well seen in Alum Bay. In both these places
they are only sparingly fossiliferous, but at Brackles-
ham and Barton, on the Hampshire coast, they contain
a rich marine molluscan fauna of a tropical or sub-
tropical character. Upon these were formed various
newer fresh-water strata, occasionally interbedded with
thin marine bands, the whole evidently accumulated
at the mouth of a river. For the names of these
minor formations, I refer the reader to the column,
p. 30.

I have in this chapter given a brief recapitulation
of the geological and stratigraphical positions of the
series of the larger and more solid geological formations
that are concerned in producing the physical structure
of England (see Map), and I will in the following
chapters endeavour to show by the help of fig. 57, and
other diagrams, the part that these formations play
in producing the scenery of the country.

. u.5 ^uV \

V'V ,rvv ^M

CHAPTEK XX.

THE MOUNTAINS OF DEVON, WALES, AND THE WEST OF
ENGLAND — THE VALLEY OF THE SEVERN, AND THE
OOLITIC AND CHALK ESCARPMENTS THE HILLY CARBON-
IFEROUS GROUND OF THE NORTH OF ENGLAND, AND
ITS BORDERING PLAINS AND VALLEYS — THE PHYSICAL
RELATION OF THESE TO THE MOUNTAINS OF WALES
AND CUMBERLAND.

IN the far west, in Devon and in Wales, also in the
north-west, in Cumberland, a'nd in the Pennine chain
which joins the Scottish hills, and stretches from North-
umberland to the Carboniferous Limestone hills of
Derbyshire north of Ashbourne, we have what forms the
mountainous and more hilly districts of England and
Wales.

In Wales, especially in the north, the country is
essentially of a mountainous character ; and the middle
of England, such as parts of Staffordshire, Worcester-
shire, and Cheshire, may be described as flat and un-
dulating ground, sometimes rather hilly. But, as a
whole, these midland hills are insignificant, considered
on a large scale, for when viewed from any of the more
mountainous regions in the neighbourhood, the whole
country below appears almost like a vast plain. To
illustrate this. Let us imagine any one on the top of
the gneissic range of the Malvern Hills (g, fig. 57, p.
304), which have, on a small scale, something of a

316 View from Malvern Hills.

mountainous character, and let him look to the west :
then, as far as the eye can reach, he will see hill after
hill stretching into Wales (1 to 3, fig. 57); and if he
cast his eye to the north-east, he will there see what
seem in the distance to be interminable low undula-
tions, looking almost like perfect plains ; while to the
east and south-east there lies a broad low flat (6 to 8),
through which the Severn flows, bounded by a flat-
topped escarpment (9) facing west, and rising boldly
above the plain. This escarpment is formed of the
Oolitic formations, which constitute so large a part of
Gloucestershire. These, as the Cotswold Hills, form a
tableland, overlooking on the west a broad plain of
Lias Clay and of New Eed Marl, across which, on a clear
day, from the scarped edge of North Gloucestershire, far
to the west, we may descry the whole of the Malvern
range, the well-known clump of firs on the top of May
Hill near the Forest of Dean, and away to the north,
the distant smoke of Colebrook Dale.

This remarkable Oolitic escarpment stretches, in a
more or less perfect form, from the extreme south-west
of England northward into Yorkshire (see Map). But
it is clear that the Oolitic strata could not have been
originally deposited in the scarped form they now pos-
sess, but once spread continuously over the plain far to
the west, and only ended where the Oolitic seas washed
the high land formed by the more ancient disturbed
Palaeozoic strata of Dartmoor, Wales, and the North of
England. Occasional outliers of Lias and Oolite attest
this fact, as, for example, in the large outlier of Lower
Lias and Marlstone between Adderley and the neigh-
bourhood of Whitchurch in Cheshire and Shropshire.
This outlier occupies an area of about 50 square miles,
and is at least 50 miles distant from the main mass of

Oolitic Escarpment and Tableland. 3 1 7

the nearest Lias, near Droitwich in Worcestershire.
Indeed, I firmly believe that the Lias and Oolites
entirely surrounded the old land of Wales, passing
westwards through what is now the Bristol Channel on
the south, and the broad tract of New Red formations,
now partly occupied by the estuaries of the Dee and
Mersey, that lie between Wales and the Carboniferous
rocks of the Lancashire hills.

The strata that now form the wide Oolitic tableland,
have a slight dip to the south-east and east, and great
atmospheric denudations having in old times taken
place, and which are still going on, a large part of the
strata, miles upon miles in width, has been swept away,
and thus it happens that a bold escarpment, once — for
a time in Yorkshire and the Yale of Severn — an old line
of coast cliff, overlooks the central plains and undula-
tions of England, from which a vast extent and thick-
ness of Lias and Oolite have been removed. That the
sea was not, however, the chief agent in the production
of this and similar escarpments will be shown further on.

An inexperienced person standing on the plain of the
great valley of the Severn, near Cheltenham or Wotton-
under-edge, would scarcely expect that when he ascended
the Cotswold Hills, from 800 to 1 ,200 feet high, he would
find himself on a second plain (9, fig. 57, p. 304) ; that
plain being a high tableland, in which here and there
deep valleys have been scooped, chiefly opening out
westward into the plain at the foot of the escarpment.
These valleys have been cut out entirely by frost, rain,
and the power of brooks and minor rivers.1

If we go still farther to the east, and pass in

1 Such valleys are necessarily omitted on so small a diagram,
and the minor terraces on the plain, especially such as 7, are ex-
aggerated.

3 1 8 Chalk Escarpment and Eocene Outliers.

succession all the outcrops of the different Oolitic for-
mations (some of the limestones of which, overlying beds
of clay, form minor scarps), we come to a second grand
escarpment (11, fig. 57), formed of the Chalk, which in
its day also spread far to the west, covering unconform-
ably the half-denuded Oolites, till it also abutted upon
the ancient land formed of the Paleozoic strata of
Wales, and by-and-by, as that land sunk in the sea,
buried it in places altogether. After consolidation
and emergence, this Chalk formation also suffered
great waste, and the result is this second bold escarp-
ment also facing westerly, which stretches from Dorset-
shire on the south coast of England into Yorkshire
north of Flamborough Head. Occasional outlying
patches of the Cretaceous formations attest its earlier
western extension in the south-west of England, and the
same overlap may be inferred with justice respecting
the relations of the Oolitic, Triassic, and Upper Cre-
taceous strata throughout the length and breath of
England. (See fig. 59, p. 313.)

The Eocene strata, which lie above the Chalk, in
their day also extended much farther to the west, because
here and there, near the extreme edge of the escarpment
of Chalk, we find outlying Eocene fragments, and potholes
more or less filled with the relics of Eocene strata. On
the opposite page there is *a drawing of such potholes
filled with relics of the Plastic Clay of the Woolwich and
Reading beds, which in and round Savernake Forest
generally overlie the Chalk in a mere thin covering of
red and mottled clay and yellow sand, often mixed with
a few rounded flint pebbles. On the top of all there is
frequently a layer of semi-angular high level gravel,
and all of these have been more or less let down into
the potholes, by the dissolving of the underlying chalk

320 Eocene Outliers.

by the carbonic acid in rain-water, and thus pockets
of Eocene strata have been preserved. The proof of
this original extension westward is shown in the follow-
ing diagram.

FIG. 61.

1. Chalk. 2. Part of the main mass of the Eocene beds. 2'. Out-
lying patch of the Eocene beds near the edge of the escarpment.

It is impossible that these outliers could have been
originally deposited on this the edge of the Chalk, and
not also on other strata that lie west of the present
escarpment, and therefore it may be assumed that they
originally extended further westward, and with the
Chalk, have been denuded backwards till they occupy
their present area. But the Eocene beds being formed
of soft strata — chiefly clays and sands — though they
make undulating ground, form no bold scenery. They
rest in patches on the tableland, or in a large and some-
what depressed area in a manner shown at 12, fig. 57. l
Such is the general manner in which the southern part
of England has attained its present form.

Nearly the whole of the west of England, that is to
say, of Devon and Cornwall, and of Wales, consists of
Palaeozoic strata, viz. : Devonian and Old Eed Sandstone,
Cambrian, and Silurian with all its igneous interstrati-

1 Were I going into extreme details on this part of the subject,
there are many distinctive features in the scenery of the Eocene
formations dependent on synclinal curves in the strata, and other
accidents, and the same remark may be extended to the scenery of
many formations more important in a scenic point of view. The
plan of this book purposely excludes such details, my object being
merely to explain the connection of the greater geological features
of the country with its physical geography.

Merionethshire and Denudation. 321

fi cations, and of the Carboniferous series, all of which
have been much disturbed and extensively denuded.

The Cambrian rocks of Merionethshire, for example,
marked 2 on the map, were once buried deep beneath
more than 20,000 feet of Lower Silurian strata. Let any-
one climb to the rugged centre of this Cambrian area, and
stand on the summit of the great grit-formed cliffs of
Ehinog-fawr or of Y-Grraig-ddrwg (the bad cliff). From
thence turning to the south and south-east, he will see
the long ridgy peaks of the interstratified felstones and
ashes of Cader Idris and Aran Mowddwy, further north-
east the serrated edges of Moel Llyfnant and the
Arenigs, and the circle is continued on the northern
side of the Cambrian strata by the noble heights of the
Manods and the Moelwyns near Ffestiniog and Port-
madoc. On three sides the great anticlinal boss of
Cambrian grits is set in a curved frame of Silurian
slates and volcanic beds, and on the fourth it is bordered
by the sea. All these rocks, and much more besides,
once overlaid the Cambrian beds, in the form of a great
anticlinal curve, and have since been removed by denu-
dation ; and thus it happens that between the estuary of
the Mawddach below Dolgelli, and that of Traeth-
bach at Portmadoc, we find this inner group of gritty
hills, more than half enclosed by that somewhat distant
ring of higher mountains, which are highest, as a rule,
simply because of the hard quality of the great inclined
beds of porphyries, of which they are so largely com-
posed. (Fig. 62.)

In this brief account of a fragment of North Wales
of about 1,200 square miles, lies the essence of the
matter, for with differences of detail, the whole of
the strata suffered an equal amount of disturbance and
denudation, and the history simply comes to this. Much

322

Lower Silurian Rocks.

W O

o

Mountains and Tablelands. 323

of the Silurian rocks in North Wales are of a slaty
character, interbedded with masses of hard igneous
rocks, which attain in some instances a thickness of
thousands of feet. It is, therefore, easy to understand
how it happens that with disturbed and contorted beds
of such various kinds, those great denudations, which
commenced as early as the close of the Lower Silurian
period, and have been continued intermittently ever
since, through periods of time so immense that the
mind refuses to grapple with them — it is, I repeat,
easily seen how the outlines of the country have assumed
such varied and rugged outlines, as those which North
Wales, and in a less degree parts of North Pembroke-
shire, Devon, and Cornwall, now present.

I have said that the Secondary and Lower Tertiary
strata have not been anywhere disturbed nearly to the
same extent as the Palaeozoic formations in England.
Though occasionally traversed by faults, yet with rare
exceptions most of the strata have been elevated above
the water without much bending or contortion on a
large scale. What chiefly took place was a slight up-
tilting of the strata to the west, which, therefore, all
through the centre of England, dip as a whole slightly
but steadily to the east and south-east. This is evident
from the circumstance that on the Cotswold Hills the
lowest Oolitic formation (Inferior Oolite, No. 9, fig. 57)
forms the western edge of the tableland, while, in spite
of a few minor escarpments that rise on the surface
of the upper plain, the uppermost Oolitic beds that dip
below the Cretaceous strata, are sometimes at a lower
level than the Inferior Oolite at the edge of the plateau.

The great result, then, of the disturbance and denu-
dation of the Palaeozoic strata, and of the lesser dis-
turbance and denudation of the Secondary rocks, is,

Y 2

324 North of England.

that the physical features of England and Wales present
masses of Palseozoic rocks, forming groups of mountains
in the west, then certain plains and undulating grounds
composed of New Ked Sandstone, Marl, and Lias, and
then two great escarpments, the edges of tablelands,
which rise in some places to a height of more than a
thousand feet : the western one being formed of Oolitic,
and the eastern of Cretaceous strata, which, in its turn,
is overlaid by the Eocene series of the London and
Hampshire basins. See fig. 57.

If we now turn to the north, what do we find there ?

Through the centre of this part of England a great
tract of Palseozoic country, more than 200 miles in
length, stretches from the southern part of Derbyshire
to the borders of Scotland, and joins with the hilly
ground of Berwickshire. It consists of Carboniferous
rocks, ranging from the Carboniferous Limestone up to
those that pass beneath the base of the Permian strata.
Further west, between Morecambe Bay and the Sol way,
lie the Silurian and Carboniferous rocks of the Cumbrian
area, separated from the Carboniferous formations of
Northumberland, Durham, and Yorkshire, by the Per-
mian beds of the Vale of Eden.

As far as the north borders of the Lancashire and
Yorkshire coal-fields, the Carboniferous rocks lie in the
form of a broad anticlinal curve.

At the southern end of this area, a wide tract of
Carboniferous Limestone hills ranging up to 1,200 feet
in height, occupies the centre of the anticlinal curve, on
each side of which, the Yoredale shales and thick strata
of Millstone grit dip east and west as the case may be.
The latter, being interstratified with comparatively soft
beds of shale, run in long bold escarpments (fig. 63), that
often trend north and south both on the west and east sides

S c

'S 3

326 High Peak.

of the Carboniferous Limestone, fine examples of which
may be seen in the country near Chatsworth on the
east, and between Chapel-le-Frith, Buxton, and Hart-
ington, and the neighbourhood of Leek, on the west.
Let anyone get to the highest limestone hills in the midst
of the area, and look west to Ax Edge beyond Buxton,
and east towards Eowseley or Bake well, and he will see
these escarpments, the nearest on either side, being
generally separated from the limestone hills by a deep
valley excavated in the soft Yoredale shales. This
special piece of geological anatomy is, indeed, character-
istic of the whole of the region, the limestone hills
being almost entirely surrounded by a valley, or
valleys, the chief watershed of which is near Castle-
ton on the north, beyond which, on the east, the Der-
went flows, well wooded, and still often bordered by
oaks,1 while on the west the classic Dove runs down a
similar valley, till it enters that gorge of tall limestone
cliffs, which itself has cut some miles above Ashbourne.
Narrow dry dales are common in the Carboniferous
Limestone region, and probably some of these are the
relics of old underground watercourses, the roofs of
which have fallen in.

In the northern part of Derbyshire, near Hathersage
and the High Peak, the Millstone grit lies in broad
plateaux, often from 1,000 to 1,200 feet in height.
Great part of the country, east towards Derwent Dale
and north of the High Peak, is called the Woodlands.
In places the steep hill-sides are still dotted with little
woods and single trees of birch, ash, mountain ash, oak,
and elder, the relics of the forest that once gave this
high country its name.

1 Derwyn is Welsh for an oak, whence probably the original
name of the river.

Kinder Scout. 327

If from the Snake Inn on the Grlossop road you
climb the High Peak, or, as it is often called, Kinder
Scout, taking Fairbrook as your route, you first pass
across shales with beds of Yoredale grit, over which the
water falls in tiny cascades, and at length, high on the
top, the view is barred by a great cliff of rock running
in a sinuous line to 'right and left. It consists of coarse
quartzose sandstone, covered in great part by about 12
feet of peat, which in all directions is intersected by
devious steep-sided water-worn channels, among which,
in trying to work out a straight course, you are apt to
return to the point from whence you started. If you
could from a balloon look down upon it, it would

FIG. 64.

look somewhat as in fig. 64, its whole length being
about 6 miles by 2 in breadth. This is the character
of the country. Kinder Scout is in the centre of a long,
low, anticlinal curve, and the strata lie nearly flat,
while to the right and left the equivalent strata form
definite scarps, dipping in opposite directions.

Where bare of peat, the surface of this little
tableland is marked by numerous monumental-looking
pillars of stone, sometimes undercut, which helps to
show how high flat areas of such rocks are worn away
by ordinary atmospheric agents. Some of these have
such forms as in the following diagram, fig. 65, and I

328 Landslips.

give them to show that even on the top of the table-land,
where of running water there is almost none, degrad-
ation and lowering of the surface does not absolutely

FIG. 65.

cease. This work is aided by the easy decomposition of
the felspar, which forms an important ingredient in this
coarse-grained sandstone, and during heavy gales that
sweep across the high bare plateau, the sand is driven
along the surface, and grating along the bases of the
projecting masses of rock, these become undercut, and
eventually must topple over. In this way, Brimham
rocks, and rocking-stones, and other isolated rock-masses
have been formed in other districts, as, for example,
such a grand mass of granite as the Mainstone of Dart-
moor, now unhappily blasted away and sold by its
proprietor.

There is no area that shows better than this part of
Derbyshire how valleys have been formed in a high
tableland composed of Carboniferous sandstones and
shales. There are landslips everywhere. Groin g up the
valley from Hathersage a notable landslip is to be seen on
the hill-side west of the Derwent and south of Yorkshire
Bridge. Between that and the twenty-fifth milestone,
on the road to Glossop, there are several on either side of
the valley. On the north side of the valley of the Ashop,
the shattered masses cumber the hill-side for at least
three miles, and on the east side of Alport Dale, there
is one vast landslip a mile in length. The whole hill-

Landslips and Valleys. * 329

side has slipped bodily away, part lies in tumbled ruins
all the way down to the river, and part still stands in
tower-like peaks and solid flat-topped castlelike masses,
called Alport towers and Alport castles.

This is the law of waste in such cases : —

, FIG. 66.

The upper strata of the tableland consists of thick
beds of sandstone, much jointed, and easily permeated
by rain-water ; the shale beneath becomes softened and
slippery, and great masses of sandstone slip over the
brow, and, once there, by gravity find their way to the
bottom of the valley. Just in proportion as the river
attacks and carries away the crumbling ruins below,
the upper part of the slip gradually creeps down the
slope, till at length it reaches the river. Thus
repeated slips take place on one or both sides of the
valley, and though the river is always deepening its
channel, the waste from the hill-sides, by slips and rain-
waste, is proportionate to the average deepening, and
thus the valley goes on increasing both in depth and
width.1

It requires little imagination to divine how such
valleys began to be formed by streams running in slight
inequalities on the very top of the sandstone plateau,
till at length, channels being cut through the sandstones,

1 These and many other valleys are also deepened and widened
by the process described at pp. 533-36 in regard to the Moselle, &c.

33O Mountains, Plains, and Escarpments.

4

landslips came in aid, and are still in
progress. This general description, with
local variations dependent on lithological
variations, and the dips, strikes, and
faults of the strata, may serve for much
of the Carboniferous ground in the middle
of the anticlinal curve, as far as the
northern borders of the Yorkshire and
Lancashire coal-fields.

If we now construct a section from
the Menai Straits, across Snowdon and
over the Derbyshire hills to the east of
England, the arrangement of the strata
may be typified in the following manner
(fig. 67, and Map, line 17). In the west,
rise the older disturbed Silurian strata,
Nos. 1 to 3, which form the mountain
region of Wales. On the east of these
lies an upper portion of the Palaeozoic
rocks, 4, consisting of Carboniferous beds
with an escarpment facing west. They
are less disturbed than the underlying
Silurian strata on which they lie uncon-
formably. Then, in Cheshire, to the east
of the Dee, lie the great undulating
plains of the New Eed series, 6, and these
form plains because they consist of strata
that have never been much disturbed and
still lie nearly flat, and are soft and easily
denuded, whence, in part, the soft rolling
undulations of the scenery. Then more
easterly, from under the strata of New
Eed Sandstone, the disturbed Coal-
measures again rise, together with the

Mountains, Plains, and Escarpments. 331

Millstone Grit and Carboniferous Limestone forming
the Derbyshire hills, 4'. These strata dip first to the
west, underneath the New Red Sandstone, and then
roll over to the east, forming an anticlinal curve, the
Limestone being in the centre, and the Millstone Grit
on both sides dipping west and east; and above the
Millstone Grit come the Coal-measures, also dipping
west and east. Together they form the southern part
of the Pennine chain. Upon the Coal-measures in
Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire, and Yorkshire, dipping
easterly at low angles, we have, first, a low escarpment
of Magnesian Limestone 5, then the New Red Sand-
stone and Lias plains 6 and 7, which are covered to
the east by the Oolite 9, forming a low escarpment, the
latter being overlaid by that of the Chalk 11. In this
district, except in North Yorkshire, the Oolitic strata,
being thinner, do not form the same bold scarped table-
land that they do in Gloucestershire and the more
southern parts of England. As shown in the diagram
the Cretaceous rocks also rise in a tolerably marked
escarpment.

Further north the grand general features are as
follows : — If a section were drawn across England from
the Cumberland mountains south-easterly to Bridling-
ton Bay, the following diagram, fig. 68, will explain
the general arrangement of the strata, and the effect of
this on the physical geography of the district.

On the west there are the Green Slates and por-
phyries, No. 1, consisting of lavas and volcanic ashes,
hard but of unequal hardness, and some of them, there-
fore, by help of denudation giving specialities of form
to some of the loftiest mountains of Cumberland. Then
comes 2, the Coniston Limestone, overlaid by Upper
Silurian rocks, 3, forming a hilly country, between which

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So10*

Plains. 333

and the Carboniferous grits, 5, lies the Carboniferous
Limestone between two faults in a broken country. Then
comes a marked feature in the district, consisting of the
long, gently sloping beds of Yoredale rocks and Millstone
Grit, No. 5, dipping easterly till they slip out of sight
beneath the Magnesian Limestone, No. 6, overlaid in
succession by New Eed beds and Lias plains, 7 and 8,
which are overlooked by an escarpment of Chalk, 9.
This Chalk is overlaid by Boulder-clay, the eastern edge
of which forms a cliff overlooking the sea.

North of this region, till we come to the east side of
the Vale of Eden, the country is much complicated by
faults and other disturbances, and to describe it in
detail would occupy much space, but east of the
Vale of Eden the structure of the country is again
exceedingly simple, the whole of the Carboniferous rocks
dipping steadily east at low angles, all the way from
the escarpment that overlooks the vale, to the Grerman
Ocean that borders the Northumberland coal-field, fig.
69, p. 334.

While travelling northward from London by the
Great Northern Railway, many persons must be struck
with the general flatness of the country after passing
the Cretaceous escarpments north of Hitchin. Before
reaching Peterborough the line enters on the great
peaty and alluvial flats of Cambridgeshire, Lincoln-
shire, and the Wash, a vast plain, and once a great
bay, formed by the denudation of the Kimeridge and
Oxford Clays. It has been for long the recipient
of the mud of several rivers — the Ouse, the Nen, the
Welland, the Witham, and the Grlen. Nature and art
have combined, by silting and by dykes, to turn the flat
into a miniature Holland, about 70 miles in length and
36 in width. Near Stamford, passing through the low,
flat-topped undulations of the Oolitic and Lias, with

334

Yorkshire Hills.

their minor escarpments facing west, the
railway emerges, after crossing the Trent,
on a second plain, through which, swelled
by many tributaries — the Idle, the Don,
the Calder, the Aire, the Wharfe, the
Nidd, the Ure, the Swale, and the Der-
went — the Trent and the Ouse flow to
enter the famous estuary of the Humber.
Passing north by York the same plain
forms the bottom of the low broad valley
that lies between the westward rising
dip-slopes of the Millstone Grit, &c., and
the bold escarpment of the Yorkshire
Oolites on the east, till at length it passes
out to sea on either side of the estuary of
the Tees. The adjoining diagram repre-
sents the general structure of the region
on a line from Ingleborough on the west
to the Oolitic moors.

On the west lie the outlying heights of
the ancient camp of Ingleborough, and of
Penyghent, capped with Millstone Grit
and Yoredale rocks (2), which, intersected
by valleys, gradually dip eastward, the
average slope of the ground over long
areas often corresponding with the dip of
the strata in the manner shown in the
diagram,1 till they slip under the low
escarpment of Magnesian Limestone (3).
Let the reader attentively consider
this part of the diagram, and he may I
hope convince himself how little ordinary
valleys, large or small, are directly pro-
1 This kind of slope is often called a dip-slope.

Yorkshire Plains. 335

duced by fractures and ' convulsions of Nature,' for in
this and many similar cases, what can be their origin
but the tranquil scooping powers of disintegration and
running water, aided by an unknown amount of time.
East of the Magnesian Limestone lies the plain (p)9
almost as flat as a table, and covered to a great extent
with an oozy loam, like the warps of the Wash and the
Humber, and like these, perhaps, formed of old river
sediments. The New Red and Lower Lias strata (4)
lie beneath the warp, and for the most part, below the
level of the sea, and high on the east, like a great
rampart, the escarpment of the Oolites (5) rises in
places to a height of more than 1,100 feet, with all
its broad-topped moorlands and deep well-wooded
valleys. Such is the anatomy of the fertile Vale of
York and its neighbourhood.

336

CHAPTER XXI.

THE ORIGIN OF ESCARPMENTS, AND THE DENUDATION OF

THE WEALD GREY WETHERS AND THE DENUDATION OF

THE EOCENE STRATA.

IN the foregoing pages much has been said about
escarpments. The origin of all escarpments, excepting
modern sea cliffs, is generally the same, and they are
nearly all marked by this peculiarity, that the strata
dip at low angles in a direction opposite to the slope of
the scarp, thus : —

FIG. 70.

1. Strata with a low dip, e escarpment. 2. Detritus slipped from
the escarpment down towards the plain p.

The Weald of Kent and Sussex and the surrounding
Chalk hills form excellent examples of what I wish to
explain, and I therefore return to the south-east of
England. In the Wealden area we generally find a
plain, bounded by hills of Lower Greensand and Chalk,
on the north, south, and west, while the clayey plain
itself surrounds a nucleus of undulating sandy hills in
the centre. The whole of this Wealden area forms a
great amphitheatre, on the outermost rim of which the

the Weald. 337

Chalk rises in bold escarpments, forming what are
known as the North and South Downs. On the east
it is bounded by the sea. There can be no doubt that
the Chalk and the underlying formations of Upper
Greensand, Gault, Lower Greensand, and Weald Clay
originally extended across all the area of the Weald for
a breadth of from twenty to forty miles from north to
south, and nearly eighty from east to west (figs. 7 1 and 73).
This vast mass, many hundreds of feet thick, has been
swept away, according to an opinion formerly universal
among geologists, by the wasting power of the sea, but.,
I believe, chiefly by atmospheric agencies ; so much so,
indeed, that I am convinced that all the present de-
tails, great and small, of the form of the ground, are due
to the latter. The result is, that great oval escarpments
of Lower Greensand, and outside of that of Chalk sur-
rounding the Wealden area, rise steeply above the
nearest plain, which is composed of the Weald Clay,
from beneath which the Hastings Sands crop out, form-
ing a central nucleus of hilly ground, in the manner
shown in the following diagram, the height of which is
purposely exaggerated so as to bring the features pro-
minently before the eye.

N FIG. 71. s

a a Upper Cretaceous strata, chiefly Chalk, forming the North
and South Downs ; b b escarpment of Lower Greensand with a
valley between it and the Chalk ; c c Weald Clay, forming
plains ; d hills formed of Hastings Sand and Clay. The Chalk,
&c. once spread across the country, as shown in the dotted
lines.

Let us endeavour to realise how such a result may
z

338 Denudation of

have been brought about. The idea that the Wealden
area once formed a vast oblong bay, of which the Chalk
hills were the coast cliffs, is exceedingly tempting ; for,
standing on the edge of the North Downs near Folke-
stone, and looking west towards Ashford, and south-west
across the Romney Marsh, it is impossible not to com-
pare the great flat to a sea overlooked by all the bays
and headlands, which the winding outlines of the Chalk
escarpment, both of the North and South Downs, are
sure to suggest. And in less degree the same impression
suggests itself, wherever one may chance to stand on the
edge of the Chalk Downs, all the way from Folkestone
to Alton and Petersfield, and from Petersfield to East-
bourne. For years, with others, I held this view ; but
for years, with me, it has passed into the limbo of
hypotheses no longer tenable.

If the Wealden area were lowered into the sea just
enough to turn the Chalk escarpments into sea-cliffs (see
Map and fig. 72), we should have the following general
results. Let the line a b represent the present sea
level, and the lines s s s the level of the sea after
depression ; then, so far from the area presenting a wide
open sea, where heavy waves could play between the
opposite North and South Downs, we should have an
encircling cliffy coast of chalk c ; the base of which
cliff, if we follow the escarpment all round from the
neighbourhood of Folkestone to that of Eastbourne, un-
like all common coasts, would in some cases be washed
by the ordinary tides, while within a mile or two, the
depth of the sea close to the cliff of chalk must have
been from 200 to 300 feet. In other words the base
of the Chalk and Upper Grreensand all round the Weald
from Folkestone to Eastbourne could not have formed
a continuous shore line in recent times, for some

the Weald.

339

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34-O Denudation of

parts of it are at the sea level now ; while other parts,
along gently undulating lines at the bases of the North
and South Downs, rise to more than 250 feet above the
sea.

On the supposition that the Wealden area was once
an oblong bay, this land would also have been formed of
two narrow strips of country, one on the south at least
60, and the other on the north not less than 100, miles
long, both of which project eastward from the Chalk of
Hampshire, to form what we now call the North and
South Downs. These hills generally rise high above
the Eocene strata that skirt them on the north and
south, and these Eocene beds, under the supposed cir-
cumstances, would be covered by sea, while the scarped
cliffs of Chalk, as shown on the diagram, would over-
look a sea-covered plain of Grault g ; outside of which,
near the shore, would be a series of ridgy islands of
Lower Ofreensand s d, which, at present, in some parts
of the country, rise into escarpments higher than the
Downs themselves. Beyond these there would be a sea
where the flats of Weald Clay w now lie ; inside of which
would rise an island, or rather group of islands, formed
of the Hastings Sand series h h. This form of ground
would certainly be peculiar, and ill adapted in form to
receive the beating of a powerful surf, so as to produce
on the inner side only, the cliffy escarpment that
forms the steep edge of the oval of Chalk. Further,
if the area had been filled by the sea, we might possibly
expect to find traces of superficial marine strata of late
date, as in some other parts of England, scattered across
the surface between the opposite Downs. But none of
these traces exist. On the contrary, the underlying
strata of the Cretaceous and of the Wealden series
everywhere crop up and form the surface of the ground,

'^

the Weald. 341

except where here and there, near the Chalk escarpments,
they are strewn with flints, the relics of the subaerial
waste of the Chalk, or where they are covered by fresh-
ivater sands, gravels, and loams of the ancient rivers
of the country.

I believe, therefore, that the form of the ground in
the Wealden area, which was once attributed to marine
action, has been mainly brought about by atmospheric
causes, and the operation of rain and running waters.
One great effect of the action of the sea, combined
with atmospheric waste, when prolonged over great
periods of time, is to produce extensive plains of
marine denudation like the line b b, fig. 97, p. 497 ;
for this combined result is to plane off, as it were, the
asperities of the land, and reduce it to an average
tidal level.

Suppose the curvature of the various formations
across the Wealden area to be restored by dotted lines,
as in figure, No. 73, which is very nearly on a true
scale. Let the upper part of the curve be planed
across, as shown in fig. 73, and let the newly-planed
surface, slightly inclined from the interior, be repre-
sented by the line p p. Against this line, the various
masses of the Hastings Sand h h, Weald Clay w, the
Lower Greensand s, the Gault g, and the Chalk and
Upper Grreensand c, would crop up. Then I believe
that, by aid of rain and running water, large parts
of these strata would be cut away by degrees, so as to
produce in time the present configuration of the ground.
If it were not so, we might expect that the rivers of the
Wealden area should all flow out at its eastern end,
through long east and west hollows, previously scooped
out by the assumed wasting power of the sea, where
the ground is now low, and looks out upon the seay

342 Denudation of

and towards which, the long plains of Gault and
Weald Clay directly lead. But this, except with cer-
tain rivulets, is so far from being the case, that some
streams, like the Beult, rise close to the sea coast and
flow westward. If, on the other hand, such a plain
as p p once existed, it is easy to understand, how the
rivers in old times flowed from a low central
watershed to the north and south across the top of the
Chalk, at elevations at least as high as, and probably
even higher than the present summit-levels of the
Downs,

Then, as by the action of running water, the general
level of the inner country was being unequally reduced,
so as to form tributary streams each cutting out its
own valley, the greater rivers, augmented in volume by
these tributaries, were all the while busy cutting and
deepening those north and south channels through the
Chalk Downs now known as the valleys of the Stour, the
Medway, the Dart, the Mole, the Wey, which run athwart
the North Downs, and the Arun, the Adur, the Ouse, and
the Cuckmare, which, through gaps in the South
Downs, flow south.1 On any other supposition, it is not
easy to understand how these channels were formed,
unless they were produced by fractures or by marine
denudation, of neither of which is there any proof.
Through most of these gaps no knoivn faults run of
any kind, and the whole line of the Chalk is singularly
destitute of fractures.

We get a strong hint of the probability of the truth
of this hypothesis of the denudation of the Weald in

1 This kind of argument was applied by Mr. Jukes to explain the
behaviour of some of the rivers of Ireland, and he supposed that it
might possibly apply to the Weald. — 'Geological Journal,' 1862, vol.
xviii. p. 378.

the Weald.

343

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344 Denudation of

the present form of the ground. Thus after the forma-
tion of the marine plain p p, the Chalk being com-
paratively hard, has been partly denuded, and now
stands out as the bold escarpments of the North and
South Downs. The soft clay of the Gault has been more
easily worn away, and forms a hollow or plain between the
Chalk and the Lower Greensand. The Lower Greensand,
full of hard calcareous bands and ironstone, more strongly
resisting denudation, forms a second range of scarped
hills, overlooking the more easily wasted Weald Clay,
which makes a second and broader plain, from under
which rise the subdivisions of the Hastings Sands, forming
the undulations of the hills of Ashdown Forest, and other
places, in the broad centre of the low anticlinal curve.
The absence of flints over nearly the whole of the
Wealden area, excepting near the Downs, is easily
explained by this hypothesis, for the original marine
denudation had removed all the Chalk, except near
the margin (see fig. 73), long before the rivers had
begun simultaneously to scoop out the valleys of the
interior, and to cut the transverse valleys across the
North and South Downs.1

Given sufficient time, I see no difficulty in this
result. But the question arises, how much time, in a
geological sense, can be given ?

It is believed that, excepting for a few feet close
upon the coast, this southern part of England was not
depressed beneath the sea during any part of the Glacial
period. It has, therefore, been above water for a very
long time. On the edge of the North Downs there are

1 The original sketch of these views was published in 1863, and
enlarged and much improved in 1864, in a second edition of this
work. For greater detail on the same subject, see Foster and
Topley, ' Journal of the Geological Society,' 1865, vol. xxi. p. 443.

^pp

the Weald. 345

certain fragmentary outliers described by Professor
Prestwich. These by some persons have been supposed
to be outliers of the Lower Eocene strata, called the
Woolwich and Keading beds, but Professor Prestwich
considers them to belong to part of the Crag. The
physical evidence seems to me to be in favour of the
former.

If they belong to any part of the Eocene series,
then, as they lie as it were accidentally conformably
on the Chalk, they were evidently affected by the dis-
turbance that raised the Wealden into an anticlinal curve,
and depressed the Chalk and overlying Eocene beds
into the now divided synclinal curves of the London
and Hampshire basins, and therefore, the beginning of
the chief denudation of the Weald, by which it gradually
assumed its present form, was post-Eocene. Under
these circumstances it is probable that the Eocene beds
themselves were cut across during the gradual formation
of the plain of marine denudation. On the other hand,
if the outliers on the' Chalk escarpment west of Folke-
stone be parts of the Crag beds, then it is possible that
strata of the Crag may have been deposited upon that
plain, and found their way into those isolated petty pot-
holes in which the fossils were found, and in that case
the bay-like denudation of the Weald has probably
taken place since that epoch, implying a lapse of
time so long, that by natural processes alone, nearly
half the marine mollusca, and probably nearly all the
terrestrial species of mammalia of the world, have dis-
appeared and been slowly replaced by others. This
may mean little to those who still believe in the
sudden extinction of whole races of life ; but to me
it signifies a period analogous to the distance of a
half-resolved nebula, the elements as yet being wanting

346 D emulation.

by means of which we may attempt to calculate its
remoteness.

I have gone so far into details on this subject,
because the ' Denudation of the Weald ' has given rise
to much theorising by distinguished authors, and I wish
to show the reasons why I think that the amphitheatre-
like form of the area, and the escarpment of the Chalk,
are not due to marine denudation or the beating of
sea waves. On the contrary, the outer crust of Chalk
that once cased the whole as the strata of the anticlinal
curve having been planed off, and by subsequent ele-
vation a tableland having been formed, the softer rocks
below that cropped up to the surface of this plane were
then attacked by running water, and worn away so as
to form by degrees the hills and valleys of the district,
including the great escarpment of the North and South
Downs.

Though the Secondary and older Tertiary strata of
England generally lie flat or dip at low angles, yet in

FIG. 74.
Section across the Isle of Wight.

Solent. /Alum Bay

g, Lower Greensand; c, Chalk; e, Woolwich and Beading beds,
London Clay and Brasklesham and Bagshot Sands, and the
overlying Freshwater strata e.

one instance they have been very considerably disturbed ;
for on a line which runs through the Isle of Wight and

Denudation. 347

the Isle of Purbeck they stand nearly on end. Those
who are familiar with the Isle of Wight will remember
that from east to west, or from White Cliff Bay to
Alum Bay, there is overlying the Lower Greensand g,
a long range of Chalk hills, c, the strata of which dip
towards the north, and are overlaid by the older
Tertiary strata e, that is to say, the Woolwich and
Eeading beds, the London Clay, the Lower Bagshot
Sands and Clays, the Bracklesham Beds, the Upper
Bagshot Sands, and all the higher freshwater and
estuarine divisions e, as enumerated in the column p. 30,
and in the diagram, p. 241.

The whole pass under the Solent, as shown in the
lower dotted lines e e, fig. 74, and rise again on the
mainland in Hampshire, a considerable portion of which
is composed of various subdivisions of the Eocene rocks.
The same general relations of the Secondary and Eocene
strata are seen on the mainland in the Isle of Purbeck,
at and west of Swan age, as shown in the following section
north of Kimeridge Bay (fig. 75).

FIG. 75.
/Section across the Isle of Purbeck.

1. Kimeridge Clay. 2. Portland Oolite sand. 3. Portland
Oolite limestone. 4. Purbeck limestone and marls, chiefly
freshwater beds. 5. Weald sands and clay, freshwater. 6.
Neocomian and Grreensand. 7. Chalk without flints. 8.
Chalk with flints. 9. Woolwich and Eeading beds. 10.
London Clay. 11. Bracklesham and Bagshot beds.

Now these disturbed strata of the Isle of Wight were
deposited horizontally, and after disturbance, the Chalk,
c, spread over an extensive area of Lower Grreensand,

348 Denudation of

<7, to the south, and the Eocene rocks e once spread
over the Cretaceous rocks in a curve, at a great height,
as shown in the dotted lines e e (fig. 74). Taking the
whole of the south-eastern part of England, from
Suffolk to Beachy Head, and westward to Salisbury and
Dorchester, the sections shown in figs. 74 and 75
merely form part of the two great anticlinal and syn-
clinal curves of which the Hampshire and London
basins form parts. Here then in our Secondary and
Tertiary rocks we get evidence, though in less degree, of
the same kind of disturbance and denudation of which
we have such striking proofs when we consider the
structure of the countries in the western and north-
western area, which are composed of Palaeozoic rocks.
In the central part of England the Secondary and
Tertiary strata, not having been so much disturbed,
have necessarily not been so much denuded in height,
but chiefly backwards from west to east.

I have still a few words to add respecting the
denudation of the Eocene strata. Some. of these beds
in the Woolwich and Beading and in the Bagshot series
consist of sands, portions of which become exceedingly
hard, especially when exposed to the air. I have
already said that these formations, together with the
Chalk, once spread much further to the west than
they do now, because outlying patches of Eocene rocks
occur here and there almost at the very edge of the
great Chalk escarpment, as shown in fig. 61, p. 320.
Part of the original continuation of both in a west-
ward direction is shown in the dotted lines in the same
diagram.

It so happened that when the wasting processes took
place that wore away both these formations from west to
east, the softer clays and part of the sands of the Eocene

Eocene Strata. 349

strata were more easily removed than the harder rocky
portions, and the result is that over large areas, such as
Marlborough Downs, great tracts of Chalk are strewn
with huge blocks of tabular quartz-grit, lying so close
together that some years ago, over miles of country, I
could almost leap from block to block, without touch-
ing the chalk on which they lie. They are, however,
in such great request for building and paving purposes,
that in the long run they will probably be all broken up
and carried away.

FIG. 76.

In the above figure, No. 1 represents the Chalk, and 2
the overlying Eocene clays and sands ; and the isolated
blocks, lying directly on the topmost beds of the Chalk,
represent the thickly scattered masses of stone left on
the ground after the removal by denudation of other
and softer parts of the Eocene strata. No. 2. Fre-
quently these masses are found scattered even on the
terraces of the Lower Chalk, a remarkable example of
which occurs at the Prehistoric town of Avebury, near
which, the lower terrace of Chalk (as in the diagram)
is strewn with c grey wethers,' as they are termed, and
immense masses of these, set on end by a vanished people,
stand in the ancient enclosure. Sometimes even on the
plains of Gault or Kimeridge Clay, well out to the north
or west of the escarpment, as for instance at Swindon,
and also in the Wealden area, blocks angular or half-
rounded lie in the meadows, marking the immense
waste to which the whole territory has been subjected
long after the close of Eocene times. They plainly
tell, that the Chalk: and overlying Eocene beds once

35O Grey Wethers.

spread far across the plains which the abrupt Chalk es-
carpments now overlook. These have been and are still
being wasted back, for they are comparatively easily
destroyed, but the strong ( grey wethers ' remain, and as
the rocks on which they once lay were slowly wasted
away and disappeared, these masses of tough and intract-
able silicious stone gradually subsided to their present
places.

Besides the name of ' grey wethers,' they are also
known as Sarsen stones, and Druid stones, and all the
standing masses of Avebury and Stonehenge, popularly
supposed to be Druidical temples, have been left, by
denudation, not far from the spots where they have since
been erected into such grand old monuments by an
ancient race.1 ,

I might add many details respecting the origin of
the scenery of other portions of England, such as the
relation of the secondary rocks to the older rocks of
Devon, the structure of the Malvern Hills, a true
miniature mountain range, and of the Mendip Hills,
or of the beautiful Vale of Clwyd, in North Wales,
consisting of a bay of soft New Eed Sandstone, bounded
by Silurian mountains and old limestone cliffs, and of
the still larger Vale of Eden, in the North, where the
mountains of Cumberland look down on an undulating
ground formed of Permian and partly of New Ked
strata (fig. 104, p. 521). But some of these regions
will be dealt with when I discuss the subject of the
British rivers, and in the meanwhile it would not

1 The smaller stones at Stonehenge have been brought from a
distance. They are mostly of igneous origin, and are believed by
Mr. Fergusson to have been votive offerings. See * Memoirs of the
Geological Survey of Great Britain ; the Geology of parts of Wilt-
shire and Gloucestershire.' sheet 34, 1858, pp. 41-44. Also a
memoir by Professor Maskelyne.

Scenery of Eng land. 351

add much to the general knowledge which I have
already endeavoured to express, viz., that England is
mountainous and very hilly in the west and north, in
Devon, Wales, Cumberland, and from Derbyshire con-
tinuously all through to Scotland, because of disturb-
ances and great denudations ; and that it consists of
undulating plains and of tablelands in the central and
eastern parts, because the strata there are generally
much flatter and softer, and because they have been
denuded in such a manner, that immense tracts of
Chalk and Lower Grreensand, in the Weald and in the
middle and west of England, have been cut away by a
slow process of gradual recession due to atmospheric
influences, and thus it happens that their edges now
form long escarpments, which are still receding in the
direction of the dip of the strata, and therefore at right
angles to the slope of the scarp.

352

CHAPTER XXII.

THE MIOCENE AND PLIOCENE FORMATIONS.

THE Eocene strata of England taken as a whole may
be looked upon as estuarine beds. At the base, the
Woolwich and Beading beds, and also the upper parts of
the series in the Isle of Wight and Hampshire, consist
of strata deposited in brackish, salt, and fresh water, at
or near the mouth of a great river, and the abundance
of plants and terrestrial remains in the London Clay,
and other marine divisions of the series, proves that
they also were deposited near the mouths of such rivers,
say, as the Mississippi and Amazon. Both in their
lower and upper divisions, these strata in France and
England contain a large terrestrial mammalian fauna,
the genera of which are so antique that they have no
very close relation with those now living. Nevertheless,
they are remotely related to living genera, and some
may even be the direct ancestors of living species
through Miocene and Pliocene intermediate forms. To
give an idea of the antiquity of this old fauna, it is
safe to say that when they lived the Alps had scarcely
any place as a principal mountain range.

This book has little to do with palaeontology, but I
have already stated in a previous chapter, that in
Germany there are formations containing terrestrial
(as distinguished from marine fossils), with mixed
Eocene and Miocene generic forms, and I lay a little

Miocene Epoch. 353

stress on these points, because, after we get through
these doubtful and fragmentary stratigraphical and
zoological gradations, we at length emerge on a time
generally recognised as Miocene or Middle Tertiary, the
larger part of the flora and fauna of which has the
closest analogy to those that now inhabit the earth, the
flora, possibly, even in part, specifically, and part of
the fauna, certainly generically. Most of the modern
types are represented in one part of the world or
another : Elephant, Ehinoceros, Hippopotamus, Horses,
Deer, Oxen, Camels, Giraffes, Monkeys, and various
carnivora. Nor are fresh -water reptilia wanting, though
they are less distinctive, some of the modern represen-
tatives of these animals having held their place through
longer epochs of time.

I recapitulate these facts, because the circumstances,
bearing as they do on the present physical geography of
our part of the world, are very distinct, and I shall soon
have something more to say about the later unions of
England with the Continent, and migrations of life
consequent thereon.

The Hempstead beds of the Isle of Wight partly
connect the Eocene and Miocene epochs, in so far that
the plants of these strata (always an imperfect guide)
are related to Miocene species. But stratigraphically,
the Hempstead beds are inseparable from the Eocene
beds below, and their fossils, those that lived in water,
are almost without exception the same.

True Miocene strata are very poorly represented in
England, as shown in Chapter XVI., in the description
of Bovey Tracey, and they play no important part in
its physical geography. The slopes which surrounded
the old lake of Bovey Tracey were clothed with splendid
pines of the genus Sequoia (Wellingtonia), oaks, cin-
A A

354 Miocene.

namons, figs, dryandra, prickly vines, nyssa, and other
plants, and on the lake water-lilies expanded their
leaves and flowers.

The present Europe, partly then a continent, was,
in Miocene times, the theatre of wide-spread volcanic
eruptions in Central France, Germany, and that part of
the British Islands now known as the Inner Hebrides,
and also in the north-east of Ireland. In that region
they play a much more important part in connec-
tion with the physical geography of our country
than they do at Bovey Tracey. In the land of Antrim,
from thence through the Isles of Mull, Rum, Eigg,
Cana, Muck, and Skye, a vast broken belt of Miocene
volcanic rocks forms great part of the Inner Hebrides ;
and far beyond Britain, in the Faroe Islands, Iceland,
Spitzbergen, and Franz Joseph Land, the same volcanic
series is found, fragments perhaps of one large con-
tinuous territory, or, if not, at all events of a series
of large islands, of which the Faroes make one of the
fragments.

In Scotland these volcanic rocks consist chiefly of
Basalts, Dolerites, Felstones, and Amygdaloids, inter-
bedded with agglomerates of lapilli, large blocks, and
volcanic bombs, such as are piled on the sides of almost
all volcanoes, and which often go by the name of
volcanic ashes. These occur, associated with beds of
clay or soil, and streaks of lignite. Some of the clays
contain leaves of plants. The late Professor Edward
Forbes determined their age, and later observations
made by Professor Heer confirm his accuracy.1

1 For an elaborate memoir on these volcanic rocks, see Mr. Judd
' On the Ancient Volcanoes of the Highlands, &c.,' « Journal of the
Geological Society,' 1874, vdl. xxx., p. 220. The whole subject of the
growth and decay of these volcanoes is there treated of in a manner
never before attempted.

Volcanic Rocks. 355

It is clear that the beds of lignite in the Western
Isles, and the shales with leaves, indicate long pauses
here and there in the activity of many craters. Vege-
tation on a large scale had time to flourish* After an
unknown lapse of time, the vast inclined plateaux of lava,
above which the lofty craters rose, are still, in Antrim,
from 600 to 900 feet thick, and more than 3,000 feet in
Mull. The denuded edges of the several lava-streams
now form a wonderful series of terraces, rising tier upon
tier, like Titanic steps, high on the hills on both sides of
the Sound of Mull, and the splendid columnar basalt of
Fingal's Cave, in Staffa, is known to all tourists among
the Inner Hebrides. The same terraced forms are
prominent in Skye, and in many of the smaller islands.
But where are the craters from which these vast volcanic
piles of lavas and ashes were ejected? They are all
gone and utterly wasted away, and only their deep-
seated roots remain to mark the sites, above which
mountains grew by accretion, as high as Etna, which is
growing even now. It is a remarkable circumstance,
and worthy to be noted, that these deep-seated centres
of crystalline rocks are now apt to form some of the
highest portions of the islands. They have been bared
by denudation, and their hardness helps to preserve
them.

Long before these extreme denudations took place,
when the islands formed part of a wide-spreading
territory, old river-beds intersected it, running through
an ancient land, formed of Laurentian, Cambrian, and
Silurian rocks, that spread far to the west, north, and
east.

These rivers scooped out valleys in the Miocene
lavas and tufas, which were again partly filled by
torrents of basalt and obsidian. In the case of the

A A 2

356 Miocene Denudations.

Scuir of Eigg, the lava (obsidian 3, fig. 77) flowed over
the valley gravel (2 ) and buried it. Since then the waste
has been so great, that the destruction of the older hills
that bounded the valley has literally exalted the valley
and laid the hills low, for the obsidian was harder than
the walls of the valley, and has longer resisted destruc-

FIG. 77.

1. Old lavas, &c. 2. River valley scooped out by denudation.
3. Obsidian filling valley. 4. Present outline of the country
produced by later denudations.

tion, and thus it happened that the Scuir of Eigg
became one of the most striking peaks in the Western
Islands.

Thus it also happens that in the old volcanic plateaux
valleys a thousand feet deep have been excavated, and
the whole region has by denudation been changed into
a line of fragmentary islands, the high sea cliffs of
which attest the greatness of the waste they have in
time undergone.1

During this time the greater contours of England
remained the same, that is to say, the old mountain
lands of Devon, Wales, and Cumbria, though suffering
from denudation, remained mountainous still, and,
together with the lower country, the whole was merely
upheaved so far that England was joined to the Con-

1 See A. Geikie, 'Jour. Geol. Society,' xxvii., 'On Tertiary
Volcanic Rocks.'

Crag. 357

tinent, and over the land, mammalian races in late Mio-
cene times migrated into our region, their bones being
now found buried at the bases both of the Coralline
and Eed Crag, but chiefly in the latter. Probably they
lived here in the earliest Pliocene times, as the relics of
an older Miocene fauna, and got intermixed with
varieties and new species. These include Beaver, Deer,
Horse and Hipparion, Hyaena, and a Felis ; Bears, Pig,
Tapir, Ehinoceros, Mastodon, and perhaps a true
Elephant, 1 all belonging to genera with which we are
quite familiar in the present world, if we except the
Hipparion and Mastodon, and these have close relations,
the first with the horse and the second with the ele-
phant.

The Crag formations of England in descending
order consist of three divisions, Norwich Crag, Ked
Crag, and Coralline Crag. The Ked and Coralline
Crags are rich in marine fossils, and the Norwich Crag
also contains a marine fauna, together with twenty-four
species of land and fresh-water shells. According to
Mr. Prestwich, the above-named formations contain
from 84 to 93 per cent, of living species. But though
very important in a stratigraphical point of view, when
viewed in connection with marine life, the Crag plays
a very unimportant part in the physical structure of
England, occurring as they do only in a few small shelly
patches of insignificant thickness in Norfolk and

1 Castor veterior, Cervus dicranoceros, Equus plicidens (?), Felis
pardoides, Hipparion, Hysena antiqua, Mastodon arvernensis, Mas-
todon tapiroides (?), Elephas meridionalis (?) Ehinoceros Schleir-
macheri, Sus antiquus (?), Tapirus priscus, Ursus arvernensis,
Megaceros Hibernicus (?). See Prestwich, 'Journal Geol. Society,'
1871, vol. xxvii., p. 348. Mr. Prestwich considers this fauna as
probably of Pliocene age, that is to say, contemporaneous with the
deposition of the crag.

358 Forest Bed.

Suffolk. They are, in fact, often so far buried under
superficial strata that they require to be looked for,
and the whole country being flat they do not at all
affect the scenery, excepting in a minor way in the
coast cliffs. Physically they chiefly indicate a certain
amount of submergence and subsequent emergence in
late times, before the epoch of the Forest bed, and that
is all, for, as already frequently insisted on, we are not to
consider Great Britain as having always been an
island during and between the periods that I have
already described. It is an accident that it is now an
island ; and it has been islands many times, and an
island more than once before, and in many shapes.
When I describe other periods, still later than the Crag,
we shall be able to understand a little more definitely
the precise kind of changes that our land in latter days
has undergone.

Younger than the Crag there are certain other
minor deposits, portions of which are scattered here
and there throughout England. One of the most
remarkable, the 'Forest bed,' lies underneath the
glacial deposits on the shore, at Cromer, in Norfolk.
This minor formation has been traced for some distance
between high and low water mark. It consists of dark
sandy clay, with plants, above which there is a band of
coarse gravel, containing the remains of elephants, &c.,
then bands of clay and gravel, with marine and fresh-
water shells and fragments of wood. The plants
noticed in the Forest bed are : Pinus sylvestris
(Scotch fir), Abies excelsa (a Pine), Taxus baccata
(Yew), Prunus spinosa (Sloe), Menycinthes trifoliata
(Buckbean), Quercus (Oak), Alnus (Alder), Nymphcea
alba (Water-lily), Nuphar lutea (Yellow Water-lily),
Ceratophyllum demersum (Horn-wort), and Potamo-

Flora and Fauna. 359

geton (Pondweed), together with fronds and rhizomes
of ferns.

In the Forest bed and the overlying gravel the fol-
lowing land mammalia have been found : Elephas
antiquus (the ancestor of the African Elephant), E.
meridionalis, Rhinoceros megarrhinus, JR. Etruscus,
Hippopotamus major, Equus caballus (the common
horse), Mackairodus (a tiger ?), Bison prisons (?), Bos
primigenius (Aurochs), Sus Arvernensis ; four species
of bears, Ursus Arvernensis, U. Spelceus (Cave bear ?),
U. EtruscuSy U. arctos (White bear) ; six species of
deer, Cervus megaceros (often miscalled the Irish elk),
C. elaphus (Ked deer), C. Sedgwickii, C. Poligniacus,
C. capreolus (Roedeer), Mygale moschata (Musk
shrew), Sorexfodiens and S. remifer ( Shrews), Arvicola
amphibia (Field-mouse), Castor Europceus (common
beaver), Trogontherium Cuvieri (a great Beaver), two
species of whales, and fish.1 The whole speaks of a
past physical geography, at least during part of which,
with a mild climate, our country seems to have been
joined to the Continent. It must, however, be confessed
that this assemblage of mammalia is not quite devoid
of the appearance of being a little too miscellaneous,
and several authors have declared that some of the
bones, having been picked up on the shore between
high and low water mark, may have been washed up
from the neighbouring sea-bottom, and thus got mixed
with others of later geological date which really belong
to the Forest bed. However this may be I have given
the list as it originally stood, with some slight corrections
by Professor Boyd Dawkins, and whichever theory be

1 The above list is taken from Mr. Prestwich < On the Crag Beds
of Suffolk and Norfolk ; ' < Quarterly Journal of the Geological
Society,' vol. xxvii., p. 466.

360 Forest Bed.

..

true, it cannot fail to impress the reader as throwing
light on some one of the ever-shifting physical and
biological phases that our country has undergone, each
of which in its day seemed as constant as that in the
midst of which we live. The special episode of the
Forest bed points to this, that it exhibits a fragment
of the vegetation and fauna of the last pre-glacial epoch,
at a time when England was united to the Continent,
and when a flora and fauna, in part new, migrated across
the intervening plain into our area.

CHAPTEK XXIII.

THE GLACIAL EPOCH. — EXISTING GLACIER REGIONS.

I HAVE now to describe a remarkable episode in Post-
Tertiary times, known as the Glacial epoch, which
is certainly later than the latest beds of the Crag, and
is generally considered to be of later date than the
' Forest bed ' of Cromer, on sound stratigraphical
evidence. The effect of local mountain glaciers, and
of far broader sheets of glacier ice that descended from
the mountains and overspread great plains, have left
unmistakable traces over large parts of the northern
and southern hemispheres ; and without going into all
the minutiae of the subject I shall be able to describe
the history of that period, as it affects the scenery of
Britain, with something like detail. Before doing so,
however, I must lead the reader into Switzerland, and
show what kind of effect is being produced there by
the ice of the present day, and afterwards into Green-
land and Victoria Land, and show what takes place
there, and then by the knowledge thus gained 1 shall
be able to return to our own country and explain what
took place here in that icy episode, which, measured by
ordinary standards, is far distant in time, but which,
by comparison with the more ancient periods, almost
approaches our own day.

The first thing to be done is to explain what a
glacier is. In any large and good map of Switzer-

362 Glaciers.

land we see certain white patches here and there
on the higher mountain ranges of the Alps. These
are more or less covered by snow and glaciers. The
highest mountain in the Alps, Mont Blanc, rises
more than 15,000 feet above the sea, and there are
many other mountains in this great chain which
approach that height, ranging from 10,000 to 15,000
feet high. The mean limit of perpetual snow upon
the Alps, is about 8,500 feet above the level of the sea.
Above that line, speaking generally, the country is to a
great extent covered with snow, excepting where the
tall cliffs are too steep to hold it, or on those sides of
even high valleys that face the southern sun. In the
higher regions it gathers on the mountain slopes, and
in the large cirques or recesses, which like vast amphi-
theatres, are characteristic of all true mountain groups
or ranges that I have seen. By force of gravity, and the
alternate melting and regelation of the molecules of
ice, especially in summer, the gathered snow presses
downwards into the main valleys; where, chiefly in
consequence of the immense pressure exerted by the
vertical weight and onward pressure of the accumu-
lated mass, the snow year after year is converted into
moving ice. Without entering on details, it is enough
if I now state that this is proved by well-considered
observations made by the best observers of the icy
phenomena of the Alps.1

Still accumulating, year upon year, by degrees this
ice slides down the valley, and is often protruded in
great tongues far below the limits of perpetual snow ;
for some Swiss glaciers descend as low as from three to
four thousand feet or thereabouts above the level of

1 See Dr. James Croll's work on ' Climate and Time.'

Glaciers. 363

the sea, whereas the limit of perpetual snow is 8,500
feet. Ever melting on its surface, in its mass, and at
the end, each glacier is yet ever renewed by yearly falls
of snow, and by direct gravity on the slopes, and by
pressure of accumulating snow and ice behind, and by
melting and regelation, it is urged down the valley and
maintains its average size. I will not enter into all
the details of the structure of the ice of glaciers,
because that will not help us in the special geological
investigation now in view; but I will describe what
are the effects produced by a glacier in the country
over which it slides, and various other glacier-pheno-
mena affecting the scenery of the Alps, and therefore
affecting the scenery of our own country in past times
when glaciers existed here, and still affecting it in the
relics they have left.

A glacier slides more or less rapidly according to
the mass of ice that fills the valley, and to the greater
or less inclination of the slope, for in these respects it
behaves very like a river. If we have a vast river like
the Mississippi flowing down a broad valley, although
the slope of the valley may be gentle, still the river
flows with rapidity, in consequence of the greatness of
the body of water ; so if we have a mass of ice, which
represents the snow-drainage of a large tract of country,
covered with perpetual snow, then the glacier floivs
with, a rapidity proportionate to the mass of ice., and
that rate of progress is modified, increased, or dimin-
ished, in accordance with the fall and width of the
valley, so that when it is steep, the glacier flows com-
paratively fast, and when the angle at which the valley
slopes is small, it flows with comparative slowness.
Like a river also when the valley expands in width, so
does the glacier broaden to meet the mountain sides on

364 Glaciers.

either hand, and should an extra steep descent occur
in its channel, as in the glacier of the Khone, the ice
becomes troubled and shattered, like a silent frozen
cataract, to re-unite below in a more tranquil sheet.
So also in the valley of Hinter Ehine, above the source
of the river, a tall cliff bounds the eastern side of the
Khine glacier, above which another large ice-sheet
presses to the edge of the precipice, from whence in
summer, constant avalanches, now here, now there, fall
with a sheer descent and a recurrent roar like that of a
great waterfall.

All glaciers are traversed by cracks termed crevasses.
Now the mountain peaks that rise above tne surface of
a glacier are in places so steep that the snow refuses to
lie upon them, even when they may happen to be above
the limits of the average line of perpetual snow, so
that masses of rock being severed by atmospheric dis-
integration, constantly fall from the slopes and find a
temporary resting-place on the surface of the ice at
the margin of the moving glacier, and, as it were,
float upon its surface in long continuous lines ; for the
motion of a glacier is so slow, that the stones that fall
upon its surface are sufficiently numerous to keep up a
continuous line of blocks, earth, and gravel, often of
great width. In like manner if an island-like boss of
rock rises through the ice in the middle of a glacier,
a line of stony debris travels on the surface of the
glacier from the lower end of the island, which, often
buried in the winter's snow, becomes again exposed
during the heat of summer. These stones, when two
glaciers combine to form one stream of ice, as in the
lower glacier of the Aar, meet at the V-shaped angle
of junction, and form one grand line running down the
centre of the glacier (fig. 78). Such lines of debris,

Glaciers. 365

whether at the sides or in the middle of a glacier, are
termed moraines, and at length all this material that
has not fallen into crevasses floats on, and is finally
slowly shot into the valley at the end of the ice-stream,
frequently forming large mounds, known as terminal
moraines.

All glacier ice, even in the depth of winter in Arctic
regions, is said to be at a temperature of about 32°
Fahr. that is to say, just about the melting point, ex-
cepting near the surface, as far as the cold atmospheric
temperature can penetrate. This, it is said, is rarely
more than eight or ten feet. Therefore, it is a common
statement that, beneath every glacier, water is constantly
flowing, caused by the melting of the ice below all the
year round, and also by the summer heat on the surface
of the glacier, and in some cases, to a less degree, by
springs that rise in the rocks below the ice.1 In parts
of some glaciers where crevasses are not numerous, we
frequently find large temporary brooks, which generally
disappear with the frost at night ; but in all the glaciers
that I have seen, long before we reach their lower end,
all the surface water has found its way to the bottom of
the ice.

The water that runs from the end of a glacier very
often emerges from an ice-cavern as a ready-made muddy
river, charged with the flour of rocks, produced in great
part by the grinding power of the glacier moving over
its rocky floor, and this river carries away the moraine

1 I am, however, informed by Mr. James Eccles that in the mid-
winter of 1875 when he was in the Valley of Chamouni no water
flowed from the end of the well-known Glacier de Bossons, and
that at the lower end of the large glacier of the Mer de Glace
(Glacier des Bois) the stream which is large in summer had
decreased to a tiny rivulet. The subject requires more systematic
investigation both in the Alps and Greenland.

366 Glaciers.

rubbish that the glacier deposits at its lower ends, in
some cases almost as fast as it is formed, perhaps, I might
rather say, as slowly as it is formed, because day after
day we may see scarcely any difference in the details of
certain moraines, though, when being worked upon by
water, all stones of moderate size that have been shed
from the ice are in the long run apt to be carried
down the valley by the ever-changing streams that flow
from the ends of glaciers along the length of many
terminal moraines. In some cases, however, it happens
that, from various circumstances, both terminal and
lateral moraines have been so well preserved from
destruction, that they form long enduring features in
the scenery.

Something remains to be said about moraine-stones
before I describe the glacial phenomena of our own
island. When an immense weight of glacier ice, in
some cases hundreds, or in Arctic and Antarctic regions
even two or three thousand feet in thickness, passes
over solid rocks, by the pressure of the moving mass,
the rocks in the valley over which it slides become
smooth and polished — not flatly, but in flowing lines,
presenting a largely mammillated surface. Further-
more, the stones of the surface-moraines frequently fall
into fractures called crevasses, and the small debris
and finely powdered rocks that more or less cover
the glacier are borne into these crevasses by the water
that flows upon the surface, and much of this matter
finds its way to the bottom of the ice, fig. 78. The
bottom of a glacier, therefore, is not simple bare ice,
but between the ice and the rock over which it flows
there are blocks of stone imprisoned, and fine silicious
and often felspathic debris (chiefly worn from the floor
itself), which may be likened to emery powder. The

Glaciers.

367

Is

1

2 s
fe .!

I
.3

O

368 Glaciers.

result is that, let the rock be ever so hard, it is in
places polished almost as smooth as a polished agate,
and this surface is also finely striated and coarsely
grooved by the debris that, imprisoned between the ice
and the rocky floor, is pressed along in the direction
of the flow of the ice. By degrees deep furrows are
sometimes thus cut in the rocks.

But the stones that are imprisoned between the ice
and the rocky floor not only groove that floor, but in
turn they also get scratched by the harder asperities
of the rocks over which they are forced ; and thus it
happens that many of the stones of moraines are covered
with straight scratches, often crossing each other
irregularly, so that we are able by this means to tell,
independently of the forms of the heaps, whether such
and such a mass is a moraine or not, and indeed, under
any circumstances, whether certain stones have been
acted on by glacier ice.

These indications of the rounding, smoothing, scratch-
ing, and grooving of rocks, in lines coincident with the
direction of the flow of glaciers, together with moraine
heaps, erratic blocks, and scratched stones, are so charac-
teristic of glaciers, that we are able to establish the
important fact that the Swiss glaciers were once of far
larger dimensions than they are now, and have gradually
retreated to their present limits. For example, all
down the Valley of the Ehone, from the end of the
Ehone glacier to the Lake of Geneva, mammillated
rocks (moutonnee), moraine-mounds, and great erratic
blocks, are of frequent occurrence, a notable case oc-
curring on the slopes behind Monthey, sone sixty
miles below the source of the river, where the ' blocks
of Monthey ' have long been celebrated. Fifty miles
beyond that, the same great glacier that filled the

Ancient Alpine Glaciers. 369

valley of the Khone, spread across the area, now filled
by the Lake of Geneva and all the lowlands of Switzer-
land, in a vast fan-like form, a hundred and twenty-
five miles in width from below Geneva to the neigh-
bourhood of Aarau, and deposited part of its terminal
moraine on the slopes of the Jura behind Neuchatel,
2,200 feet above the level of the lake. The famous
Pierre a Bot, 50 feet long by 20 feet wide, and 40 feet
in height, forms one of a belt of moraine blocks at a
height of about 800 feet above the level of the lake of
Neuchatel. Every Alpine valley, whether in the heart of
the mountains, or on the northern slopes opening into the
lowlands of Switzerland, or on the wide plains of Italy
that lie between the Alps and the Po, tells the same
story ; and the old glacier of the Dora Baltea, about a
hundred miles in length, which from Mont Blanc to
beyond Ivrea filled the whole valley of Aosta, has left
on the plains of Italy a vast moraine 60 miles in
circumference, more than 1,600 feet in height, and in
places 6 or 7 miles in width. The signs of vanished
gigantic glaciers constantly strike the practised eye,
and are indeed frequently as fresh as if the glacier had
scarcely left the rocks before the existing vegetation
began to grow upon their surfaces.

Such being the case in the Alps and other regions
where we are able to study the action of modern
glaciers in detail, we have next to inquire — Is there
anything further to learn in regions where glaciers are
found on a far greater scale ? Those who have read the
descriptions of navigators will be aware that in Green-
land the average snow-line, as a whole, descends lower
and lower as we go northward, till at length the whole
interior of the country becomes covered by one snow-
field, which, pressing seaward from the interior, gives

B B

370 Modern Large Glaciers.

birth to a prodigious number of large glaciers, many of
which protrude far into the Fiords, while very many
others on a smaller scale descend directly into the sea
from the mountains on either side. In other cases, as
on straight parts of the coast of Melville Bay, the
glacier-ice crowns the cliffs for miles, and breaking off
in masses, falls in cataracts of small-shivered icebergs
into the ssa, grinding and smoothing the rock as they
descend. But in the same region when broad valleys
open out towards the sea, then it frequently happens
that prodigious glaciers push their way out far beyond
the shore. These are in some cases 12 or 20 miles
across at their ends, and in the case of the great Hum-
boldt glacier, 60 miles across, ending in a cliff of ice in
places 300 feet in height. One of these vast glaciers has
been estimated as being at the very least 3,000 feet in
thickness. Great masses of ice breaking away from
their ends form icebergs, which, sometimes laden with
moraine rubbish, like that which partly covers the
glaciers of Switzerland, float out into the Greenland
seas, and are carried south by a current in Baffin's Bay.
Not infrequently icebergs float far into the Atlantic,
beyond the parallel of New York, and they have been
seen even off the Azores.

Along the shores also, when the sea freezes, the ice
becomes attached to the coast. By-and-by, as summer
comes on, the ice partly breaks away, leaving what is
called an ice-foot still joined to the land. Vast quan-
tities of debris during part of the year fall from the
cliffs, and are lodged upon the ice-foot, and when it
breaks off and floats away and melts, the rubbish is
strewn about, and accumulates on the bottom of Baffin's
Bay. In like manner the icebergs melt chiefly in Baffin's
Bay, but sometimes escaping from thence and melting

Modern Large Glaciers. 371

in the seas of warmer climates, their stony freights,
when they have any, get scattered abroad here and
there over the bottom of the West Atlantic, which,
therefore, must be dotted with erratic blocks and other
debris borne from far northern regions.

The same kind of phenomena, on a still grander
scale, are common in the Antarctic regions of Victoria
Land. There, between south latitude, 71° and 79°, the
land, as described by Sir James Ross, rises in places to
10,000, and even 15,000 feet in height, and the whole
country may almost be said to be covered by a universal
sheet of glacier ice, whic"h, protruding far seaward, rises
in cliffs from 150 to 250 feet above the level of the sea.
Such a wall, east of Mount Erebus, extended in 1841
for a distance of about 600 miles, and from it and parts
of the coast great tabular bergs break off, occasionally
bearing blocks of volcanic rocks. Sir James estimated
the average thickness of the glacier ice to be not more
than 1,008 feet, but in many cases this is doubtless an
under-estimate. This Antarctic continent is probably
as large as or larger than Australia, and every yard of
its surface must be ground and polished by the nearly
universal glacier that radiates from its centre to the
sea.

Having ascertained what are the signs by which a
glacier may be known, and also the signs left by ice-
bergs, I shall now show that a large part of the British
Islands has been subjected to glaciation, or the action
of glacier-ice.

BB2

372

CHAPTER XXIV.

OLD BRITISH GLACIERS.

THOSE who have closely observed the Highlands of
Scotland and of Cumberland, may remember that,
though the weather has had a powerful influence, ren-
dering the mountains in places rugged, jagged, and
cliffy, yet, notwithstanding this, their general outlines
are often remarkably rounded, flowing in great and
small mammillated curves, a configuration of ground
tolerably plain in the accompanying view (fig. 80),
especially in the rocks of the island in the foreground.
When we examine the valleys and plains in detail we
also find that the same mammillated structure frequently
prevails. These rounded forms are known in Switzerland
as roehes moutonnees, a name now in general use among
those who study the action of glacier-ice. Similar ice-
smoothed rocks strike the eye in many British valleys,
marked by the same kind of grooving and striation, so
characteristic of the rocks of Switzerland. Almost
every valley in the Highlands of Scotland bears them,
and the same is the case in Cumberland, Wales, and
other districts in the British Islands, and not in the
valleys alone, but also in the low countries as far as
Liverpool and the middle of England.

Considering all these things, geologists, led many
years ago by Agassiz, have by degrees come to the

I

: l; "•.

3 74 Old British and

conclusion that large parts of the northern hemisphere
were, during the ' glacial period,' more or less covered,
or nearly covered, with a coating of thick ice, in the
same way that the greater parts of Greenland, Spitz-
bergen, and the whole of Victoria Land are covered at
present. Britain formed part of this area, and, by the
long-continued grinding power of great glaciers nearly
universal over the northern half of our country and
Wales, the whole surface became moulded by ice. The
relics of this action still remain strongly impressed on
this country to attest its former power, and I need
scarcely say that the same kind of phenomena are
equally striking in Ireland.

It might be unsafe to form this conclusion merely
by an examination of such a small tract of country as
the British Islands, but when we consider the great
Scandinavian chain, and the northern half of Europe
generally, we find that similar phenomena are common
over the whole of that area, and in the North American
Continent, as far south as latitude 38° or 40° ; for when
the soil, or the superficial covering of other debris
is removed, we discover over large areas that the solid
rock is smoothed and polished, and covered with grooves
and striations% similar to those of which we have ex-
perience among the glaciers of the Alps. I do not
speak merely by common report in this matter, for I
know it from personal observation, both in the Old
Continent and the New. We know of no power on
earth, of a natural kind, which produces these indica-
tions except moving ice, and therefore geologists are
justified in attributing them, even on this great con-
tinental scale, to ice-action.

This conclusion is fortified by many other circum-
stances. Thus, I have stated that in the Alps there is

Other Glaciers, 375

evidence that the present glaciers were once on an
immensely larger scale than at present. The proof not
only lies in the polished and grooved rocks far removed
from the actual glaciers of the present day, but also in
numerous moraines on a scale so immense that the
largest now forming in the Alps are of pigmy size when
compared with them. Such a moraine is the great one
of the Dora Baltea, sometimes called the Moraine of
Ivrea, which, on the plains outside the mouth of the
Val d'Aosta, encloses a circuit of about sixty miles, and
rises above the plain more than 1,600 feet in height,
being altogether formed of mere accumulations of
moraine rubbish. Its width in places averages about
seven miles, as mapped by Grastaldi. Many others
might be cited. The same kind of phenomena occur in
the Altai Mountains, the Himalayah, the Caucasus, the
Eocky Mountains, the Andes, the Sierra Nevada, and
the Pyrenees of Spain, the Atlas of Morocco, the moun-
tains of Sweden and Norway, the Black Forest and the
Vosges, and in many other northern mountain chains or
clusters, great or small, that have been critically ex-
amined. In the southern hemisphere, where mountain
ranges are comparatively scarce, the same ancient exten-
sion of glaciers is prominent in New Zealand. There-
fore there can be no doubt that at late periods of the
world's history a climate or climates prevailed over large
tracts of the earth's surface generally, but not always,
of extreme arctic severity, for there were intermittent
episodes of comparative warmth, when what is misnamed
perpetual snow disappeared, or almost disappeared from
mountain regions of moderate height. The cold of these
minor cycles in time (for as shown by Dr. Croll, glacial
cycles alternate in the northern and southern hemi-
spheres) was produced by causes about which there have

376 Cause of Glacial Epochs.

been many guesses, and which, perhaps, are only now
beginning to be understood.

It is not very many years, since a great difference
in the geographical distribution of land and sea was
regarded as a possible or even a probable cause of the
occurrence of important changes of climate during
•Geological Time. If, said Lyell, in his earlier writings,
all the continental lands, were gathered in tropical
regions, and the rest of the globe were mainly covered
by sea, the climates of the world would be tropical and
temperate according to their latitudes, and if all the land
were mainly massed round the poles, even in the tropics
there would be no tropical heat such as they now endure,
while the greater portions of the northern and southern
hemispheres would suffer from climates of extreme
severity. In such a sketch as this it is needless to argue
the question, at all events as regards this special glacial
epoch, for the obvious reason that it is an established
fact that during most of that epoch, the continents of the
world, mountain chains and all, were distributed much
as they are at present, with occasional minor variations
in detail due to short local submergences.

Neither is it worth while to discuss the facile
explanation of variation of climate, being due to the sun
with all its planets travelling through alternate hot and
cold regions of space. Such an idea crops out now and
then in conversation, but I do not remember to have
met any educated physicist who seriously entertained
it.

I believe that the day may come, when both astro-
nomers and geologists will be forced to allow that, in
great cycles of geological time, changes have taken
place in the position of the earth's axis of rotation, in a
slowly cumulative manner, by gradual disturbances of

Cause of Glacial Epochs. 377

what is called the crust of the earth, but by no means
by sudden upheavals of vast mountain tracts at or near
the poles, or any where' else on the earth's surface ; and,
indeed, the phenomena of the vegetation of old geolo-
gical epochs in formations as far north as land has been
discovered, seems to me to point in that direction and
in no other. At all events it is plain, that no such
sweeping changes of physical geography have taken
place in those comparatively short episodes of geological
history, that have graduated into each other from the
beginning of this latest glacial epoch down to the
present day, and therefore it is needless to discuss the
question here.

There is, however, an astronomical cause which
seems to meet all the circumstances of any one glacial
epoch, and is therefore deserving of the gravest
attention. The question has been worked out with
great skill by Dr. James Croll, first, in various memoirs,
and latterly, in his celebrated work ' Climate and Time,'
and I can only state in a very sketchy manner some of
his main conclusions.

Alternations of cold and warm or temperate climates,
in the same latitudes, are in the first instance due to
the varying eccentricity of the orbit of the earth, by
which ' a host of physical agencies are brought into
operation, the combined eifect of which is to lower to a
very great extent the temperature of the hemisphere
whose winters occur in aphelion, and to raise to
nearly as great an extent the temperature of the
opposite hemisphere, whose winters of course occur
in perihelion.' It is perhaps possible that the orbit
of the Earth may become circular, at periods of time
prodigiously far removed from each other, but at
present, when the earth in its elliptical orbit is

378 Cause of Glacial Epochs.

furthest from the sun (aphelion), the distance is about
90 millions of miles, and its smallest distance (peri-
helion) is about 89,864,480 miles. The varying amount
of ellipticity is owing to the ever-changing positions of
the planets in our solar system within and without the
orbit of rotation of the earth, and we can imagine a state
of combination of the planets, the effect of the attraction
of which must be to lengthen the ellipse in the extremest
possible degree, so that the earth in aphelion would be
98^ millions of miles distant from the sun. This is not
a mere guess, for it has been approximately calculated
by Leverrier and other astronomers. The eccentricity
of the earth's orbit is at present decreasing, and it will
reach its minimum in about 24,000 years.

In connection with degrees of eccentricity, Dr.
Croll argues that the distribution of ocean-currents is
due to the system of winds, and in the modern world the
existing system of winds is due to those astronomical
causes that, by help of eccentricity have produced a
minor glacial epoch in part of the southern hemisphere
at the present day, and a remarkably mild one over
Western Europe and great part of the north. This
coincidence of winds and great ocean currents is shown
by Dr. Croll in a map, the most familiar of which to
us, being the westerly and south-westerly winds and
currents of the Gulf Stream, the warm winds from
which so largely raise the average temperature of
the British Islands and the whole of the western part of
Europe. There being nothing equivalent to this current
running south towards the great Antartic Continent of
Victoria Land, this circumstance, taken in connection
with the fact that the southern winter occurs in aphelion,
has produced in that region a minor glacial epoch, so
that in south latitudes, between about 64° and 78°, the

Cause of Glacial Epochs. 379

whole country is nearly entirely shrouded in glacier-ice,
and is altogether uninhabitable by man, while in the
northern hemisphere, in equivalent latitudes, there are
no parts of North America and Europe totally un-
inhabited, and even the north of Norway in summer,
when the sun does not set, is often inconveniently
warm, and the traveller is troubled with clouds of mos-
quitoes.

The present winter of the southern hemisphere being
when the earth is in aphelion, the result is this, that the
winter of the Antipodes is seven or eight days longer
than our own, for the further the earth is removed from
the sun, the more slowly it moves in its orbit, and the
nearer it is, it moves in proportion more rapidly, and
this somewhat lengthened winter, coupled with the
absence of heated water flowing south from equatorial
regions, has enabled the snows to accumulate, and being
but little affected even by the summer's sun, the country
is continually buried in ice, while in Norway and on the
shores of the Baltic, in equivalent latitudes, forests, grass,
and crops abound. The winter of our northern hemis-
phere is of course seven or eight days shorter than that
of the south, and the earth is at that season with us
nearest to the sun, and our summer being a little longer
though further from the sun. the effect of its heat
corresponds to the difference, irrespective of the power-
ful effect of the heated water of the Grulf Stream.

If such marked results are produced with this com-
paratively small amount of eccentricity, it is reasonable
to suppose that with the greatest possible eccentricity
the effect must be much greater, and it has been calcu-
lated that when this by slow degrees takes place, the
earth in aphelion is distant from the sun about 98-J
millions of miles, or nearly 7 millions of miles further

380 Glacial Epoch in Britain.

from the sun than when eccentricity is at a minimum, or
about 8 \ millions further than its greatest distance now.
The earth, therefore, in aphelion would be more than
1 4 millions of miles farther from the sun than when in
perihelion, and if, in accordance with the precession of
the equinoxes, it so happened that winter in the
northern hemisphere took place when the earth is
furthest from the sun, then by calculation it has been
shown that ; the direct heat of the sun in winter would
be one-fifth less during that season than at present,
and in summer one-fifth greater.' But this extra
amount of heat in summer would even less have
sufficed to remove the snow and ice then, than it suffices
to remove it from Victoria Land at the present day ;
for just as that region is all summer apt to be involved
in clouds and fogs by vapours, due to partial evaporation
of melting snow, even so on a greater scale the same
effect must have been produced in old epochs, when
greater glacial epochs took place alternately in the
northern and southern hemispheres.

It was during part, or in parts of one of these periods,
that great part of what is now the British Islands, was
last almost entirely covered with ice, for, as I have
already shown, similar phenomena are periodical, and
have occurred in several old geological epochs. I do
not say that our area consisted of islands during the
whole of the last Glacial epoch, and probably during
part of it they were united with the Continent, and the
average level of the land may then have been somewhat
higher than at present, by elevation of the whole, and
also because since the first appearance of British glaciers
it has suffered much degradation ; but whether this was
so or not, the mountains and much of the lowlands were
long covered with a universal coating of ice, pro-

382 Glacial Epoch in Britain.

bably as thick as that in the north of Greenland in the
present day. During this time all the Highland moun-
tains were literally buried in ice, which, partly flowing
eastward, joined a vast ice-sheet coming westerly and
southerly from Scandinavia. Jn another direction a
thick sheet of the same Highland ice pressed southward
into the valley of the Tay, where a low stratum of the
glacier passed eastward to the sea, while the remainder
pressed up the slopes and across the summits of the Ochil
Hills, and on to the valley of the Forth, where it found
a vent for a further outflow to the east, at a time
when the Bass Rock, Fidra Island, Inch Keith, Inch
Colon, and all the other beautiful islands of the Firth
of Forth, lay as mere roches moutonnees, buried so deep
under glacier-ice that it overflowed the eastern part
of the Lammermuirs and spread southward into
Northumberland. Some of these islands still retain
their ice-worn surfaces, while others, such as the Bass
and Fidra, have become scarred and cliffy by the action
of weather and the sea (figs. 80 and 81). Another part
of the great glacier-ice passed west across the Hebrides,
and southerly into the Firth of Clyde, where, passing
over Bute, and smothering and smoothing those large
mammillations the Cumbraes, it was reinforced by
the snows of Arran, and buried that c craggy ocean
pyramid,' Ailsa Craig. All the southern Highlands,
from Fast Castle on the east to Wigtonshire on the west
coast, were also covered with glacier ice, together with
Northumberland, Durham, and the beautiful dales of
Yorkshire, scooped out of the Carboniferous series of
rocks. Cumberland too was buried in ice, part of which
crossed the vale of Eden and over the hills beyond,
carrying detritus to the eastern shore of England. So
great was this ice-sheet that, joining with the ice-

\

384 Glacial Epochs.

stream coining from what is now the basin of the Clyde,
it stretched away south so far that it overflowed
Anglesea, and, so to speak, overcame the force of the
smaller tributary glaciers that descended from the
mountains of North Wales ; for the glacial striations of
Anglesea point not to the Snowdonian range, but about
25° to 30° east of north, directly toward the mountains
of Cumberland. South of Wales, in England, I know
of no definite signs of the direct action of glaciers.

Much of the Lower Boulder-clay is known as ' Till '
in Scotland ; and it was only by slow degrees that geo-
logists became reconciled to the idea that this Till is
nothing but moraine rubbish on a vast scale, formed
by those old glaciers that once covered the northern
part of our country. In fact, Agassiz, who held these
views, and Buckland who followed him, were something
like twenty years before their time ; and men sought to
explain the phenomena of this universal glaciation by
every method but the true one. Mr. Kobert Chambers
was, I think, the first after Agassiz who asserted that
Scotland had been nearly covered by glacier ice, and
now the subject is being worked out in all its details,
thus coming back to the old generalised hypothesis of
Agassiz, which is now accepted by many of the best
geologists of Europe and America.

The general result has been that the whole of the
regions of Britain mentioned ! have literally been
moulded by ice, that is to say, the country in many
parts was so much ground by glacier-action, on a conti-
nental scale, that though in later times it has been
more or less scarred by weather, enough remains of the
effects to tell to the observant eye the greatness of the

1 And equivalent regions in Ireland which in this book it is not
my object to describe.

Boulder-Clay. 385

power of moving ice. Suddenly strip Greenland of its
ice-sheet, and it will present a picture, something like
the greater part of Britain immediately after the close
of this Grlacial period.

During the time that these results were being pro-
duced by glacial action, there were occasional important
oscillations in temperature, so that the ice sometimes
increased and sometimes diminished, and land animals
that lived habitually outside the great glacier limits, at
intervals advanced north or retreated south with the
retreating or advancing ice.

Evidence of the same kind is not wanting in
England, for erratic stones and large blocks of granite,
gneiss, felspathic traps, Carboniferous Limestone, &c.
are scattered over the west and east coasts and
the central counties of England. Boulders of Shap
granite of Cumberland are comfnon in Staffordshire,
and even in the valley of the Severn, about twelve miles
north of Cheltenham, and they have also been borne
across the central watershed of the north into the plains
of Yorkshire, near Darlington, and further south on the
banks of the Humber. This distribution of erratic
stones, on the east of England, throws much light on
the subject of the motion of large sheets of glacier-ice,
and therefore it is worth while to give a few details,
some of which are probably not generally known.1

At and a little south of Berwick-upon-Tweed, where
the sea-cliffs are clear, or, when the Till has been re
moved, the surfaces of quarries of Carboniferous Lime-
stone are found to be ice-polished and grooved, the
striations point from 10° to 12° south of east, in the

1 The observations were made in 1863 during an examination of
the glacial accumulations on the coast-cliffs by Professor J. Geikie,
Mr. Aveline, and myself, and are extracted from my note-book.

C C

386 Glacial Epoch.

direction, in fact, of the onward march of the vast glacier
that flowed from the Highland mountains down the
valley of the Forth, and overflowing the Lammermuir
Hills, spread across the border into England. The
stones in the Till are scratched, and consist of Carbon-
iferous Limestone (very angular at the base of the Till)
and of other materials derived from the northern hills.
Some of the boulders are from one to two yards in
diameter, and the beach-like sands and gravels that
overlie the Till are charged with large blocks of lime-
stone and porphyry at the base, and many broken sea-
shells. In places these sands are strangely contorted,
as if they had been disturbed and pushed on by moving
ice. The large blocks in them are of the Carboniferous
Limestone of the country, and the smaller ones consist
of what seems to be Silurian Lammermuir grit, granite,
probably from the same area, and felspathic and augitic
porphyries, &c.

About ten miles further south, near Belford, the
glacial striations trend about 1 5° south of east, and still
point towards the upper part of the estuary of the Forth,
and much of the low ground round Belford and Lucker
is formed of those singular mounds, called Kames in
Scotland, and Eskirs in Ireland, beautiful examples of
which are known to many persons at Carstairs and
Carnwath in Lanarkshire, near Stranraer in Wigtonshire,
and in many other areas in Scotland.1 So identical are
the phenomena, that in my note-book I find that I
compare the English examples with those of Carstairs
and Carnwath, and like the existing lakes and pools in
these, the Kames of Belford and Lucker in older times

1 For details respecting Scottish Kames, see ' Great Ice Age,'
J. Geikie, chapter xix.

Boulder- Clay. 38 7

held lakes and tarns in the hollows of the mounds, but
now filled with peat.

On the coast near Alnmouth, in Northumberland,
there is a large sand-bank overlooking the river with
intercalations of fine loamy clay. The sand contains
fragments of coal and other Carboniferous rocks, and in
the middle of the sand there lies a lenticular patch of
Boulder-clay, from six to ten feet thick, full of angular
ice-scratched stones confusedly mingled with the clay.
They consist of pieces of Carboniferous Limestone,
porphyries, sandstone, &c. the largest being about a
foot in diameter.

Some miles south of Blyth there is a cliff forming
a promontory on the coast, made of boulder-clays, near
Seaton. It consists of two divisions, rarely separated
by thin lenticular bands of sand. The lower band of
greyish-blue clay is charged with large boulders, while
in the upper one, which is of a brown colour, the stones
are much smaller. The lower boulder-clay seems to
belong to the great glacier period that produced the Till,
and the upper band to a later glacial episode, and ex-
cept in the parting of sand, there are no signs of true
stratification. The large blocks, which are very
numerous, chiefly consist of Carboniferous sandstone
and conglomerate, which are often from one to two
yards in diameter. Blocks of Carboniferous Limestone
are fewer in number, as might be expected, for the
Boulder-clay lies on Coal-measures, while the Limestone
occurs more than twenty miles to the north and north-
west. Mingled with these are fragments of granite and
greenstone.

On both banks of the Tyne, above Newcastle, there
are great banks of sand, gravel, and tilly clay, all
charged with ice-scratched stones of no great size. They

c c 2

388 Glacial Epoch.

consist of Coal-measure sandstones and conglomerate,
Carboniferous Limestone, and more sparingly, Lammer-
muir grits and granite. In pits thirty feet in depth,
beneath sands, the clay is very fine, containing a few
scratched stones, and we were informed that this clay
has been sunk through to a depth of fifty fathoms
(300 feet), so that the bottom of this pre-glacial river-
valley is much below the level of the sea.

Under Tynemouth, at the mouth of the river, there
is a high cliff of stiff Boulder-clay, about 50 or 60 feet
in height, facing North Shields. Stones and boulders
large and small are scattered all through the clay from
bottom to top approximately in the following propor-
tions : —

Carboniferous Sandstone i. . 34
„ Limestone . . 27

„ Coal „ . . 10 • 80 per cent,

„ Ironstone ... 5

Shale . . .4.

Lamm ermuir grit . . - . . .19 „
Greenstone . . . . -, . • »• 1 „

There are several irregular thin bands of gravel
and sand in the Till. It will be observed that except-
ing two insignificant outlying patches of Magnesian
Limestone at Tynemouth, all the rocks up to and beyond
the borders of Scotland belong to the Carboniferous
series, and the result is, that of the ice-borne erratics ,
80 per cent, belong to these formations, and only 19
per cent, to the more distant Silurian grits of the
Lammernmir range.

At Sunderland, about a mile north of the harbour
light, there is a section of boulder-clay lying on the
Magnesian Limestone. The surface of this rock has
been polished by glacier ice, and the striations trend
very nearly from north-east to south-west. The over-

Bo ulder- Clay. 389

lying clay has the character^ of genuine Till, and the
change in the direction of the striations from those pre-
viously noticed, may possibly be due to the pressure of
the inferred Scandinavian ice-sheet, which is supposed to
have united with that coming from Scotland, and may
for a space have deflected the line of its onward march
from the NNW. On the other hand, it may be a mere
local accident connected with a later part of the Glacial
epoch, when a distinct individual glacier flowed from the
far western watershed, more than a thousand feet in
height, about the sources of the Wear, which may have
spread into a fan-shape as it reached what is now the
shore. Such smaller glaciers existed, for in these
long dales of Durham and Yorkshire there are distinct
moraines, which mark the gradual decline of the glaciers,
and through which, and through the Boulder-clay, the
rivers have cut their modern channels.

Stones derived from the Magnesian Limestone first
appear in the Till south of Tynemouth. In the neigh-
bourhood of Sunderland, the percentage of various kinds
of rocks seems to be nearly as follows • —

Carboniferous Sandstone . . . 29 >
„ Limestone . . .21

Coal 6 59 per cent.

„ Shale . . . . 2 '

Magnesian Limestone 22 „

Lammermuir grits, &c. . . . . . 16 „

Greenstones and Basalts . . . 4 ,,

The cliff is about 30 feet in height, and shows the
section given in fig. 82.

The Till seems to have been worn on the surface
before the deposition of 3 and 4.

It will be observed by consulting any geological
map, that, as in the previous case, the large percentages

390 Glacial Epoch.

of Carboniferous rocks have travelled from the wide-
spread Carboniferous country to the north, that the
smaller percentage of Magnesian Limestone fragments
must have been derived from the small area immediately

FIG. 82.

1. Kotten nodular Magnesian Limestone.

2. Stiff brown Till with blocks and scratched stones. The
largest are of Carboniferous Limestone and Magnesian Lime-
stone, from 1 to 1^ yards in diameter, and 1 block 2^ feet of
Lammermuir grit.

3. Sand and loamy beds with scratched stones, rare.

4. Finely laminated clay.

north of Sunderland, occupied by that formation for a
distance of about 9 or 10 miles, and the decreased pro-
portion of Lammermuir rocks have had to travel not
less than 70 miles.

Somewhat further south we find 57 per cent, of Car-
boniferous rocks, 32 per cent, of Magnesian Limestone,
and only 9 per cent, of Lammermuir grits.

About half way between Sunderland and Seaham,
where on a sea-cliff stiff Boulder-clay or Till lies on the
Magnesian Limestone, the latter is covered with
glacial groovings which run from NNW. to SSE. and
all along the sea-cliffs of this neighbourhood there is a
lower Boulder-clay with a very irregular surface, on
which there lies sand and gravel, often very much con-
torted, which in its turn is overlaid by patches of an
upper Boulder-clay.

Boulder-Clay.

At Seaham ironworks and elsewhere, such sands and
gravels in the middle of the Till frequently thin away
in wedge-shaped ends.

FIG. 83.

I. Magnesian Limestone.
3. Sand and gravel.

2. Lower Boulder-clay.
4. Upper Boulder-clay.

It is unnecessary and would be wearisome to the
reader, were I to describe all the details of the sections
I have examined between Hartlepool near the mouth
of the Tees, and Spurn Point at the mouth of the
Humber. Suffice it to say that, in the Liassic and
Oolitic region of Yorkshire, the valleys that open upon
the sea are apt to be more or less filled with boulder-clays,
sands, and gravels, and the same phenomena occur in
many parts of the high sea-cliffs. Thus at Cromer Point,
about 2| miles north of Scarborough, there are beds
of sand and gravel in places about 120 feet thick,
which lie on an undulating surface of shales, &c., of the
Oolitic series. The embedded pebbles largely consist
of sandstones (Oolitic in part), grits, porphyry, &c., and
at the top, about 130 feet above the sea, there are beds
of clayey gravel with small stones and fragments of sea-
shells.

In Cayton Bay, about three miles south of Scar-
borough, lying upon Oxford Clay, there is Boulder-clay,
with a great variety of boulders of Carboniferous Lime-
stone, Lammermuir grit, basalts, greenstones, and other
rocks that lie nearer the spot. Many of these are sub-
angular and many are well rounded, and both kinds are

392 Glacial Epoch.

often marked with glacial scratchings. Above this
Boulder-clay there are beds of gravel with fragments of
marine shells, and the embedded stones only show the
ghosts of scratchings, as if they had been nearly
obliterated by trituration. Above this gravel, Boulder-
clay again occurs in a little hollow, in which there are
deposits of fine clay and shell-marl, with Paludinas, &c.
The relics of such old pools are common on the surfaces
of irregular deposition of the boulder-clays all the way
from Northumberland to the Humber, and doubtless far
beyond.

On the coast, from one to two miles north of Brid-
lington, lying on chalk, there are beds of Till interstrati-
fied with beds of sand and gravel, parts of the Boulder-
clay among the Till being much contorted. In one case
they were seen to lie in an old valley of erosion in the
Chalk, the lowest strata consisting of stratified brecciated
chalk gravel, overlaid by sand, on which there rested
chalky sand and gravel, which in its turn is overlaid
by Till with irregular minor inter stratifications of sand ;
and in another case, about three miles north of Bridling-
ton, fragments of sea-shells occur in the gravel about
1 50 feet above the sea. Near Bramston, in Holderness,
a few miles south of Bridlington, on the shore, there
are large boulders of gneiss, basalt, diorite, &c.

Immediately north of Hornsea, about twelve miles
south of Bridlington, the Till, which partly forms a sea-
cliff fifty or sixty feet high, is very irregularly bedded,
and contains numerous scratched stones of flint and
chalk, Carboniferous Limestone (more scarce), Silurian
grit, granite, gneiss, &c. The quantity of stones of
chalk is quite a new and remarkable feature in the
section, for north of Flamborough Head, in the Oolitic
country, I found none. The Till, which forms the base

Boulder- Clay. 393

<r

of one end of the cliff, is overlaid by sand and gravel,
which again is overlaid by lenticular patches of Till,
covered by higher gravels, on which, in a hollow, there
occur clays with Paludinas deposited in an old fresh-
water pool. The same kinds of sections, with variations,
are found all the way from Hornsea to Withernsea and
Spurn Point, and here and there many large boulders
of granite, Carboniferous and Lias Limestones, Sand-
stones with Stigmarias, &c., lie on the shore, bearing
witness to the recession of the cliff, which is fast
wearing away under the united influence of landslips,
and the action of breakers and tides on the fallen masses
of clay. Nor do the remains of sea-shells cease, for at
Out Newton, by the shore, the base of the cliff, in which
frequent landslips occur, consists of stiff blue Till with
erratic blocks and many fragmentary shells, overlaid by
clay with smaller stones, on which lies well-stratified
warp clay, surmounted by beds of sea-sand and gravel,
which again is overlaid by red Till with scratched
stones. On the shore of the Humber, also, when exca-
vations were in progress connected with the building
of a fort, beds of sand, gravel, and warp were exposed,
containing sea-shells intensely contorted, as if the strata
had been subjected to strong lateral pressure.

Between the Humber and the Wash I have no per-
sonal knowledge of the coast sections, which are of the
same general nature as those of Holderness. South and
south-east of the Wash, as far as the neighbourhood of
the Thames, much has been written about glacial
detritus, with the details of which I will not now
meddle. It is enough to state that by Mr. Searles
Wood, junr. and Mr. F. W. Harmer, they have been
divided into Lower and Upper Boulder-clays, between
which there are beds of sand and gravel, often contorted,

394 Glacial Epoch.

thus presenting points of resemblance to the sections
on the coast which I have described between Berwick-
on-Tweed and the mouth of the Humber. These sands
and gravels which contain sea-shells have been named
by these gentlemen ' Middle Glacial.'

The Upper Grlacial Boulder-clay has been called by
Mr. Wood and Mr. Skertchly the great Chalky Boulder-
clay, from the circumstance that it chiefly consists of
chalk, ground up by an advancing glacier travelling
frcm north-east to south-west, the chalky and flinty
debris being sparingly mingled with fragments of
Oolite, quartz, basalt, granite, &c., sometimes smooth
and striated. Though chiefly formed of chalky material,
yet when found lying on Kimeridge Clay it is found to
be mingled with the detritus of that formation, and
when it reaches the Oxford Clay, all three are inter-
mingled. The Boulder-clay lying on each formation
that lay under the glacier ice-sheet, which was invading
the country from north to south, always partakes of
the nature of the underlying rock, and the total area
occupied by this chalky Boulder-clay must, according
to Mr. Skertchly, have been more than 3,000 square
miles in the south-east of England. If, however, this
supposed glacier extended as far south as Romford,
where there is Boulder-clay with scratched chalk-flints
and masses of Oxford and Kimeridge Clay, then the
area covered by the great Chalky Boulder-clay and its
southern continuation instead of 3,000 square miles
must have covered 9,000 or 10,000 square miles of
ground.

It must now be evident to the reader, that on the
east coast of England, and on the adjoining ground in
the interior, there is no want of evidence of a cold
episode or of episodes when snow and glacier-ice largely

Boulder- Clay. 395

prevailed in these regions under some form or other.
A minority of persons who excel in the art of doubting
will of course dissent for a time, but the proof is too
strong to be withstood by commonplace minds. On^the
whole, also, it would appear that the complete glacial de-
posits of the east of England consist of Lower and Upper
Boulder-clays, between which there lie stratified sands
and gravels containing sea-shells, and that these strata
were deposited in the sea during a temporary intermis-
sion of the cold of a Glacial Epoch. Shells, sometimes
fragmentary and sometimes entire, are also found
plentifully enough in the Boulder-clays of Holderness
and elsewhere.

In older times the origin of these Boulder-clays was
attributed chiefly to icebergs that, laden with moraine
matter, broke from glaciers that descended, during a
period of partial submergence, to the sea, and which,
floating south and melting, scattered boulders and
stony debris mixed with fine mud across the bottom of
the sea.

But of late there has been a tendency in some
writers to attribute the origin of all, or almost all of the
British Boulder- clays to the direct action of glaciers,
and to look upon them as ground-moraine matter, the
moraine profonde of Swiss and French authors, which
is supposed to have a modern parallel in the vast quan-
• tity of debris, believed to underlie and be pushed for-
ward by the mighty ice-sheet that passes seaward from
the great basin of central Greenland, and finds its vents
through unnumbered fiords into Baffin's Bay. On these
grounds both the Boulder-clays of the east of England,
are looked upon by Mr. Skertchly as having been
formed by the direct action of glaciers, the upper
Boulder-clay being the work of the larger and later ice-

3 9 ^ Glacial Epoch.

sheet, when it so happened that the cold of that region
became most intense.

Assuming this theory to be true, the old glacier
must have reached the plateau of Romford that over-
looks the valley of the Thames, and the low country on
the coast of Essex, near Southend. One serious difficulty
to its acceptance occurs in the fact, that on the coast-cliff
near Lowestoft there are beds of Boulder-clay which
overlie thick strata of soft false-bedded sands with gravel,
and these sands lie apparently quite conformably and
undisturbed beneath the Boulder-clay. If the latter
was the ground-moraine that underlay a heavy glacier
pressing southward, it is hard to understand why the
sands show no signs of pressure and glacial erosion.
Neither is it necessary to suppose that glaciers are
always needed for the production of ice-polished sur-
faces of rock and for the making of Boulder-clay, for,
as shown by Professor H. Youle Hind, the formation of
both on a large scale is now and has been for long in
progress on the north-east coast of Labrador, through
the agency of ' Pan ice/ which ' is derived from Bay
ice, floes, and coast ice, varying from five to ten or twelve
feet in thickness, all of which are broken up during
spring storms.* This broken ice is pressed on the coast by
winds, 'and being pushed by the unfailing Arctic
current, which brings down a constant supply of floe-
ice, the pans rise over all the low-lying parts of the
islands, grinding and polishing exposed shores,' and
removing ' with irresistible force every obstacle which
opposes their force . . . and the masses pushed or
torn from those surfaces . . . are urged into the sea
and rounded into boulder forms by the rasping and
polishing pans.' Here, too, goes on the process of
manufacturing Boulder-clay, for the deep hollows and

Ice- marks. 397

ravines, at present under the sea, the records of former
glacial work, are being filled with clay, sand, unworn
and worn rock fragments, producing a counterpart of
some varieties of Boulder-clay. l I have quoted thus
far from Professor Hind's admirable memoir, for it
has sometimes been stated, that all the contorted
Boulder-clays and interbedded sand, with shells entire
and broken in England, were pushed bodily upon the land
by a vast advancing sheet of glacier-ice, even to heights
of a thousand and twelve hundred feet. As the British
Islands during the Glacial epoch were more than once
much in the same state as the north of Labrador, there
can be little doubt that some of the British glacial phe-
nomena were produced by the same causes.

1 See 'Notes on some Geological Features of the North-East ern
Coast of Labrador,' by Henry Youle Hind, M.A., ' Canadian Natu-
ralist,' vol. viii.

398

CHAPTER XXV.

OLD BKITISH GLACIERS CONTINUED.

I SHALL now briefly describe some of the broader features
of the glacial phenomena of the western coasts of
England, with here and there necessary allusions to and
descriptions of the interior of the country.

It is a self-evident proposition, that when cold began
to increase sufficiently to produce glaciers in Britain,
these in their infancy must have been first formed in
the high regions of the north, where precipitation of
snow was greatest among the mountains of the High-
lands. As the climate got more severe, such glaciers
would spread from the upland glens in all directions,
and by-and-by, as cold and precipation became more and
more intense, and at last the whole mountain land, like
the interior of Greenland, got smothered in ice, a pro-
digious onflow of glacier ice spread from the Highlands
west into the Atlantic across the Outer Hebrides, and
south into the North or Irish Channel along the ice-
buried valleys of the Sound of Jura, Loch Fyne, and the
whole of the Firth of Clyde, in the midst of which the
island of Arran then formed, what it may seem presump-
tuous to call, only a great roche moutonnee ; or if any
of its peaks then stood above the surface of this mer de
glace, they yielded but a feeble contribution of ice to
swell the general mass of the glacier. Escaped from
the Highlands, the glacier split upon the island of

Ice-marks. 399

Rathlin off the coast of Antrim,1 and being largely re-
inforced by tributary ice that descended from the Gallo-
way mountains and all the high lands, the slopes of
which, then filled with tributary ice, now send rivers
into the Solway, the advancing mass invaded the
area called the Irish Sea, where, it was still further
swelled by the glaciers that descended from the moun-
tains of Cumberland.

These facts are further confirmed by observations in
the Isle of Man by the Rev. J. Gr. Gumming, who shows
that the chief glacial striations in that island trend
from NNE. to SSW. as if the ice that made them,
travelled from the high ground of Kirkcudbrightshire
and the northern borders of the Solway Firth.

If we now go into the interior of the country what
do we find ? First, it is obvious to anyone with an eye
educated in glacial phenomena, that the whole of the
mountains of Cumbria and Westmoreland have been
buried in ice during the period of extremest cold.
Though now somewhat ruined by time, their mam-
millated forms proclaim it, and in the time that the
glacier-ice attained its maximum, that ice, pressed on
by ice coming from the north, must have passed south-
ward into and far beyond Morecambe Bay. East of
this mountain-land, between the rivers Kent and Lune,
almost all the striations run about SSW. while a very
few trend near south-westerly, while on all the high
Fells on both sides of the Kibble, the prevailing
direction of the striae is either south or a few degrees
west of south, as shown by Mr. R. H. Tiddeman in his
memoir c On the Ice-Sheet in North Lancashire and
adjacent parts of Yorkshire and Westmoreland.' 2 I am

1 Vividly described by Mr. J. Geikie, * Great Ice Age,' chap. xxiv.

2 'Journal of the Geological Society,' vol. xviii., 1872, p. 471.

400 Glaciers of North Wales.

well acquainted with the country, and can vouch for the
accuracy of his observations, and what makes them of
special value in this inquiry is, that such striations range
from a few feet up to 40, 100, 200, 300, 550, 775,
1,100, and 1,375 feet above the sea, and at many
intermediate elevations.

One great fact which they teach is this, that the
broad and thick ice-sheet, urged onward from the north,
buried the whole of the region described, and all the
ground to the east as far as the sea, and further, that the
glacier moulding itself to the shape of the country
(after the manner of all glaciers), was pressed right
onward with so much force, that the long northern
slopes of the east and west valleys offered comparatively
no more impediment to its onward march, than an
occasional transverse bar of rock hinders the onward
flow of a river. Occasionally there are striations
that do not quite conform to the rule, but in some cases
I feel convinced that these were due to undercurrents
in the ice in some of the deeper valleys, and at a later
date to minor glaciers that got specialised in the valleys
during the decline and disappearance of the ice-sheet.

At Liverpool, and on the opposite side of the Mersey,
Mr. Morton observed on the Keuper Sandstone certain
ice-grooves, trending S. 35° E.1, and it seems to me that
this direction is connected with the circumstance that
when the northern ice-sheet reached the rising ground
of Denbighshire and Flintshire, it was deflected to the
right and left, and while one part flowed south-easterly
across the plains and undulations of Cheshire, another
part flowed south-westerly, and, scraping the coast hills
of North Wales, overwhelmed Anglesea and the low
ground of Lleyn that forms the north horn of Cardigan
1 * Reports of British Association, Liverpool,' 1870.

North Wales. 401

Bay. This I shall presently prove, for having brought
our ice so far south, it is now time to explain the part
played by the mountains of Wales in this glacial
history.

When glaciers first began to form among the moun-
tains of the Highlands of Scotland, from 200 to 300
miles north of Wales, though the heights of the latter
region may have been far more snowy than they ever
are now, yet at first it is probable that the snow did not
continue through the year, and therefore no glaciers
were formed. But in time, as the great glaciers ad-
vanced, and the cold increased and snow in North WTales
became perennial, then glaciers began to be formed,
first in the high valleys in the upper recesses of the
mountains ; and as the climate and precipitation of snow
grew more severe, these glaciers must have waxed in
size, till at length they filled all the valleys, and in-
truded on the plains and low undulating grounds be-
yond. How far south they extended from the moun-
tains of Merionethshire I do not know, but probably
the ice-flow went far into South Wales. Neither is it
possible to say how far these early glaciers of Snow-
donia stretched across the broad undulations of Ang-le-

o

sea, for, if they did so, the marks that they made were
afterwards entirely obliterated by the onward march of
the great northern glacier which I have already de-
scribed, and which I have no doubt extended southward
into St. Greorge's Channel. In aid of this statement I
would quote the opinion of the Keverend M. Close, and
the later observations of Professor Hull. The central
plain of Ireland forms a great basin, surrounded by the
broken mountains of the south from Kerry to Wicklow,
and of the west and north-west from Galway to Donegal,

D D

4O2 G lactation of ' Angle sea.

Like Greenland of the present day, but on a smaller
scale, the whole of this basin of more than 120 miles
in diameter was deeply buried in snow and ice, which,
in glacier fashion, found vents through the broad gaps
in the circling mountains, westward into the Atlantic,
and eastward in the direction of what is now the Irish
Sea, to join the ice-sheet that worked its way south
from Scotland and the north of England.1

If all this be true, it is easy to see how any older
ice-grooves in Anglesea must have been obliterated, and
in aid of this argument I will now give a more par-
ticular account of the glaciation of Anglesea, seeing
that it has an important bearing on the whole question
of the great northern glacier.

The structure of the low ground of Caernarvonshire,
within three or four miles of the Menai Straits, in
almost all respects resembles that of Anglesea, both in
its geology and physical geography. The Menai Straits

1 With Messrs. Hicks, Homfray, and Etheridge, near St. David's,
on the coast of Pembrokeshire, I have seen well marked glacial
striations on the rocks on the coast at Trwyn-hwrddyn, Porth-clais,
and Pen-dal-deryn. In the first two they point NW. and SE., and
in the last NE. and SW. Boulder-clay with ice-scratched stones
is common, and chalk flints mingled with stones native to the
district, are not uncommon on the mainland and in Ramsey Island.
Flints are also found in quantity, mingled with ice-scratched
erratics, all along the low ground of Glamorganshire north of
Bristol Channel between Cardiff and Bridgend, and Boulder-clay is
indeed common here and there all over South Wales. When the
Geological Survey was in that district glacial phenomena had just
begun to be heard of, and the 'drift,' as it was termed, was chiefly
looked upon as a troublesome superficial deposit that concealed the
boundary lines of the solid rocks beneath. Till some qualified
person surveys the whole of the glacial phenomena of South Wales
and the adjacent counties in a connected manner, it would be pre-
mature to connect the striations in Pembrokeshire with the
northern glacier described in this book.

G lactation of Anglesea. 403

divide the two regions; but Carboniferous rocks form
the larger part of either shore, and the Straits may
be considered simply as a long shallow valley, the
bottom of which happens to lie beneath the level
of the sea. The question thus arises — At what epoch
and by what means was Anglesea separated from the
mainland ?

Looking north-west across the country from any of
the minor heights a mile or two inland between Bangor
and Caernarvon, no one would even suspect the existence
of the Straits. The whole of Anglesea is low ; and only
one steep escarpment, a minor one, occurs in the island
— that of the Old Ked Sandstone overlooking Traeth
Dulas, which rises abruptly above the tidal flat of the
Traeth to the height of about 250 feet.

The entire island may, indeed, be looked on as a
gently undulating plain, the higher parts of which
attain an average elevation of from 200 to 300 feet above
the level of the sea ; while most of its principal brooks
and small rivers run north-east and south-west, in
depressions with gently sloping sides ; and only one in-
land valley, with the same trend, is of any marked
importance, namely that of Malldraeth Marsh, in which
a small coalfield lies. There are, however, a few
exceptions to the average levels mentioned above — the
summit of Holy head mountain being 709 feet, and Grarn,
near Llanfairynghornwy, 558 feet above the sea, while
the greatest elevation crossed by the sections of the
Geological Survey (sheet No. 40) is only about 400 feet
high.

On the opposite side of the Straits, the same kind of
low, undulating scenery prevails for several miles inland,
with the same kind of minor north-east valleys, one
marked instance of which occurs in a long, shallow, and

D D 2

404 Glaciation of Anglesea.

narrow valley, in, or alongside of which, the Caernarvon
and Bangor road runs for several miles.

The surface of the ground on both sides of the
Straits is to a considerable extent composed of glacial
detritus, with erratic boulders large and small ( from the
north), gravel, sometimes sand, and clay, from which any
number of ice-scratched stones may be gathered from
well-exposed sections, as, for example, in the Boulder-clay
coast-cliff of the Mount at Beaumaris, or anywhere else
in similar cliffs round the shores of Anglesea, or, inland,
in occasional pits and fresh cuttings on both sides of the
Straits. Through these glacial accumulations the rocks
of the country frequently appear, sometimes in barren
tracts of considerable extent, sometimes in small isolated
bosses of gneiss or grit, often covered with heath or
furze, while the more fertile grounds of the whole of
Anglesea consist chiefly of glacial detritus, with here
and there small alluvial meadows by the sides of the
streams.

When freshly stripped of glacial debris, or even of
a mere thin turfy soil, the underlying rocks are often
found to be ice-smoothed and marked with glacial striae,
running generally from about 30° to 40° west of south.
The larger valleys of Malldraeth Marsh and the Menai
Straits (with others of minor note) run in hollows in
the same general direction.

I have already shown that in mountain regions
where glaciers exist, or have in past times existed, the
disturbances of the earth's crust that produced the
elevation of the mountains go back to periods long
antecedent to the last great Glacial epoch. Thus the
first great upheaval of the Alps is of pre-Miocene age,
and the last, as far as the Alps is concerned, closed the
Miocene epoch, while the mountains of Scotland and

Glaciers of North Wales. 405

Cumberland were mountains at least before Old Red
Sandstone times, and the last great movement of the
rocks of Wales is certainly older than the Permian epoch,
and, probably, like the mountains of Cumberland, very
much older.

There was therefore plenty of time, in what is now
Wales, long before the beginning of the great Glacial
episode, for the more ordinary agents of denudation to
have formed deep valleys, down which, when that episode
began, the growing glaciers might gravitate, deepening
their channels as they pressed forward, and mammillating
and striating the rocks over which they slid ; for the
great original valleys of the mountains were by no
means entirely scooped out, but merely modified by the
glaciers.

Thus, for example, it happens in Wales that all the
striations in the valley of Dolgelly and the estuary of
the Mawddach, in Merionethshire, follow the south-
westerly trend of the valley, the glacier that filled it
when at its greatest being fed by the snows of the slopes
of Cader Idris and Aran Mowddwy, and those of the
tributary valleys of Afon Eden and the Mawddach that
joined it from the north ; while from a central low
watershed, near the sources of the Wnion, another branch
pressed north-easterly, into and far beyond the region
now occupied by Bala lake.

The striated rocks exposed among the sands at low
tide in the ectuary of the Mawddach, and the islet-like
heathy bosses of rock that stand out amid the marshy
moss opposite Barmouth, are merely roches mou-
tonnees, once buried deep beneath the glacier that
pressed forward to join the great northern glacier that
then filled Cardigan Bay.

In like manner all the western valleys of the

406 Glaciers of North Wales.

Cambrian mountains of Merionethshire, such as those
of Afon Atro, Ardudwy, and Afon Ysgethin, are marked
by deep grooves and striations pointing more or less
westward, according to the trend of the valleys.

In ascending the valley from Llanbedr on the coast
south of Harlech to Llyn-cwm-bychan, the experienced
eye is at once attracted by the long smooth sweeps of
the ice-ground rocks of Mynydd Llanbedr, all trending
towards the west, and from the summit of Graig-ddrwg,
looking south towards Khinog-fawr, the same effects
of old glacier-ice are seen on a still grander scale. The
deep craggy pass of Bwlch-drws- Ardudwy is itself
strongly ice-grooved, while the western flanks of Graig-
ddrwg are covered with deeply incised striations, up to
the very summit of the mountain, all trending west-
ward. The rock-bound hollows of Llyn-cwm-bychan,
and other mountain turns, tell in like manner of the
effects of thick masses of glacier-ice, as I shall after-
wards explain.

The broad flat moors and roughly hilly, but not
mountainous country of Cors-goch, Afon Eden, Traws-
fynydd, and indeed all the lower ground bounded by the
splendid amphitheatre of scarped mountains formed by
the Arenigs, the Manods, the Moelwyns, and the Cam-
brian steeps of Diphwys, Graig-ddrwg, Rhinog-fawr,
and Cefn- cam, were at the same time filled to the brim
with deep accumulations of snow and ice, from which
were discharged radiating currents of glaciers, one
pressing southward to swell the ice-stream that filled
the valley of what is now the estuary of the Mawddach,
another through the Pass of Afon Treweryn between
Arenig Mawr and Arenig Bach eastward towards Bala
and the valley of the Dee, there to be aided in the
work of erosion by the glaciers that descended from

Glaciers of North Wales. 407

either flank of Aran Mowddwy. Further west, swelled
by all the snows of the Manods and the Moelwyns, a
great ice-stream flowed south-west, into what is now
the broad flat of Traeth Bach, there to be joined by
another tributary which, partly descending Cwm Llydaw
and Cwm-llan from the high eastern slopes of Snowdon,
rilled Nant Grwynant, and debouched into the area now
occupied by the marshy flat of Traeth Mawr. In all of
these the directions of the striations necessarily conform
to the trend of the valleys — easterly, southerly, or
south-west, as the case may be. And this must have
been the case even though it happened that the moun-
tain valleys and broader amphitheatres were tilled to
the very brim, and overflowing with ice and snow in
such a manner that, had there been human eyes to
look on the scene, it would have been impossible to
have specialised each individual glacier. In such a
case, however, there were many deviations consequent
on under and upper ice-currents, the upper parts of
glaciers diverging from the direction of the under-flovv,
and passing across what are now low watersheds, like
that of Llyn Cawlyd, which lies between the valley of
the Llugwy, arid that of the Conwy — a circumstance
to which special attention has been called by the Rev.
W. T. Kingsley.

On the north-west slopes of the Snowdonian range,1
great glaciers poured their ice-streams down the val-
leys of Llyniau Nant-y-llef to the west, and of Llyn
Cwellyn, Llanberis, and Nant-ffrancon, the last deriving
additional power by aid of the tributary ice-flows of
Cwm-llafar and Afon-gaseg, the chief gathering grounds

1 I use the word range as a convenient term. There is no
range of mountains in North Wale's. Taken collectively they form
a group.

408 Glaciation of Anglesea.

of which, were the cliffy cirques on the western flanks
of Carnedd Llewelyn and Carnedd Dafydd, which, with
Y-Foel-fras, formed one great nursery of the glaciers of
Caernarvonshire, sending off ice-flows eastward to Capel
Curig and the valley of the Conwy, and westward to
where Bangor now stands and the Lavan sands.

None of these glaciers, at a certain epoch, quite
reached the region now occupied by the Menai Straits,
but escaping from the higher bounding-walls of their
valleys, they spread out in the shape of broad fans on the
north-western slopes of the minor hills that now over-
look the Straits. This is partly proved by the northerly
curve of the glacial striations at the mouth of the Pass
of Llanberis, on the flatter area above the steep slopes
of the slate-quarries by Llyn Peris and Llyn Padarn.

If, as I believe, these glacier masses did not cross
the Straits into Anglesea, we must look for some other
cause for the production of the north-east and south-
west striations which mark the whole of that broad
region.

These striations point directly towards the moun-
tains of Cumberland, a country which, lying further
north, was at one time buried so deeply under snow
and ice, that almost all its mountains look simply like
gigantic roches moutonnees. From Cumberland, as
already stated, a vast mass of ice flowed southward ;
and reinforced by the ice-streams that came from the
mountains of Carrick in the south of Scotland, and
from the basin of the Clyde, it overspread the region
now occupied by the shallow sea of Morecambe, Lan-
caster, and Liverpool bays, that lie between Cumberland
and Anglesea, nowhere more than 30 fathoms deep.

In its onward course, this mighty glacier buried all
the hills and rounded knolls of Great Ormes Head, Little
Ormes Head, and Diganwy, which are still on a large

Glaciation of Anglesea. 409

scale so strikingly moutonnee, and pressing along the
slopes of Llanfair-fechan, the lower end of Aber Valley,
the seaward flank of Moel Wnion, and across the lower
end of the valley of the Ogwen, it marked its track by
long, slightly-inclined terraces, somewhat faintly marked,
but still clear to the experienced eye when looked for
from the shores of Beaumaris. Beyond this the glacier
continued its course across Lleyn, and onward to the
region now occupied by St. George's Channel.

Furthermore, in my opinion, so great was the size
and power of this ice-flow, that it hindered the glaciers
of Y-Foel-fras, Llanberis, and Nant-ffrancon from
encroaching on the territory of Anglesea, and they
simply joined the larger glacier as minor tributary ice-
streams. For this reason it happens that the glacial
striations of Anglesea, as we might at first expect, do
not point towards the old glacier-valleys of Snowdonia
that open on the Straits, but run at right angles to
the courses of these comparatively minor glaciers.

If we now turn to the rocks that form the banks of
Menai Straits, we find that they chiefly consist of nearly
flat-lying Carboniferous strata, and looking at the dis-
position of these beds from Traeth Melyn, opposite
Caernarvon, to Llanfair-pwll-gwyngyll, in Anglesea, and
on the opposite shore from Caernarvon to Bangor,
there is no reason to doubt that from end to end they
once filled the whole of the region now occupied by the
Straits. The larger part of this region, as it now exists,
is of Carboniferous Limestone age; but it by no
means consists entirely of solid limestone. On the
contrary, numerous bands of shale and friable sandstones
and conglomerates are intermingled with the limestones,
together with beds of soft red marl. On the coast oppo-
site Caernarvon, the low cliffs are entirely formed of
red marl overlying the limestone ; and on the Caer-

4 1 o Glaciation of Menai Straits.

narvonshire eoast, for three miles north of the town,
also overlying the limestone, there are soft shales of the
Coal-measures, sometimes red and marly, and contain-
ing thin seams of coal.

In Anglesea, from three to four miles north-west of
the Straits, lies the valley of Malldraeth Marsh, the
rocks of which also consist of Carboniferous Limestone,
Millstone grit, soft Coal-measure shales, with a little
sandstone, beds of coal, and Permian strata ; and this
valley, nine miles in length, runs almost exactly parallel
to the valley of the Menai Straits. Many years ago,
at its north-eastern end, I saw deep glacial striations on
the Millstone Grit, running straight down the shallow
valley towards Caernarvon Bay.

Considering that the south-westerly trend of each of
these valleys and of others of minor note, corresponds
with the general direction of the glacial striations of
Anglesea, and therefore with the onward course of the
great glacier that produced them, I have been led to
the conclusion that both of the shallow valleys were
scooped out in comparatively soft rocks, by the grinding
power of the vast glacier coming from the north-east,
and that when in the course of time the climate amelio-
rated, and the glacier disappeared, the sea flowed in
where part of the glacier had been, and thus it was that
Anglesea got separated from the mainland and first
became an island. The islets in the narrower and
shallower part of the Straits at the Menai and tubular
bridges are merely weathered roches moutonnees. once
overridden by the moving glacier, and Menai Strait is
merely a long and broad glacial groove, which was first
laid bare by the partial removal of the boulder-beds,
after the close of the Glacial epoch.

CHAPTER XXVI.

GLACIAL EPOCH CONTINUED. SUBMERGENCE AND RE-
ELEVATION OF LAND, AND FINAL DISAPPEARANCE OF
BRITISH GLACIERS.

IN describing the glacial phenomena, my chief concern
in this book is to show the effects produced by ice on
the general scenery of the country, and it is therefore
unnecessary that I should here attempt to go into all
the details of glacial and interglacial episodes, and of
minor upheavals and depressions of land, thus seemingly
tracing out a chronological series of geological events
as clear and precise as any six or eight stages in the
succession of the Oolitic subformations. It is enough
for me at present to deal with a broader view of the
subject.

Whether or not, before and during the first growth
of the glaciers, the British area, by upheaval, was
united to the Continent, I do not know, but of this I
am certain that, probably during, and certainly after
the largest extension of glacier-ice, the land underwent
a process of submersion, and while the great glacier was
retiring, the diminishing ice, still descending to the sea,
deposited moraine rubbish there. In Scotland, marine
shells in situ are found at heights somewhat more than
500 feet above the level of the sea, and if the whole of
Britain were then submerged only to that depth, it must
have presented the spectacle of a group of islands. One
of these would consist of the mountainous country north

412 Submergence.

of the Caledonian canal, fringed by many small islands
on the west. The next would extend from the canal to
the valleys of the Tay and Forth, bordered by many
islands on the west and south, and in both the ground
was penetrated by many fiords, some of which were
longer than our longest fiord-lochs of the present day.
The third large island included most of the country
between the Clyde and Forth, and the Sol way and Tyne,
while two deeply-indented islands lay south of that line
and the Derbyshire hills north of Ashbourne. On the
east of these would lie fourteen islands, formed of part
of the North and East Ridings of Yorkshire, while nine-
tenths of Wales would form one large island with many
small ones lying to the east, south-east, and south, in-
cluding the highlands of Devon and Cornwall.

Such islands, as far as Wales and Cumberland were
concerned, I am convinced still maintained their minor
glaciers, which descended to the sea, where their ends
broke off as icebergs, which, floating hither and thither,
deposited their stony freights as they melted. We shall,
however, presently see that in some districts there is
evidence of the country having sunk much more than
500 feet.

In many parts of England shell beds associated with
glacial material are by no means uncommon, and it is
difficult to believe that in scores of places where they
occur, on the coast cliffs between Berwick and the
H umber, they had always been thrust up from the sea by
glaciers. The most plentiful species there, as determined
by Mr. Etheridge, are Cardium, edule, Cyprina Islan-
dica, Dentalium entalis, Leda oblonga, and Saxicava
ruyosa, together with undetermined species of Venus
and Tellina. In Cheshire, near Macclesfield, lying
between a lower and an upper Boulder-clay, Professor

Submergence.

413

Prestwich found marine shells in sand and gravel at a
height of about 1,200 feet. I have visited the place,
and saw the shells in situ ; and at Congleton, 600 feet
above the sea, I also found sea-shells.

Similar shell-bearing deposits at a low level are
found near the Mersey at Blackpool, and on the coast
north of the Kibble, and I have also observed them in
Caernarvonshire in the district of Lleyn. In the same
county similar deposits were found by the late Mr.
Joshua Trimmer, about five miles SE. of Caernarvon,
near the summit of Moel Tryfan, at a height of about
1,170 feet above the level of the sea. With that locality
I have been long acquainted, and in 1876 I revisited
it along with Mr. Etheridge. The section occurs at a
slate quarry in the Cambrian rocks.' This, after being
long abandoned, has of late years been worked with
vigour, and the result is, that good sections are exposed
as the gravel and boulder-clay are gradually cleared
away from the surface. In August 1876 the section
was as follows :—

FIG. 84.

•• CL <l! ' ;

1. Cambrian slate. 2. Shell-bearing sands and gravels.
3. Glacier Boulder-clay.

The sands and gravels are all marked by oblique
lamination (false bedding) and have a beach-like as-

414 Submergence.

pect, with sea-shells, broken and entire, of the following
species : *

LAMELLIBRANCHIATA.

Cardium echinatum, C. edule * and its variety rus-
ticum, Astarte borealis, * A. compressa (var. globosa),
A. sulcata, Cyprina Islandica, Tellina Balthica,*
My a ? Saxicava rugosa, * mactra ovalis, * and various
fragments.

GASTEROPODA.

Trochus magus. Lacuna vincta,Littorina littorea,*
Turrit&lla communis., * Pleurotoma pyramidalis,
P. turricula, Buccinum undatum, Nassa reticulata,
Purpura lapillus, * Murex erinaceus, * Trophon
antiquum, T. clathratum, T. scalaroides, T. ? Denta-
lium, and various fragments.

The stones on the ground consist of species of diorite,
felspar, porphyry, jasper, chalk-flints, Silurian slate, &c.
The surface of the sands beneath the boulder-beds is
very irregular, and has been much eroded, in my opinion
probably by the pressure of a glacier during the depo-
sition of the moraine matter that forms the overlying
Boulder-clay. The latter contains large masses and
smaller fragments of igneous rocks from the Lower
Silurian mountains on the east, jasper, quartzite, purple
and blue slate, &c., and looks like part of an old moraine.
All the way up the slope, from the neighbourhood of
Llandwrog, quantities of moraine mounds cumber the
ground, and ice-scratched stones abound, and even
small water-worn pebbles are marked by glacial striae.
Some of the blocks are very large. In the underlying
gravels also stones sometimes occur, faintly marked by

1 Those marked * were also found by Mr. Etheridge and the
author,

Submergence. 415

glacial striations, as if the materials, during the pro-
gress of submersion, had been derived from older
moraines, and, being water-worn by attrition on the
margin of the sea, the original sharpness of the scratches
had been well nigh obliterated.

At various levels on the low ground between Caer-
narvon and Criccieth, on the north coast of Cardigan
Bay, there are extensive deposits of sand and gravel,
well stratified, and much resembling those of Moel Try-
faen, but in them I have not yet found sea-shells.
They are overlaid by boulder-beds, and the same is the
case with similar halt-consolidated strata on the sea-cliffs
of Anglesea at Lleiniog, and beyond, between Beaumaris
and Penmon near Puffin Island.

Putting all these facts together I see no reason to
get rid of the hypotheses published by me in 1859,1
that, as a slow submersion of the land took place, the
diminishing glaciers, still descending to the level of
the sea, deposited their moraine-rubbish there, which
matter was often remodelled by the waves to form sand
and gravel. Gradually sinking more and more, and
sufficient cold still continuing, the minor glaciers, de-
scending from groups of icy islands, entered the sea and
broke off in icebergs, which, as they melted, deposited
their stony freights on the sands and gravels that
more or less covered the bottom of the sea.

To what depth this progressive submersion may have
reached I cannot say, but I think it cannot have been
less than from 1,200 to 1,500 feet. In corroboration of
this it is worthy of note that the Rev. Maxwell Close
has described sea-shells as occurring at the height of
1,300 feet on the Wicklow Hills. The features of the

1 < Old Glaciers of North Wales, and Peaks, Passes, and Glaciers.'

41 6 Submergence.

ground where the circumstances can be best studied
are as follows.

On the north-western flank of the Caernarvonshire
mountains, which looks towards the Menai Straits, there
are certain high moorland tracts, the surfaces of which,
more or less strewn with boulders, have very gentle
slopes, and when the sections are exposed, caused by the
cutting action of brooks, the subsoil is found to be
Boulder-clay, full of ice-scratched stones. The slopes of
Moel Tryfan are surrounded by such material, which
stretches from thence north-east towards the valley of
Llyn Cwellyn or Cwm Seiont, and on the opposite side
of that valley, beyond Bettws Grarmon, comes on again
in the higher ground. Its continuity is again inter-
rupted by the valley of Llanberis at Llyn Padarn, on
the north-east side of which, from 800 to 1,200 feet
above the sea, the same inclined plains of drift are con-
tinued to Nant-ffrancon, north-west of the great Penrhyn
Slate quarries, while on the north-east side of that valley
the same plain stretches still further north. In one part
of these glacial drift deposits, on the moor of Ffridd
Bryn-mawr, I found sea-shells at a height of about
1,COO feet above the level of the sea, and I was in-
formed by Mr. Trimmer that shells had also been found
in corresponding clays, on corresponding heights, on
the east side of the Ogwen, beyond Bethesda. The
shells which I found were examined by Edward Forbes,
but unfortunately they have since disappeared. Similar
deposits in the same region seem to attain a height of
at least 1,500 to 1,800 feet, but without insisting on this
it is something to be assured that marine strata-bear-
ing shells attain a height on these Welsh mountains of
1,000 feet and more.

Further proof of this is to be found in an upper

Submergence. 417

detritus which covers much of the lower parts of Scotland
and of England, composed of clay, mixed with stones and
great boulders, many of which are scratched, grooved,
and striated, in the manner of which we have experience
in the glaciers of Switzerland and Norway. Sands and

FIG. 85.

Natica clausa. Turritella communis. Aporrhais pes-Pelicani. Scalaria Grcenlandica.
Group of Post-Pliocene Fossils, Clyde beds.

gravels, with perfect sea-shells, are interstratified with
these boulder-beds, and sometimes the clays themselves
contain unbroken shells, as, for example, in the low
ground of Shropshire between Coalbrook Dale and
Wellington. Here and there, even in the heart of the

E E

4i8

Submergence.

moraine-matter of the Till, there are patches of sand
and clay interbedded. The main mass, indeed, is not
stratified, because glaciers rarely stratify their moraines,
but the waves playing upon them, as they were deposited
in the sea, arranged portions in a stratified manner ;
and there occur at intervals in these patches in Scot-

Fm. 86.

Pass of Llanberis.

land the remains of sea-shells of species such as now
live in the far north.

In the low grounds that border the estuaries and
alluvial plains of the Clyde, the Forth, the Endrick,
and elsewhere, up to^ 125 and 262 feet above the sea,
there are well known brick-clays which sometimes
contain erratic boulders and ice-scratched stones. Here

Glaciers, North Wales. 419

and there many sea-shells are found in these strata, all
of existing species, but the general assemblage of forms
indicates an arctic climate comparable to that of
Greenland of the present day, a circumstance many
years ago pointed out by Mr. James Smith of Jordanhill.
The evidence all tends to prove that these strata were
deposited during a part of the Glacial epoch, probably
towards its close (fig. 85, p. 417).

After what seems to have been a long period of
partial submergence the country gradually rose again,
and the evidence of this I will prove chiefly from what
I know of North Wales.

I shall take the Pass of Llanberis as an example,
for there we have all the ordinary proofs of the valley
having been filled with glacier-ice. First, then, during
and after the time of the great ice-sheet, the country
to a great extent sunk below the water, and drift was
deposited, and must more or less have filled many of the
deep narrow valleys of Wales, and which still remains in
part in some of the broader expanses of the country.
When the land was rising again, the glaciers gradually
increased in size, although they never reached the
immense magnitude which they attained at the earlier
portion of the icy epoch. Still they became so large,
that such a valley as the Pass of Llanberis was a second
time occupied by ice, which, without invading Anglesea,
spread itself into the lowlands beyond, and the result
was, that the glacier ploughed out the drift and loose
rubbish that more or less cumbered the valley. Other
cases, such as those of Nant-ffrancon and Aber, could
easily be given. By degrees, however, as we approach
nearer our own days, the climate slowly ameliorated,
and the glaciers began to decline, till, becoming less
and less, here and there as they died away, they left

E E 2

420

Glaciers.

their terminal and lateral moraines, still in some cases
as well defined as moraines in lands where glaciers now
exist. Beautiful examples of such moraines are seen in
the Pass of Llanberis, between the precipice south of

FIG. 87.

Moraines and Roches Moutonnees between Cwm-glas and
Blaen-y-nant, Pass of Llanberis.

the road and the bridge called Pont-y-gromlech. Not
far behind the house called Blaen-y-nant, there is a
large moraine lying on the slope of the hill. It con-
sists of heaps of boulders, clay, and angular gravel
and blocks, identical in genera spect with many

North Wales. 421

Swiss moraines. Some of the loose stones are scratched,
the lines crossing each other confusedly ; and the mass
of the moraine is formed of three or four concentric
elliptical mounds, which merge together at their bases,
and mark on a small scale the gradual decrease of the
Cwm-glas glacier. These circle round the lower side of
a large roche moutonnee, which forms a small hill, as
shown in front of the cliff in the middle of fig. 87.

A little behind this hill, about half a mile south of
Blaen-y-nant, a perfectly symmetrical terminal mo-
raine, grass-grown, but strewn with travelled blocks,
ranges across the valley between two brooks, almost as
regular in form as an artificial earthwork. It is be-
tween 1,200 and 1,300 feet above the sea. Higher up,,
on the west side of Cwm-glas, the striae on the rocks run
NNE. below the space where the glacier, in a cataract
of ice, once slid down the cliff that now appears so
grim. Four white threads of water glance on its side,
the sole representatives, in another form, of the jagged
ice-fall, that on a smaller scale must have resembled
the ice-cataract of the glacier of the Rhone. Beyond
this cliff, in one of the innermost recesses of Snowdon,
lies an upland valley bounded on three sides by tall
cliffs, in the midst of which lie two small, deep, clear
tarns about 2,200 feet above the sea, each in a perfect
basin of rock. Between these pools and the cliff below,
a large quantity of moraine-debris, derived from Crib-
goch, cumbers the ground. The rocks on which it lies
are often perfectly smoothed, rounded, and deeply
grooved; and the striae that, lower down the valley,
strike straight towards the Pass, here branch to the
south-west and south-east, following the courses of two
minor valleys on either side of a peaked ridge that
descends from Crig-goch to the ground between the

422 Glaciers.

pools. Tiny moraine mounds scattered about, tell of the
last remnants of ice ere the shrunken' glaciers finally
melted away in the upper recesses of the mountain.

From the summit of Snowdon three of the old
glacier valleys may be seen that radiate from the
mountain. On the east, the magnificent amphitheatre
of Cwm-glas and Llyn Llydaw, with all its striated
roches moutonnees, moraine mounds, and numerous
perched blocks ; on the south, the deep glen of Cwm-y-
llan, with its ice-worn surfaces of rock on the sides of
the hills, in which, just below the peak of Snowdon,
there is a symmetrical moraine about half a mile in
length, formed in the latter days of the glacier, that
once flowed down to join the larger ice-stream that
descended through Nant Grwynant and the valley of
Llyn-y-ddinas, and so onward to Traeth-mawr below
Beddgelert. Just below the peak lies the broad pre-
cipitous cirque of Cwm-y-clogwyn, in which may be
faintly seen the terminal moraine of a minor glacier,
partly circling the pool of Llyn-goch ; and, descending
by the path to Llanberis, a vast moraine heap lies
immediately north and west of the deep-set tarn of
Llyn-du'r Arddu.

It would be easy for me to give a similar descrip-
tion of the large glacier that filled the valley of
Nant-ffrancon, and flowed onward to where Bangor
now stands, where, as a terminal moraine, it deposited
those beautiful wooded mounds that form the park of
Penrhyn Castle. Further up the valley, beyond Ogwen
Bank, the river is barred across by striated grits, dotted
with erratic blocks, and high above is the craggy
tributary valley of Cwm-graianog. Its whole length
is not over half-a-mile, and at its mouth, above the
steep descent to Nant-ffrancon, a small but beautifully

North Wales.

423

symmetrical moraine crosses the valley in a crescent-
shaped curve. •

Another striking example of the moraines of a
retreating glacier may be seen in Llyn Idwal, first

FIG. 88.

Glacier of the Pass of Llanberis.

described by Mr. Charles Darwin in 1842. Below an
amphitheatre of steep hills and cliffs lie the waters of
Llyn Idwal, which are dammed up by ice- worn rocks
strewn with moraine. Below the moraine, down to the
Ogwen, the rocks are strikingly moutonnee, the striations
gradually curving round NW. to take the direction of
the main valley. On either side of Llyn Idwal lie several
moraines, four in number on the west. They run in

424 Glaciers.

long symmetrical mounds lengthwise in the valley, and
were deposited at intervals at the side of the glacier
when it ceased to fill the valley from side to side, and
was gradually decreasing in size. There is also some
appearance of an inner terminal moraine where the lake
narrows towards its southern end.

When the ice of these later glaciers of Llanberis and
Nant-ffrancon was thickest, in my opinion it could not
have been less than 1,300 feet thick in the former, and
from 1,000 to 1,200 feet in the latter.

In Switzerland there is an offshoot of the glacier of
the Aletsch which, at the foot of the Aeggischhorn,
projects from the great glacier a short way into the
valley in which the little lake lies, well known as the
Marjelen See. This lake is drained by a small brook,
which tumbles down the rocky ground to pass under
the glacier of the valley of Viesch. The right and
left sides of the lake are bounded by mountains, but
the side opposite the outflowing brook is overlooked
by an ice-cliff of the Aletsch glacier, which was about
60 feet in height where highest when I first visited the
spot. The water was then 97 feet deep where deepest,
and this I proved by soundings from the edge of the
ice-cliff. Occasionally masses of ice fall from this cliff
and break up into numerous icebergs, some of them
large enough to float boulders of moderate size. The
bergs, floating hither and thither, melt by degrees, and
boulders and smaller stones are thus scattered over the
bottom of the lake. At intervals, it is said, of about
eight years, a crack or crevasse opens in the ice, and all
the water of the lake passes away under the glacier to
swell the river that flows from under its lower end.

In the valley of Llanberis there are two well known
lakes, Llyn Padarn and Llyn Peris, and on a clear day,

North Wales.

425

when the water is still and pure, from a boat one can
see boulders here and there lying on the bottom of the
shallower parts of the lakes. In fig. 88 the Pass of
Llanberis is represented as it may have been at some
period when from end to end it was comparatively full
of ice. In fig. 89 it is shown as it must have existed

FIG. 89.

An episode in the history of the Glacier of Llanberis.

for a time when the glacier, by amelioration of climate,
had retired from all the lower part of the valley, and
debouched into an upper part of what is now Llyn Peris.
As it gradually receded, moraine stones, that fell from
its end, got scattered over the bottom of the lake ; for
in those days the alluvial flat had no existence which,
but for a short river, now divides into two an older

426

Glaciers.

lake of more than five miles in length. In the fore-
ground, are the then unweathered block-strewn roches
moutonnees, on which Dolbadarn castle now stands,
which here and there are still marked by distinct
glacial striations. This scattering of boulders on the

FIG. 90.

Roche Noutonnee, with Sloes Perekes, Pont-y-gromlech, Pass of
Llanberis.

bottom of the lake is analogous to that which now takes
place in the Marjelen See, or which on a great scale
once took place, as the mighty glacier of the Rhone was,
from where Geneva now stands, slowly retreating fifty
miles eastward towards Bex. In the shallow water

North Wales. 427

near Geneva, boulders shed from the huge glacier may
still be seen with their tops above water, and in the
midst of the Delta of the Rhone, between Bex and the
mouth of the river, portions of an old terminal moraine
peep through the wide alluvial flats and marshes which
began to be deposited by its waters, at a time when the
lake was several miles longer than at present.

The gradual retreat of the glacier of the Pass of
Llanberis is further proved by numerous perched blocks,
which, here and there, isolated or in groups, stand on
the surfaces of roches moutonnees, as, for example, at
Pont-y-gromlech, and in many other places, masses of
stone that, so to speak, floated on the surface of the ice,
were left perched upon the rounded rocks in a manner
somewhat puzzling to those who are not geologists ;
for they lie in places to which they clearly cannot
have rolled from the mountains above, because their
resting places are separated from it by a hollow ;
and, besides, many of them stand in positions so pre-
carious, that if they had rolled from the mountains,
they must, on reaching the points where they lie,
have taken a final bound and fallen into the valley
below. But when experienced in the geology of
glaciers, the eye detects the true cause of these pheno-
mena, we have no hesitation in coming to the conclu-
sion that, as the glaciers declined in size, the errant
stones were let down upon the surface of the rocks so
quietly and so softly, that there they will lie until an
earthquake shakes them down, or until the wasting of
the rock on which they rest precipitates them to a
lower level. Finally, the climate still ameliorating,
the glaciers shrunk farther and farther into the heart
of the mountains, until, at length, here and there, in
their very uppermost recesses, we find the remains of

428

Glaciers.

tiny moraines, marking the last relics of the ice before
it disappeared from the country.

The same kind of evidence of a period of greatest
glaciation, followed by partial submersion, re-elevation.,
and the gradual retreat of the later glaciers, is plain in
almost every valley in Cumberland, and Mr. Ward con-
firms this old view of mine, as applied to Wales, in his
late account of ' The Glaciation of the Northern Part

FIG. 91.

Old glacier cirques in Arran, from Lagan Hills.

of the Lake District,' in the 29th volume of the Journal
of the Geological Society.

In Scotland also the land underwent partial sub-
mersion and re-elevation during the Glacial epoch, and
the gradual retreat of the later glaciers is witnessed in
many a valley in the Carrick and Lammermuir Hills,
in the moraines of the cirques of Arran, and through
the mainland of the Highland?, and in Skye in the

Cirques. 429

valleys of the Cuchullin Hills. I could give special
instances in some of those regions, but they would add
little to the effect of what I have stated, and would
needlessly lengthen this book.

Again, when the glaciers were retiring westward, up
the dales of Yorkshire and Northumberland, the ice left,
as it retreated, heaps of debris originally forming irre-
gular mounds, often enclosing cup-shaped hollows ; but
these, which sometimes still remain in the more recent
smaller moraines, have in the more ancient and larger
ones often got filled up by help of rain washing the fine
detritus into them ; and the whole has become so smooth
that the original moundiness has, by degrees, been
nearly obliterated. In like manner the same has taken
place in the wide valley that crosses England eastward
from the bend of the river Lune, near Lancaster, by
Settle to Skipton, including most of the country between
Clitheroe in Lancashire and Skipton, and as far south
as Pendle Hill and the other hills that border the Lanca-
shire Coal-field on the north. And this is what we
find : — The great glacier sheets that came down the
valley of the Lune from the Cumbrian mountains and
Howgill Fells, and from the high hills of which Ingle-
borough and Penny gent form prominent features, spread
across the whole country to the south, and fairly over-
flowed the range of Pendle Hill into the region now
known as the Lancashire Coal-field, and far beyond. The
result was that the whole of the country between Clitheroe
and Skipton, including the country south of Clapham
and Settle, was rounded and smoothed into a series of
great roches moutonnees, partly formed of Carboniferous
Limestone; and as the final glaciers retired, through
gradual change of climate, these became covered with
mounds of moraine-matter, now not easy, at first sight,

430 Glaciers.

to distinguish from that marine drift which, at equal
levels, covers so much of the country further south.

There is often great difficulty in distinguishing be-
tween these latter moraines and the great masses of
moraine-matter that were formed during that earlier
period when the northern ice-sheet covered the greater
part of Britain, and which undoubtedly were not ter-
minal, but actually lay under the ice — moraines pro-
fondes, as they have been termed by French and Swiss
geologists. Neither is it always easy to distinguish
between this ' Till ' and the marine glacial drift when
shells are absent, for the plains of the latter melt into
gentle slopes of glacial debris that pass far up the valleys,
and on the hill-sides over many high watersheds.

One reason for this difficulty is that, in certain
stages of the history of the period, the larger sheet or
sheets of glacier-ice covered the hills and filled the
valleys so thickly and completely that, pushing out to
sea, they even excluded it from parts of valleys that
were at a lower level than the sea itself; and moraine-
matter thus got sorted and mingled with other marine
deposits. This partly accounts for the gradual merging
of those marine gravelly mounds, called Kames or
Eskers, into Boulder-clay and true moraine heaps full of
ice-scratched stones. The Eskers themselves are often
largely charged with water-worn stones originally well
ice-scratched. These glacial scratchings have since
been almost entirely worn away by friction, the stones
having been rubbed against each other by moving water.
The mere ghosts of the original sharp scratchings now
remain.

The foregoing sketch of the Glacial epoch is of
much importance in a geological point of view, more
especially because of the pictures we get of phases of a

Eskers. 43 1

physical geography in these regions, so different from
that of to-day, and which judged by any geological stan-
dard is yet so recent. Besides, the events of this period
of plentiful snow and ice gave distinctive characters both
to our mountains and much of our lowlands, different, in
many respects, from those of mountain ranges and low-
lands where glaciers never were. No one with an eye
educated in glacier work, can fail to recognise the
'moulding by ice of the outlines of the Highland and
Cumbrian mountains. Their lines are often smooth
and flowing curves, and, excepting here and there,
cragginess is not their special characteristic. In North
Wales the mountains are apt to be more craggy,
partly because of the variable hardness of the rocks, and
partly because, being further south, that region was
not so completely smothered in ice as the more northern
mountains.

432

CHAPTER XXVII.

GLACIAL EPOCH CONTINUED.— ORIGIN OF CERTAIN LAKES.

THERE is an important subject connected with the
physical geography of our country, and that is, the
multiplicity of lakes in the mountain regions, and the
question thus arises — To what physical operations do
they happen to be so numerous in some districts and
so scarce or altogether absent in others ?

When glaciers descended into valleys, and depo-
sited their terminal moraines, it sometimes happened
that when a glacier declined in size its moraine still
remained tolerably perfect, with this result — that the
drainage formerly represented by ice is now represented
by running water, which is dammed in between the
surrounding slopes of the solid mountain and the
mound formed by the terminal moraine, thus- making
a lake. There are such minor lakes on the Italian side
of the Alps below Ivrea, and there are several among
the mountains of Wales, which at least are partly
dammed in by moraines, and a few, perhaps, entirely
so. They are always small, and may be classed as
tarns, lying at the bases of cliffs in the upper recesses
of the mountains. Whether there are any in Scotland,
dammed by the terminal moraines of common valley
glaciers, I do not know, although they may exist in
parts that I have not visited. Furthermore, some-
times on the outer side of these moraines we find what

Lakes. 433

seems to be stratified boulder-drift, in which cases it
would appear that glaciers descended to the level of the
sea, and deposited their moraines there, and, breaking
up, floated about as icebergs bearing boulders. By-and-
by, the glacier that was produced by the drainage of
snow disappeared, and is now represented by water,
forming a lake dammed by a moraine, outside of which
lie long smooth slopes of stratified drift. In the ma-
jority of cases, however, as already stated, I believe that
most of these small lakes are only partly blocked in by
moraine matter, and that, like some of the large lakes
of both sides of the Alps which have moraines at their
outlets, even if these moraines were removed they
would be found to be entirely enclosed by solid rock
formations.

Such lakes in Wales are always on a small scale,
but there are others on a larger scale, having a far
more important bearing upon the physical geography
of our country and of many other countries in the
northern hemisphere, and I have no doubt also in the
south. The theory which I propound is my own, and
in its first conception is not now much more than
seventeen years old. It gave rise at the time to a
considerable amount of opposition, and also to some
approval.1

There is no point in physical geography more difficult

1 See « The Old Glaciers of Switzerland and North Wales,' 1860,
Soon after the special paper was published in the ' Journal of the
Geological Society ' in 1862, it was with satisfaction that I received
a letter from Dr. Julius Haast, stating that the theory perfectly
applied to many of the lakes in New Zealand, and that he had
adopted it after the perusal of my paper. See also on the ' Erosion
of Valleys and Lakes,' 'Philosophical Magazine,' 1864, and 'Sir
Charles Lyell and the Glacial Theory of Lake Basins,' 'Phi-
losophical Magazine,' 1865.

F F

434 Lakes.

to account for than the origin of many lakes. When
thought about at all it is easy to see that lakes are the
result of the formation of hollows, a great proportion of
which can be easily proved to be rock-basins — that is
to say, hollows entirely surrounded by solid rocks, the
waters not being retained by mere loose detritus. But
the great difficulty is, how and why were such large
numbers of these rock-basins made in special regions ?
I have often been so much misunderstood and mis-
represented in this matter, that those who had not
read my early papers on the subject might easily have
supposed that I attributed the origin of all lake-basins
to glacial erosion, and that in spite of my having, in
print, formally disclaimed any such idea. It is not
likely that any man could have entertained it who
had seen lakes in old volcanic craters, who was familiar
with the fact of subsidences in old and new volcanic
regions, and who, besides, expressly stated that there
were doubtless other kinds of lakes, the origin of which
he probably knew nothing about.

A great many lakes lie in valleys, and many persons
in times past and present have been easily satisfied as
to the causes that produced mountains, valleys, and
lakes. To the uneducated, the first and obvious ex-
planation is, that in all its grand features the world was
originally made very much as it now stands. With the
half educated, even in geology, the explanation is, that
the irregularities of the surface have been caused purely
by dislocations, or, going one step further, that deep
openings ( were primarily due to cracks which took place
during the various movements which each chain has
undergone at various periods,' the meaning of which
I conceive to be, that mountain valleys necessarily lie
in lines of curvature, dislocation, and fracture, and that

Lakes. 435

the mountains on each side of them are in their present
forms mountains, far less because of denudation, than
by reason of operations of fracture and dislocation. For
clear demonstrations of such assertions none are given,
and I now propose to give a resume of the reasons as
originally published by me and since confirmed by
others, which show, how it happened that certain rock-
bound hollows were scooped out by the agency of glacier-
ice. In doing so, I shall briefly go into other subjects
than those involved in questions of mere movements
of the earth's crust.

In the first place, consider what is the effect of
marine denudation. On the sea-shore, where waves
are always breaking, the effect of this, and of the
weathering of cliffs that rise above the waves, is to
waste back the land. But the sea in this case cannot
make a deep hollow below its own average level.
What it might do, if there were hollows there, would
be to fill them with detritus, for it cannot cut them
out. The consequence is, that the chief power of the
sea and the weather combined, working on the land
and wasting it back, is to act as a great planing
machine, wearing down the larger irregularities that
rise above its level in the manner shown in the descrip-
tion of the first denudation of the Weald at page 343,
and of South Wales at page 497, so as in the end to
form a plain of marine denudation.

Again, what is the effect in any country of running
water ? Rivers cannot make large basin-shaped hol-
lows surrounded by rocks on all sides. All that
running water can do upon the surface is to scoop
out trenches or channels of greater or less width, form-
ing gorges or wider valleys, according to the nature
of the rivers and the rocks, and the time employed

F F 2

43 6 Lakes.

in the work. If we have an inclined plane with a
long slope, gentle or steep, water will run upon it
because of the slope ; and, aided by atmospheric dis-
integration, it will cut out a channel, but it cannot
make a large rock-bound lake-basin, though it can
scoop out a small one below a waterfall, or where two
rapid streams meet, it may hollow out a pool or linn
by reason of the turbulence of the water.

Again, it has been contended that the hollows were
formed by the disturbance of the rocks, so as to throw
them into a basin-shaped form. But when we take
such lakes as those of Geneva, the lake of Thun, the
lakes of Lucerne, Zurich, Constance, and the great
lakes on the Italian side of the Alps, or many of the
Welsh, Cumberland, or Highland lakes, and examine
the strata critically, we find that they do not lie in the
form of basin-shaped, synclinal hollows, but, on the
contrary, the strike of the strata often runs right across
the lake-basins instead of circling round them, or they
may be bent and contorted in a hundred curves all
along and under the length of the lake. Such syn-
clinal depressions are the rarest things in nature : that
is to say, hollows formed of strata bent upwards at
the edges all round into the form of a great dish, the
very uppermost bed or beds of which shall be con-
tinuous and unbroken underneath the water of the
lake. Some such synclinal hollows are found in the
upper valleys of the Jura, but without lakes, and in
which the drainage runs into potholes, and finds its
way to the level of the Val de Travers, where ready-
made rivers issue from caverns in the Secondary rocks.
But these synclinal hollows can be explained on prin-
ciples quite different from those I have to propound.
If such synclinal lake-basins exist at all, I never saw

Lakes. 437

one, though specially looking out for them in many
regions, and I believe that they have been only as-
sumed by persons who have not realised the meaning
of denudations on a large scale, and therefore are apt
to consider hills and valleys as the result, mainly, of
disturbance and dislocation. From repeated examination,
I feel indeed assured, that the Swiss and other valleys
generally, and the lake-valleys in particular, do not lie
in gaping rents, fissures, or in synclinal curves ; and,
indeed, after half a life spent in mapping rocks, I
believe that there is no necessary connection between
fractures and the formation of valleys, excepting that
in certain cases a line of close fracture was also a line
of weakness, on which the watery agents that promote
denudation were more easily able to work, especially, if
on each side of the fault the rocks happen to be of
different degrees of hardness.

It might, however, be said that these lakes lie in
areas of special depression, made by the sinking of
the land underneath each lake. So difficult indeed did
it seem to Playfair, the great illustrator of Hutton, to
account for the origin of the rock-basin in which the
Lake of Geneva lies, that he was forced to propound
the hypothesis that beds of salt had been dissolved
underneath its bottom, which therefore sunk, and so
formed a hollow for the reception of its waters. Lakes
are, however, so numerous in the Alps, North Wales,
Cumberland, and the Highlands of Scotland, where they
occur by the hundred, and in part of North America by
the thousand, that I feel sure the theory of a particular
depression for each lake, will not hold in these or in any
other northern or southern region that has been acted
on by glacier-ice on a great scale. In that part of
North America which lies well east of the Rocky Moun-

438 Lakes.

tains, and north of latitude 40°, it is as if the whole
country were sown broadcast with lakes, large and
small ; and great part of the country not being moun-
tainous, but consisting of undulating flats, it becomes
an absurdity to suppose that, so close together, a special
area of depression was provided for each lake. The
physical geology of America, Scotland, and Sweden, for
example, entirely goes against such a supposition ; and
I believe that it is equally untenable for the Alps and
the lowlands between the Alps and the Jura. Having
come to these conclusions, it is plain that it is not a
simple thing to account for the existence of hollows,
composed of hard rocks, which completely enclose lakes.

If, then, we have disposed of these erroneous hypo-
theses, what is left ? If the sea cannot form such
hollows, nor weather, nor running water, and if the
hollows were not formed by synclinal curves of the
strata, and if they do not lie in gaping fissures, nor, for
most lakes, in areas of special depression, the only re-
maining agent that I know is the denuding power of
ice.1

In the region of the Alps it is a remarkable circum-

1 I must again guard myself against misapprehension. Some
lakes owe their existence merely to inequalities in ' the drift ' or
other glacial deposits, many to extinct volcanic craters, and others,
especially in volcanic regions old and new, to special subsidences.
An excellent paper on this subject ' On the Ancient Volcanoes of the
District of Schemnitz Hungary,' has been published by Mr. J. W.
Judd, F.K.S. in vol. xxxii. of the ' Journal of the Geological Society,'
1876 ; and I have no reason to doubt that the Great Salt Lake, the
Yellowstone Lake, and others in the barely extinct region of the
Eocky Mountains, have a similar origin. Neither would I think of
attributing the origin of the great lakes of Africa to glacial
influences, any more than I would the Black Sea, the Caspian, and
the Sea of Aral. He would also be worse than a bold man, who
would speak of the Salt Lakes of the Sahara as being of glacial
origin, to say nothing of others too numerous to name.

Lakes. 439

stance that all the large lakes lie in the direct channels
of the great old glaciers — each lake in a true rock-basin.
This is important, for though it is clear that the drain-
age of the mountains must have found its way inta
these hollows, either in the form of water or of glacier-
ice, yet if ice had nothing to do with their formation,
we might expect an equal number of lakes great and
small in other regions where the rocks are equally dis-
turbed or of like nature, but where there are no traces
of glaciers. I have never observed that this is the
case, but rather the reverse.

I will take the Lake of Geneva as a special example
(as I did in my original paper) before applying the
theory to our own country. This lake, once more than 50,
is now about 40 miles, long, its upper end between the
neighbourhood of Bex and the mouth of the Khone having
been filled with moraine matter and alluvium. In its
broadest part about 12 miles wide, it lies at the mouth
of the upper valley of the Ehone and directly in the course
of the great old glacier, which was more than a hundred
miles in length from the present glacier of the Rhone
to where at its end it abutted upon the Jura, by about
1 30 miles in width at Geneva, from south-west to north-
east, at what was once considered to be its lower end.
There, however, it is now known that its bulk was
swelled by the tributary glaciers of the Arve descending
from Mont Blanc, and of the valleys of the lakes of
Annecy and De Bourget, flowing west and north-west
from the high Alps further south, so that its most
westerly edge lay at least 60 miles beyond Geneva, as
far as Lyons on the Rhone.

In old maps, showing the extent of the great ancient
glacieis of Switzerland, authors were somewhat too
timid, and large blank spaces were here and there left

44° Old Glaciers of Switzerland.

among mountains of the second and third classes, as if
they were not sufficiently lofty to have contributed
their quota of ice to fill the minor valleys. But on the
map that accompanies Professor Rutimeyer's memoir
on the Pliocene and Glacial epoch, that distinguished
author has boldly drawn a continuous line of moraine-
matter, extending from Lyons along the south-east flank
of the Jura, and from thence to Steyer, in Austria, about
20 miles from Linz on the Danube.

I do not doubt the general fidelity of this bold gene-
ralisation, and if it be true, it seems to me that, during
the most intense part of the Glacial epoch, the whole of
Switzerland between the Alps and the Jura must have
been covered with glacier-ice. If so, to the eye (had
human eyes been there to see it) it must have been im-
possible to specialise individual glaciers such as those of
the Rhone, the Rhine, the Linth, the Reuss, and the
Aar. Nevertheless when we consider the great an-
tiquity of the post-Miocene disturbance of the Alps,
I do not doubt that in some form those valleys
existed, in which case the great glacier, maintaining an
average uniformity of surface, must still have been
thickest in the lines of the pre-existing valleys, and
the erosive power of the moving ice must have been
proportionally increased thereby. The effects produced
on the country over which the under-current of the
Rhone glacier flowed were commensurate to its great
size and thickness.

The Lake of Greneva where deepest, towards its eastern
end, is a little more than 1,000 feet in depth, and it
gradually shallows to its outflow. By examining the
sides of the mountains on either side of the valley of
the Rhone, through which the glacier flowed, we are
able to ascertain what was the thickness of the ice in

Old Glaciers of Switzerland. 44 1

that valley when the glacier attained its greatest size viz.,
at least 5, 200 feet above the present bottom of the valley
at Viesch, and more than 3,700 feet at Morcles, not far
above the southern end of the delta of the Ehone, whiclr
once formed part of the lake. If we may suppose that
this latter thickness continued approximately as far as
the deepest part of the lake between Evian and Cully,
the glacier may have been nearly 4,700 feet thick, if we
add to the above thickness at Morcles the depth of the
water.1 By similar observations on the Jura, it is
clear that where the ice abutted on that range, it still
maintained a thickness of something like 2,200 feet
where thickest, swelled as it was by the vast tributary
masses of glacier-ice that progressed down the valley of
the lakes of Thun and Brienz, and also by that of the
Arve and of Chamouni, and by others of smaller size
that flowed down the valleys south of the lake.

Consider the effect of this gigantic glacier flowing
over the Miocene rocks, which in this part of Switzer-
land are comparatively soft, and yet of unequal hard-
ness ! That mass, working slowly and steadily for a
period of untold duration, must have exerted a pro-
digious grinding effect on the rocks below. Where
the glacier-ice was thickest, there the grinding power
was greatest, especially on the softer Miocene strata,
and the underlying rock was consequently to a corre-
sponding extent worn away. No one can doubt that the
ice-flow that pressed down the upper valley of the
Rhone exercised a great amount of eroding power,
representing as it did the snow-drainage of all the

1 For details on this question, see ' Notice sur la conservation
des Blocs Erratlques et sur les Anciens Glaciers du Revers Septen-
trionale des Alpes,' par M. Alphonse Favre, Archives des Sciences de
la Bibliotheque Universelle, November 1876.

44 2 Old Glaciers of Switzerland.

Alpine Lakes. 443

southern slopes of the Oberland, and the northern
drainage of all the southern Alps, from Mont Blanc
to the Matterhorn, which looks down on the modern
puny glacier of the Eh one. But where at its western
end, near Geneva, the ice was thinner, there the pressure
and grinding power were less, and the waste of the
underlying rock was proportionately diminished. The
result was, that a great hollow was scooped out, at
least 984 feet deep as sounded by De la Beche, or about
1 ,000 feet as given by later measurements in the deepest
part, without allowing for the moraine matter that, in
later times, must have been left in the depths of the
lake by the retreating glacier, or for the modern sedi-
ment that covers the bottom. At first it may be diffi-
cult to realise this theory and to appreciate the mode of
action of the ice, but when we compare the depth with
the length of the lake and the height and weight of the
ice above, and reduce all to a true scale, as shown in
fig. 92, it becomes evident that the depth of the rock-
basin is comparatively quite insignificant.

I have elsewhere shown that the rock-bound lakes
of Brienz and Thun had the same kind of origin. These
were originally one lake, but are now separated by
broad alluvial meadows. In like manner the Lakes of
Lucerne, Zug, the Wallen See, Zurich, and Constance,
all lie in rock-basins of erosion by glacier ice. The same
is the case with many other Swiss lakes of minor note,
and should anyone wish to see actual basins, visibly
bordered by glaciated rocks, let him critically inspect
the lakes of Sarnen and Lungern on the route from
Lucerne across the Brunig. The deep hollows in which
the great Italian lakes lie on the south side of the Alps
had a similar origin.1

1 .See Memoir by the Author, « On tlie Glacial Origin of certain

44-4 European and American Lakes.

It may seem strange that I should take the Lake
of Geneva as a special example, when the lakes of
Llanberis, Llyn-llydaw, and Bala in Wales, Windermere
in the Cumbrian region, Loch Doon in Ayrshire, Loch
Katrine, or Loch Lomond, and many other lakes in the
Highlands, would on a smaller scale do as well. But
though it was in Wales that the first idea of the theory
struck me, while mapping its moraines and ice-grooves
in 1854, yet it was only after a critical examination of
many of the lakes in and around the Alps, that in 1861
I ventured to assert that nearly all their basins were
scooped out by the great glaciers of the icy period. I
then first clearly saw its bearing as a veritable discovery
in physical geography, affecting not Switzerland and
Britain alone, but a large part of the habitable world.

If we examine the maps of the northern hemisphere
generally, beginning at the equator, and going north^
it is remarkable that, excepting lagoons, crater-lakes,
and a few formed by subsidence in volcanic areas,
we find very few important lakes in its southern regions,
and these chiefly in Central Africa, where no traveller
has yet tried to account for them. As we proceed
northwards in America, in latitudes 38° and 40°, the
lakes on the eastern half of the continent begin to in-
crease, and soon become tolerably numerous. North of
New York, towards the St. Lawrence, they become so
numerous, that they appear on large maps to be
scattered over the country in every direction, and beyond
this to the west and north of Lake Superior and the
St. Lawrence, the whole country is, so to speak, sown

Lakes,' &c. ' Jour. Geol. Soc.' 1862, vol. xviii. For the germ of the
whole subject see also ' The Old Glaciers of Switzerland and North
Wales,' ' Peaks, Passes, and Glaciers,' republished as a separate
book 1860.

Scandinavian and Welsh Lakes. 445

broadcast with lakes large and small, and a vast number
of the smaller ones are omitted partly for want of room,
and partly because even now they are unknown to topo-
graphers. The whole of that area has been completely'
covered by ice, as the researches of geologists show.

Coming to this side of the Atlantic, and examining
the Scandinavian chain on the east, where the slopes
are less inclined than on the western flank, all round
the Gulf of Finland, and the Swedish coast of the
Baltic, the whole country is covered with lakes, many,
if not all, of which lie in true rock-basins, a fact which
I inferred in my memoir on lakes published in 1864,
and which has since been proved by Mr. Amund Helland,
of Christiania, in his late memoirs, a summary of which
is given in his paper ' On the Ice- Fjords of North
Greenland, and on the Formation of Fjords, Lakes,
and Cirques in Norway and Greenland.' 1 In Finland,
according to Professor Nordenskiold, the lakes lie
in a glaciated country, being chiefly dammed in by
heaps of detrital matter called Osar.2 Go into North
Wales where glaciers were once in every valley ; there
we have the lakes of Llanberis, once one, and 107 feet
deep where deepest, of Cwellyn, Ogwen, Llyn-y-Ddinas,
Llyn Gwynant, Llyn-llydaw (180 feet), Glaslyn, (114
feet), and all the lakes and tarns near Capel Curig,
and in the upper Corries, each lying in a true rock-

1 < Journal of the Geological Society,' 1877, vol. xxiii. p. 142.

2 The Eskers of Ireland and the Kames of Scotland. These are
common in the valley of the Clyde, especially near Lanark and
Carstairs, where they form elongated irregular mounds of gravel
which sometimes merge into true glacial detritus. They enclose
lakes and peat-mosses, once lakes. They have been mapped and
described by Professor Geikie. They occur in the grounds of Castle
Kennedy near Stranraer, enclosing two beautiful lakes, and also
in Northumberland, Lancashire, and Yorkshire.

446 Cumberland Lakes.

basin. All the lakes in Cumberland that I have ex-
amined (and of which I have seen soundings) lie in true
rock-basins (unless, in some cases, a few of the smaller
ones may be dammed up by mere moraines or other
superficial detritus) ; and this has been confirmed by
Mr. Ward in his various memoirs on the glaciation of
Cumberland, published in the ' Journal of the Geological
Society.' I was also informed by the late Professor
Jukes, and personally know, that the glacial origin of
many of the celebrated lakes in Ireland, and of others
unknown to fame is equally clear. Professor Hull
also has confirmed the view that great numbers of the
lakes in Ireland lie in veritable rock-basins, often
crowded together in districts some of which I have not
yet seen. Few or no parts of Britain have been more
intensely glaciated than Ireland, and, indeed, all of these
regions have been extremely abraded by glacier-ice.

In Scotland, in the southern hills, and in Kirk-
cudbrightshire and Ayrshire, there are many truly
rock-bound lake-basins scooped out of the Silurian rocks
of the Carrick Hills. If anyone wants a convincing
proof let him go to Loch Doon, where at the outflow of
the lake he may see the rocks perfectly moutonnee and
well grooved, slipping under the water in a manner that
unmistakably marks an ice-worn rocky barrier, while
elsewhere all round the lake is circled by mountains,
the highest of which is more than 2,800 feet in height.
In the Shetlands and the Orkneys, in the Lewes and all
the Western Islands, in Sutherland, Inverness-shire,
Perthshire, Dumbartonshire, and the Mull of Cantyre,
the country is, as it were, sown with lakes — a number
of which I can testify by personal observation lie in
true rock-basins.

Let anyone climb to the summit of Suilven in

Scottish Lakes. 447

Sutherland, which rises sharp and steep-sided above a
broad, bare, undulating plateau of gneiss (p. 289) and let
him count the lakes, large and small, seen from the top.
In 1859, on one side alone I counted forty-two, and-
turning round to count those on the other sides, I
thought — their name is legion ! and gave it up. I cannot
assert that each one is a rock-basin, but everyone that
I visited, not there alone, but in other Highland areas,
is so, and it is simply absurd to suppose that each tarn or
larger lake was provided with a special area of subsi-
dence wherein its water might lie, especially when many
of such hollows lie in one broad plateau. As for tilting
up the outlets of valleys, or the depression of their upper
reaches, it would indeed require a remarkable series of
tiltings to have produced the myriad lakes of Scotland,
Sweden, and North America, and it would be difficult to
give a reason why such unnumbered special tiltings
should have been confined to areas the surfaces of which
had all been subject to glaciation.

Kock-bound basins are, however, not confined to
the land, for they are almost universal in the bottoms of
fiords, or, as they are called in Scotland, Salt- Water
Lochs, which so largely intersect all coasts where
glaciers are or have been.

All Scotchmen who know the west coast are familiar
with these long, narrow, mountainous arms of the sea,
which any person capable of a grain of thought at once
recognises as seaward continuations of inland valleys,
which, it is well known, were, in Scotland and Norway,
filled with glaciers. As far as I know, Professor James
D. Dana, of Newhaven, U.S., was the first who dis-
tinctly stated that ' fiord-latitudes and drift-latitudes
are the same.' * In the term ' drift-latitudes ' are in-
1 ' Manual of Geology,' 1863, p. 543.

448 Fiords.

eluded all those glacial influences that polished and
grooved rocks and scattered erratic boulders.

Ever since exact Admiralty charts were published,
it has been well known that our fiords are generally
shallower at their mouths than further up, and it is
more than thirty years ago since Mr. Charles Darwin
observed, that ' Tierra del Fuego may be described as a
mountainous land, partly submerged in the sea, so that
deep inlets and bays occupy the place where valleys
should exist' ('Journal of a Naturalist'). He has also
remarked that the fiords are generally shallower towards
their mouths than in the interior, at that time attri-
buting this fact to the gathering of sediments on those
exposed parts of the coast that are more subject to
the abrading action of the sea than they are in the
stiller interior reaches. In my memoir on Lakes, pub-
lished in 1862, 1 stated of Scotland and Norway that the
fiords and lochs are the prolongation of valleys down which
glaciers flowed, and each was itself filled with a glacier,
and I attributed the origin of their deep interior
basins to the grinding power of glacier-ice ; and in 1 865,
in the ' Philosophical Magazine,' I compared their inner
great depths to those of Loch Lomond, itself once a fiord
and a true rock-bound basin ; for, in among the group
of beautiful islands, mere striated roches moutonnees,
near the outflow of the Leven, the water is only from
8 to 17 fathoms deep, while opposite Ben Lomond it
deepens to 89 fathoms, or 534 feet, and above Tarbet
opposite Culness to 105 fathoms, or 630 feet. If the
country were to sink 20 feet, the surface of Loch
Lomond would be at the level of the sea, and a few
feet of additional depression would again convert
it into a fiord like Loch Long, Loch Fyne, or Loch
Etive.

Fiords. 449

Though I have no doubt that many seaward ex-
tensions of land valleys, now fiords, were once dry land
valleys themselves, and that the deeper hollows in them
were sometimes excavated when the whole stood above-
the level of the sea, yet this is not essential, for as
has been observed by Mr. Amund Helland in his masterly
papers (already quoted) on the Grlaciation of Greenland,
Norway, and Sweden, if a great glacier be sufficiently
powerful to push onward, and grind for many miles
along the bottom of a long fiord, the scooping out of
rock-bound basins will be much the same as if its whole
length were above the level of the sea.

I am not aware of any such fiords on the coast of
England, though it may very well be that in Wales the
Estuary of the Mawddach may be an old lake or rock-
bound fiord-basin now greatly silted up, for the
frequent roches moutonnees opposite Barmouth, once
islands, seems to indicate a rocky barrier there.

When, however, we go into Scotland, where the
mountains are high and the valley ice-streams were
thick, there is no lack of them there. From Loch
Erriboll, with its ice-ground mountains and islets, fig.
94, to the Firth of Clyde there is not a fiord that is not
deeper in its further recesses than at its mouth, a fact
proved by the charts of the Admiralty.1 It is needless
here to enter into minute details, but I may mention
that the small fiord of Loch Erriboll is 78 feet deep
near its upper end, and much shallower at its mouth.
Half way up, little Loch Broom has a depth of 342
feet, and at its mouth is nowhere deeper than from 60 to

1 For a recent account of this subject see ' The Great Ice Age,
by James Geikie, LL.D., F.R.S., in which, on very clear maps, he
shows soundings both of inland fiords, and sea rock-basins near
the British coasts.

G G

450

Fiords.

Fiords, Loch Etive. 451

156 feet. Loch Fyne, about eight miles below Inverary,
is 414 feet deep, and is very much shallower 15 miles
further down, while in Loch Etive, near Oban, the whole
theory is brought prominently before the eye, as shown
in the accompanying picture, fig. 95.

The mouth of this sea loch or fiord at Connel
Ferry is so narrow, that it seems as if a stone might
almost be thrown across, but further up it spreads into a
noble sheet of water, and its length is about 20 miles, and
its greatest depth 456 feet. When the tide is up, on a
quiet day, all is still and unruffled from end to end ;
but as the tide falls the water gets troubled across the
mouth of the fiord, two rocky islets begin to appear,
and by-and-by, standing on the roche moutonnee in the
foreground, it becomes plain that a rocky barrier
traverses the fiord from side to side, over which the
outflowing sea falls with a roar that may be heard for
a mile or more.1 If the region were raised for a few
feet, Loch Etive, by influx of rivers, would by degrees
become changed into a freshwater lake, like its
neighbouring tributary rock-bound basin Loch Awe,
which is 306 feet deep where deepest. Here then is
what may be called a demonstration of the glacial
origin of many rock-bound fiord basins, unless we can
persuade ourselves to believe that all the great fiords
of Scotland, Norway, Greenland, and North and South
America, were by some special operation upheaved at
their mouths, no matter how the inlets trend, so that
some day when these countries may be further elevated,
the fiords shall all be converted into inland rock-bound
freshwater lakes ! 3

1 Coruisk in Skye is another case in point on a smaller scale.

2 The Lakes of Maggiore and Como were once fiords. Long

Q G 2

452

Fiords.

11 rjy

Greenland. 453

This point is clear, that most of our country, as in
Greenland and Victoria Land now, was in the icy
period ground by a heavy weight of slowly moving and
long enduring glacier-ice, which I firmly believe was
the scooping power that originated most of the lake
scenery of our country. I go further, for in ice-worn
rocky regions, both north and south of the equator, the
farther north or the farther south we go the more do
lakes increase in number, and I am convinced, that this
fact is not a mere accidental coincidence, but is one of
the strongest proofs of the former existence of that
widespread coating of glacier-ice that in old times
moulded the face of so much of both hemispheres.
The day has been when Greenland was a mild and
fertile country,1 and should such an episode return, its
land-surface will be varied by a prodigious number of
lakes, and should its fiords emerge, its splendid high-
land valleys will show many a long stretch of fresh water
dotted with islands, like some of the lakes of Sweden,
of Loch Lomond, and others in Scotland, or like Lake
Champlain in North America.

This full theory, brought out in March, and pub-
lished in August 1862, of the origin of so many lakes
in the northern hemisphere, wherever there have been
either widespread continental or even isolated moun-
tain glaciers, was on the whole received with disfavour,
or ' faint praise,' in England and Switzerland when
first produced, and it fared but little better in the
north of Italy, where, however, it was then allowed that
it ' deserved the gravest attention,' and its general
principles have since been accepted by Grastaldi. Now

before this was discovered I had proved them to be rock-bound
glacier lake-basins.
1 In Miocene times.

454 Lakes.

it finds its way into geological manuals, and many
monographs, reports, and memoirs ; in some of which
it has been stated that it must in the long run be ac-
cepted as the origin of those rock-basins of the northern
hemisphere that are occupied by lakes.1

Finally, if I were to classify lakes directly and in-
directly produced by glacial action, it would be as
follows — the first named being most and the last least
numerous: 1st. True ruck-basins scooped by glacier-ice
out of the solid rocks. 2nd. Lake hollows due to
irregular accumulation of moraine-matter on broad
flattish surfaces, among which in many districts may be

1 See Professor Geikie, ' Phenomena of the Glacial Drift of
Scotland ; ' Sir William Logan, < Keport on the Geology of Canada,'
1863, where he states that the great North American lake-basins
' are depressions, not of geological structure, but of denudation ;
and the grooves on the surfaces of the rocks which descend under
their waters appear to point to glacial action as one of the causes
which have produced these depressions.' Also Dr. Newberry, in the
•American Annual of Scientific Discovery,' for 1863, and in other
publications. Following my view, he allows that glacier-ice ex-
cavated all the great lakes, from Ontario to Lake Superior, excepting
Lake Superior, an exception for which I see no necessity. See also
reports by Dr. Julius Haast on the Geology of New Zealand ; and
the writings of Dr. Hector and Captain Hutton on the same region ;
Professor Geikie, ' The Scenery of Scotland viewed in connection
with its Physical Geology,' 1867, and ' The Student's Manual of
Geology,' by the late Professor Jukes, third edition, edited by
Professor Geikie. Mr. Jukes strongly advocated this theory in
papers in the ' Header,' in a long controversy with the late Dr.
Falconer. See also 'The Great Ice Age,' by James Geikie, F.K.S.,
both for lakes and fiords, and last, not least, the letter of Signer
Gastaldi in the ' Journal of the Geological Society ' to Sir Charles
Lyell, 1873, vol. xxix., in which he says, 'I have given you
summarily the reasons which have converted me to Mr. Ramsay's
theory.' I could quote other authors on the same side of the
question, and I am more than content with the rapid progress it
has made. Sir Charles Lyell gives a qualified assent in his
< Student's Elements of Geology,' 1871.

Lakes. 45,5,

included those dammed in by Eskers or Kames, well
known on a large scale in Finland, and good examples
of which, on a smaller scale, may be seen at Carstairs,
and in the beautiful grounds of Castle Kennedy near
Stranraer. Many of these lakes since their formation
have got filled with alluvial detritus, and are now peat
mosses. There are also many small hollows formed in
original irregular accumulations of the boulder-clays
of Northumberland and Durham, now filled with lami-
nated clays, sands, and bearing fresh-water shells and
plant-remains, and some of these shallow lakes still
exist as such. 3rd. Moraine-dammed lakes, which I
think on the whole are scarce, for many that appear
to be so are in reality more than half rock-basins-, or
only dammed up by moraine-matter for a part of their
depth.

Of lakes in Britain, formed by sinking of the ground,
I know of none, save a few pools of water formed by
the infalling of New Red Marl above salt-mines and
brine-pits.

456

CHAPTER XXVIII.

NEWER PLIOCENE EPOCH, CONTINUED — BONE-CAVES, AND

TRACES OF MAN MIGRATION OF TERRESTRIAL ANIMALS

INTO BRITAIN ACROSS THE DRIFT PLAINS SUBSEQUENT

SEPARATION OF BRITAIN FROM THE CONTINENT DENU-
DATION OF THE COASTS OF BRITAIN.

I HAVE already said, and will here briefly recapitulate,
that, during the Tertiary and later epochs, England has
been repeatedly joined to the mainland : a circum-
stance proved by the mammalia that migrated hither
after each successive emergence. Our Eocene ter-
restrial fauna, of a very antique type, is the same as
that of the Eocene strata of France ; our Miocene fauna
(if the mammalia found in the Crag migrated hither
in late Miocene times) is of the same general type as the
fauna of some later Miocene phases of the Continent
and this type, with important modifications, still con-
tinued after the Crag was raised out of the sea, and
England wa§ again joined to the Continent during the
time that the vegetation of the ' Forest Bed ' flourished.
In the main the mammalian Miocene fauna of the
world was the obvious predecessor of the fauna of the
present day. The species are mostly different, the
types mostly are the same.

In this ( Forest-bed,' elephants, hippopotami, rhino-
ceroses, horses, deer, oxen, pigs, a tiger, and bears,
beavers, and other mammals abound, most of them of

Glacial Epoch. 45 7

extinct species. Such large mammalia, on any hypo-
thesis, did not originate in a small detached island like
England, but formed parts of large families that in-
habited the north of Europe, America, and Asia, at
'various comparatively late periods of geological time,
and they could only have passed into our area by
the union of England with the Continent.

Again, in the south of England, at Selsey Bill,
there are post-Pliocene strata on the sea-shore, described
by Mr. Godwin-Austen, one of the beds containing
species of living marine shells, not belonging to icy
seas, and overlaid by icy Boulder-drift. In the former
there were found the remains of a well-known species of
elephant, E. antiquus, lying on clay, on which stumps
of trees, the remains of an old wood, still stand.

These Boulder-clays were formed during a period of
cold, accompanied by the great glaciers that covered so
much of the north of Europe, as I have already explained.
While, or after the glaciers were largest, the country
slowly sank, and, severed from the mainland, became
merely groups of islands. But it was again elevated,
and there is evidence that it was then united to the
Continent, for we find in later deposits the remains of a
number of terrestrial animals, some of the species of
which are unknown in the older formations. The
Elephants which lived before this time must have been
driven out of our area by that submergence, unless some
of them, with other mammalia, managed to live on in
the extreme south of what is now England, which
apparently suffered a smaller change of level. Farther
north, such large animals as the Elephant, Ehinoceros,
and Hippopotamus could not have lived on mere groups
of icy islands, on which vegetation must have been
scanty. Thoy required a large amount of vegetation

45 8 Glacial Epoch.

to feed on, and therefore they must have died out or
been banished from our area by that partial submerg-
ence, the rivers of which, under any climatic conditions,
could not have been sufficiently large to support
numerous Hippopotami. We find, however, that on
the re-elevation of the country, it must have been
reunited to the Continent, because the great hairy
elephant. Elephas primigenius, again appears, asso-
ciated with a number of other animals that, after the
re-elevation of the land, migrated from the Continent
of Europe to our area, the bones of which are found in
the old alluvia of rivers, partly of older and partly of
younger date than the Glacial period. If, as is often
stated, E.primigenius occur in the Forest-bed, then, in
the opinion of most of our geologists, it lived in the
British area before the beginning of the Glacial epoch,
and therefore I say that the Mammoth reappeared, and
as that great elephant is found in Scotland in early in-
ter-glacial strata, it seems by no means improbable that
he obtained a footing in our area in pre-glacial times.

This, indeed, is only one of several migrations of
mammalia, that took place both from and into our country
during various episodes that occurred in the long- con-
tinued Glacial epoch. It was for some time the fashion
to attribute the occurrence in such superficial deposits
of what may be called conflicting faunas, to the annual
changes of summer and winter temperatures. In this
way it was attempted to account for the presence of
Lions, Hyaenas, Hippopotami, &c., in strata supposed
to be precisely of the same age with those that contain
the bones of Reindeer, Mammoths, Musk-sheep (Ovibos
tnoschatus), and White Bears. When the glaciers
and the cold declined in summer, and ice disappeared
from the rivers, then the Hippopotami made a raid to

Bone Caves. 459

the north accompanied by Lions and Hyaenas, and when
the winter cold returned they retreated further south,
leaving such snowy land as there was in exclusive posses-,
sion of White Bears, Musk-sheep, Eeindeer, and perhaps
hairy Mammoths with a warm coat of wool beneath the
long hair. But with the advance of research inter-
glacial episodes began to be established, when, in the
language of Mr. James Greikie, there took place ' a great
recession of the confluent glaciers consequent upon a
change of climate.' l

In connection with this subject it is now necessary
to say something of the bones found in limestone caves,
especially as the subject is intimately connected, not
only with a large and partially extinct mammalian
fauna, but also with the presence of man as a hunting
denizen of the British area, at the time in which these
carnivorous and browsing mammalia roamed the
country.

Bone-caves are often of very old date, and always
occur in limestone strata, in which they have been
formed in consequence of part of the carbonate of
lime having been dissolved. Most solid limestone rocks
are jointed : that is to say, they are parted by narrow
fissures, often vertical, through which water that falls
on the surface can easily find its way. .Rain-water per-
colates through the joints, and the carbonic acid,
picked up by the water as it falls through the air, by
degrees dissolves part of the limestone, and carries it
away in solution in the form of bicarbonate of lime.
Eunning in underground channels, caves have thus been
formed, often of great extent, and branching in many
directions, through which streams sometimes still run.2

1 ' The Great Ice Age,' p. 339, second edition.

2 The great limestone caves of Kentucky form the most pro-

460 Bone Caves.

Close to Clapham, in Yorkshire, in the grounds of
Ingleborough, such a cave runs from the side of a
limestone gorge into the hill, 800 yards in length, and
no doubt further if it were followed. From its top,
' like natural sculpture in cathedral cavern,' beautiful
stalactitic pendants and pillars descend to the floor ;
delicate open arcades run along the ledges, large fretted
accretions of stalagmite swell out in the angles of the
cavern between the floor and sides, and great flat
pendants of stalactite hang like petrified banners from
the walls. Sometimes the cavern runs in a long low
gallery, sometimes it rises into high chambers, scooped
into ogee arches ; and wherever a chamber occurs, there
we find a joint in the rocks, through which water from
above percolates, and continues the work of sculpture.
The whole is the result of the dissolving of carbonate
of lime by carbonic acid in the water ; and modern
drippings and a rivulet in the cavern still carry on the
work through all its length. White rats live in the cave,
and fresh-water shrimps, perhaps washed from above,
have been seen in the brooklet; but I am not aware
that any fossil bones have been found in it, though they
are common in other caverns in the same county near
Settle, in the Carboniferous Limestone of Derbyshire,
North and South Wales, the Mendip Hills, and in the
limestone caverns of many other parts of England.

It is impossible to fix with absolute accuracy the
precise age of such caves, or the time when all the
bones that are fouud in them were buried there ; for the

minent examples. At Ottawa a large part of the river falls into a
chasm in Silurian limestone and is seen no more. The perte du
Mhone, below the Lake of Geneva, is a minor example. The Caldes
of Yorkshire, where large brooks flow from limestone caves at the
sides of the valleys of mountain limestone, are well known. I have
already, p. 436, mentioned others in the Jura.

Bone Caves. 461

wearing out of the caves has been going on for unknown
periods of time, and some of them may have been filled
with sediments, perhaps charged with bones, again and
again. There is often proof that, by underground
changes of waterflow, old consolidated gravels that filled
them to the roof have been, at various periods, forcibly
cleared out by natural means. When, therefore, we find
bones in these caverns, mixed with red loam, sand,
gravels, and angular fragments of rock, it is very diffi-
cult, and perhaps sometimes impossible, to define to
what precise 'minor period they belong ; for, viewed on
a large scale, all periods from later Miocene times
downwards are minor periods.

In such caves the bones of extinct mammals, probably
of pre-Grlacial, and certainly sometimes of Glacial times,
are found, together with the remains of species that still
inhabit our country and the Continent of Europe ; and
as it is hard to separate them, I must devote these
paragraphs to caves in general.

Sometimes the skeletons, or parts of them, seem to
have found their way in through the mouths of the
caverns ; more frequently they were washed in through
' pot-holes ' and openings in their roofs. On the verge
of the mouths of large bell-shaped pot-holes, on the
Carboniferous Limestone plateaux of Yorkshire, under
which we hear the water rushing, I have often seen the
carcases, or detached bones, of sheep waiting for a
flood to be carried below.

Sometimes the detached bones of animals, or the
animals themselves, have been dragged in by beasts
of prey, such as Bears and Hyaenas, that inhabited
these caves. One evidence of this is, that the bones
are frequently gnawed, and still bear the marks of the
teeth of carnivora, as first shown by Dr. Buckland ; and

462 Bone Caves.

another, that the angles of the caverns themselves are
occasionally smooth, having been polished by the animals
rubbing against the rock, as they passed by corners and
along other uneven surfaces on their way into and out
of their dens.

I repeat that there is no doubt that many of these
caves date from before the Glacial epoch, and therefore
that the bones of animals must have found their way
into some of them before that period, ' while yet our
England was a wolfish den ' ; and since the glaciers
died away many of the caves have been more or less
tenanted down to the present day, or bones have been
at intervals washed into them ; and thus it happens,
that organic remains of older date than the Glacial
epoch may be found in the same cave with bones
belonging to that period, and to minor epochs that
come down to historical times, and even to our own
day.

Mingled with the bones of extinct and modern
species in England and Wales, flint implements, and
other works of man, have been found ; and though it
has often been said that these are of later date than
the remains of extinct species sometimes found in
the glacial deposits, it has not only not been proved
that this is the case, but in my opinion, and in that of
many competent judges, the very opposite view has
been reduced to a demonstration. Some of the Devon-
shire caves in which works of man were found, having
apparently been above the sea during the whole of the
Glacial epoch men frequented them. Others farther
north, like that of Cefn in North Wales, were below
the sea during part of the Glacial epoch, for the boulder-
beds reach a higher level; and, with Dr. Falconer, I
found fragments of marine shells of the drift in the

Bone Caves. 463

cave overlying the detritus that held the bones of
elephants and other mammalia. No human remains
were found in that cavern. During part of the time
some of the caves in the south of England seem to have
been inhabited, while others farther north lay under-
neath the ice-sheet, so that part of the northern land
was desolate, and for a time uninhabited by beast or
man. This, however, is certain, that man, the Mam-
moth, and other extinct mammalia, were contem-
poraneous, and to make this general statement more
definite, I shall give a condensed account of the
proofs on which it rests, selecting for that purpose some
of the caves that have been explored by competent ob-
servers.

First, however, I will observe that the bones of wild
animals, together with implements made by man, have
in all the caverns generally been preserved in much the
Fame manner. As already stated, they were often
washed into caverns from above through fissures, and
sometimes they were carried in by beasts of prey
through the mouths of dry caves. Often, in some of
the lower strata of caverns, they lie in a red loamy
earth mixed with stones. Over this there frequently
lies a thick deposit of stalagmite or carbonate of
lime, deposited from water dropping from the roofs of
the caverns. Some caves are, or have been, filled or
almost filled, with stalagmite, and in it bones, horns,
and other relics are buried. In this way bones became
sealed up in the caves safe from the effects of air and,
to some extent, of moisture ; and the result has been
the natural burial and preservation of those old races of
animals that formerly inhabited our land.

At least thirty-six British caves have been recorded
as holding the remains of terrestrial mammalia, and

464 Victoria Cave.

doubtless the list will be largely increased. I will
arrange those I have to notice geographically, begin-
ning with the north of England, and I may mention
that England is peculiarly fortunate in the possession
of so many dens and caverns, most of which have been
excavated by natural processes in Carboniferous Lime-
stone, which forms such large tracts of country both in
England and Wales. The remainder are chiefly in the
Devonian Limestone of Devonshire, while a few are in
Oolitic or other limestone strata. In connection with
this subject, it is worthy of remark, that the poverty of
Scotland in the fossilised bones of Elephants, Hippo-
potami, Ehinoceroses, Lions, and perhaps of man or his
works, is, doubtless, chiefly due to the general absence in
that corntry of large masses of Carboniferous Limestone,
while Ireland, more than half the surface of which is
made of Carboniferous Limestone, will probably yield a
rich crop of such organic remains, when leisure permits
people to search for them.

The Victoria Cave, near Settle in Yorkshire, is
entered at the base of a Scar in the Carboniferous
Limestone, at a height of about 1,450 feet above the
sea. Since 1870, it has been carefully excavated
under a trustworthy committee, and reports have been
issued on the subject by Professor Boyd Dawkins, and
since 1873 by Mr. E. H. Tiddeman of the Geological
Survey. The mouth of the cave was at first much
obscured by talus, fallen from the cliff or Scar, and
when this was removed, a layer was found inside the
cavern, partly composed of charcoal and burnt bones.
It was on this layer that the original discoverer of
the cavern, Mr. Jackson of Settle, found, in 1838,
coins, iron spear-heads, brooches, and many other
articles, all pointing to the fact that the cave had been

Victoria Cave. 465

tenanted during, or not long after, the Eoman occupa-
tion of Britain. All this comes easily within the range
of what may be called modern history.

Beneath this stratum there lies partly at the en-
trance of the cavern an accumulation of angular stones,
about six feet thick, at the base of which, resting on grey
clay, there occurred charcoal, a bone bead, flint flakes,
and broken bones of the Brown Bear, Stag, Horse, and
Bos longifrons (Celtic shorthorn). Professor Dawkins
guardedly speculates on the date of this human occupa-
tion, as having been 6 about 4,000 or 5,000 years ago,' *
a moderate computation of a portion of backward time
that few will grudge, and which to my mind seems
short compared with the earlier history of man and
other mammalia in relation to this cavern.

Beneath these shingly deposits at the entrance of
the cave, and * at the base of all the talus '2 there was
found a genuine glacial Boulder-clay, charged with
ice-scratched stones and boulders, consisting of upper
Carboniferous black limestone derived from the north,
conglomerates from the base of the Carboniferous Lime«
stone also from the north, while other boulders consisted
of Carboniferous sandstones, and 'a very large proportion
of Silurian rocks,' the nearest large areas of which
are in Cumbria and the south of Scotland. The
extent of these Boulder-clays has been proved over an
area of 1 ,200 square feet, and this lies upon the edges
of deposits of grey clay, and a lower reddish cave-
earth, which is a kind of loam peculiar to many bone-
caves. The local absence of Boulder-clay on the ground
at the top of the cliff, shows that the material could not
have fallen from above before the accumulation of the

1 < Cave Hunting,' p. 115.

J II. H. Tiddeman, Victoria Cave Exploration Committee, 1875.
H H

466

Victoria Cave.

shingly debris called ' screes,' and, in Mr. Tiddeman's
opinion, this Boulder-clay forms part of the ground-
moraine of a great glacier coming from the north, such
as that described in Chapter XXIV.

' The bones in the caverns,' says Mr. Tiddeman,
' appear to group themselves chiefly along two horizons,
which are separated from one another by a greater or less
thickness of cave-earth, laminated clay, and stalagmite.'
The organic remains found in these beds are arranged
by him as follows ; —

s

d
3

1

W

I

1

j>,

"C
O

I

c
(t

1

3

m

Elephas
Antiquus.

o

w

Ithinocez'os
leptorhinus.

Hippopotamus.

.si

P
1

i

P3

Reindeer.

Bos
primigenius.

Goat or Shrep.

Upper Bed

X

—

X

X

—

X

_

x

_

_

x

x

x

9

x

Lower Bed

X

X

X

X

X

—

X

X

X

x

—

X

—

The general assemblage closely resembles that found
in 1821 by Dr. Buckland in the famous Kirkdale Cave
in the Vale of Pickering in Yorkshire, and such as is
also known in the Dream Cave, and others near Wirks-
worth in Derbyshire. In the Victoria Cave all the
bones in the lower bed are marked by the gnawing
of the teeth of Hysenas. One bone from this bed is
of special interest, a fragment which Mr. Busk identi-
fied as part of a human fibula. No one doubts the
existence of man along with the modern fauna of the
upper bed, which is later than the Boulder-clay. But
a man co-existent with a Grlacial, or probably a pre-
Grlacial fauna, is a very different matter, and, accord-
ingly, some eminent osteologists have lately declared
that though they cannot assert that the fragment is
not part of the bone of a man, on the other hand they

Caves, Creswell Crags. 467

cannot deny that it may just as well be part of the
fibula of a bear.

On a point such as this, though I have been in the
cave, I have no claim to form an opinion, but subse-
quent paragraphs will show that though at present the
question has not been decided by the evidence yielded
by the Victoria Cave, there are yet grounds for the
certain belief, that man in the British area lived in
inter-Glacial and probably even in pre-Glacial times.

The next caves I shall mention are, like the Vic-
toria Cave, of unusual importance, because of their con-
tents and the careful manner in which they have been
explored by the Rev. J. Magens Mello and Mr, Thomas
Heath, assisted in the determination of species by
Professor Boyd Dawkins. These caverns occur in the
Magnesian Limestone (Permian ) of Creswell Crags in
Derbyshire, about ten miles ENE. of Chesterfield, and
two miles SSE. of Whitwell. Three of the explored
caves are known by the names of Robin Hood's Cave,
the Pin Hole, and Church Hole.

In the first-named the layers consist in descending
order of :

1. Stalagmite, 2ft.

2. Breccia, with bones and flint implements, 1 ft. 6 in.

3. Cave-earth, with bones and implements, 1 ft. 9 in.

4. Mottled bed, with bones and implements, 2 ft.

5. Red sand, with bones and quartzite implements.

The upper soil in the cavern 'yielded traces of
Romano-British occupation, such as enamelled bronze
fibulae, fragments of pottery,' &c. ' In the surface soil and
in the upper part of the Breccia (No. 2\ there occur
some bones of the domestic hog, goat, sheep, and Celtic
shorthorn, but no implements of a Neolithic type were
found associated with these.' Beneath this upper part,
H H 2

468 Caves, Creswell Crags.

the explorers found c teeth and bones of the bear, the
fox, the hare, the reindeer, the hyaena, and the woolly
rhinoceros and horse. Together with these were found
numerous flint implements, mostly chips and flakes, but
some few of them were carefully wrought lanceolate
weapons, trimmed on either side.'

'The cave-earth below the Breccia contained the
relics of a similar fauna, with one or two additions, but
a different type of implements was met with . . .
none presenting the more elaborately-shaped forms of
those of the Breccia.' One or two are of bone, and
numerous implements of quartzite rudely fashioned
from water-worn pebbles, and, as pointed out by Professor
Dawkins, they are of an earlier type than those found
in the overlying Breccia.

The red sand bed at the base of all also contained
relics of most of the animals common in the overlying
strata, but no traces of human bones or works have yet
been found therein.

Exclusive of the uppermost part of the Breccia,
No. ^, the following remains of Mammalia have been
found : Man, Lion (var. Felis spelcea), Hycena spelcea,
the Fox, Wolf, Bears (Ursus ferox and U. arctos),
Cervus Megaceros (great Irish deer), .Reindeer,
Bison prisons, Horse, Rhinoceros tichorhinus, Elephas
primigenius (Mammoth), Pig and Hare.

One point seems to be certain, that between the
Romano-British epoch and the sub-epochs recorded in
the table of strata given above there is a great gulf.
From the historical epoch we make a sudden leap ' in
the dark backward and abysm of time,' into the ele-
phantine era of Palaeolithic man, for no instrument
of Neolithic type has been found in any of the caverns.
Further, the remains indicate two climatal stages, ' when

Cefn Cave, 469

man, the hunter and fisherman, endured all the vicissi-
tudes of a climate, at one time mild enough for the Hip-
popotamus to be an occupant of the Yorkshire rivers,x
at another so severe that amid the snow and ice of an
Arctic winter he would have to struggle for existence
in company with the Eeindeer, the Glutton, and the
Arctic Fox.'

As these and many other caves of England are
doubtless of pre-glacial origin as to their original scoop-
ing out, it may well be that some of the bones are as
old as those found beneath the boulder-beds of the Vic-
toria Cave, but of this there is no absolute proof.

The next caves I have to mention are those on the
western side of the Vale of Clwyd, which lie in the
escarpment of the Carboniferous Limestone that rises
from under the New Ked Sandstone which fills the lower
part of the valley. One of these is the well-known
bone-bearing cave of Cefn, described in 1833 by Mr.
Stanley, afterwards Bishop of Norwich. This cave and
part of its contents I have seen along with Mrs. Wynn
of Cefn, and the late Dr. Falconer, whose researches on
the extinct mammalia of India are so well known.
Among the bones found in the cave are Elephas anti-
quus (the ancient representative of the modern African
elephant), Rhinoceros hemitcechus, Hippopotamus,
Cave-Bear, Spotted Hysena, and Reindeer. In this
cave a human skull and cut antlers of a stag were
discovered 'in the lower entrance,' as described by
Professor Boyd Dawkins, but no attempt has been
made to separate the flint implements found in these
caves into Palaeolithic and Neolithic ; 1 nor has anyone
determined that any of the bones belonged to distinct

1 See pp. 540 and 545 for figures of Palaeolithic and Neolithic
flint implements.

47° Paviland Cave.

pre- Glacial, inter- Glacial, or post-Glacial epochs. My
own strong impression — for I may not call it convic-
tion— is, that some or all of the bones found a way
into the Cefn Cave before the partial submersion of
Wales during the Glacial epoch, and were sealed
therein before the shelly sands were deposited in the
cavern, as recorded at page 462.

It is certain that the Vale of Clwyd at that time
was occupied by the sea, for the Boulder-clay of the
banks of the River Elwy is charged with well-preserved
sea-shells, and if Moel Try fan was submerged 1,175 feet,
it, is unlikely that the Vale of Clwyd did not suffer
something like an equal submergence. ElepTi.as anti-
quus and Elephas primigenius are alike known as
animals that lived, the last in Glacial, and the former,
in pre- Glacial time, and if, as I believe, the former be
the ancestral precursor of the African, and the latter
of the Indian elephant, it may be hard to determine
which has the oldest ancestry as a distinct species,
while it is by no means certain that both species may
not have crossed into the British area before the advent
of the Glacial epoch.

Go-ing further south, the limestone cliffs of the
promontory of Gower are penetrated by no fewer than
ten caverns, all of which have been more or less ex-
plored— one, the Paviland Cave, by Dr. Buckland in
1823, and the others by Colonel Wood since 1848.
They yielded a vast number of bones, according to
Falconer of almost every species elsewhere known
in British caves, including E. primigenius and E.
antiquus, Rhinoceros primigenius, and R. hemi-
tcechus, Hippopotamus major, Hyaena, Cave-Bear,
Wolf, Fox, &c., and in one cave, called Bosco's Den,
there were found a thousand shed antlers of the Eein-

Pavi land Cave. 471

deer, which were extracted by Colonel Wood. In one of
the caves, called Long Hole, he made the important
discovery of Rhinoceros tichorhinus, and R. hemi-
tcechus, along with manufactured flint knives in the
same undisturbed deposit.

In the Paviland Cave, which was unscientifically
opened before it was visited by Dr. Buckland, there
were found the remains of the Mammoth, Woolly Rhino-
ceros, Hyaena, Cave-Bear, and many other animals in
red earth, under the usual crust of stalagmite which
formed the upper floor. With these was found a human
skeleton, stained red by infiltration of an oxide of iron,
and called by the quarrymen, ' the red lady of Paviland.'
According to Dr. Buckland, the contents of the cavern
seemed to have been disturbed by old diggings, and it
was therefore his opinion that the body had been buried
there at some ancient time. This cave must probably
have been inhabited, for charcoal and sea-shells of edible
species were found in it, and near the skeleton some
carved beads and ornaments of ivory, possibly made
from the tusks of the Mammoth, which with the skull
lay close by the body. It is also said that a small
chipped flint was found in the same place.

I have no doubt that the antiquity of this famous
skeleton must be very great, but who can tell how old,
not in years, but according to standards of comparative
geological antiquity ? Even though the debris had been
disturbed there is no valid reason why the man should
not have been coeval with the Mammoth and his con-
temporary Mammalia, for the figure of that great hairy
elephant, with its enormous curved tusks carved on its
own ivory, has been found at La Madelaine in the Dor-
dogne; and in Denmark there was found a skull of
this species with a flint arrow-head sticking in the

472 Caldy Cave.

bone. How late they survived in Europe no written
history tells, though the unwritten history of flint
weapons in caverns shows that Palaeolithic man hunted
the great beast ; while in Asia, as all readers know,
his whole body has more than once in summer dropped
out of the frozen mud cliffs of the great Siberian rivers,
a region in which he, perhaps, survived very much later
than in Europe. We may be permitted to regret that
' the red lady of Paviland ' was exhumed 44 years ago,
long before the art of ' Cave Hunting ' ranked as a
branch of palseontological science in which an early
history of man is involved.

On the west side of Caermarthen Bay lies Caldy
Island, about a mile from the Pembrokeshire shore, near
Tenby. About forty years ago a cave was discovered
there in the northern sea-cliff, which was quarried for
limestone, and which I visited with Dr. Buckland
in 1841, when the last relics of the cavern were disap-
pearing under the operations of the quarrymen. Bones
and teeth of Mammoths, Ehinoceroses, Hysenas, Lions,
and other Mammalia common in such caves occurred in
abundance, and I well remember the glee with which
Dr. Buckland on his knees gathered the bony harvest
into a large silk bandana, while surreptitiously I sketched
him in the act. Other caves have since been explored
in Caldy, and on the mainland of Pembrokeshire, with
like results.

I specially mention the caves in Caldy, because they
help to prove the long lapse of time that has taken
place since so many great mammals lived on ground,
part of which is now only an island one mile in length.
It must indeed have taken a great number of years
for atmospheric influences and sea waves to have worn
a channel a mile in width so as to separate the island

Caves, Mendip Hills. 473

from the mainland, for the waste of sea cliffs as hard
as the Carboniferous Limestone is so slow, that the life-
time of generations of men sees but little change in
their outlines, and rude camps and earthworks of un-
known age even now stand on many a hard rocky pro-
montory, almost as fresh as the day when they were
first constructed. These were my first reflections when I
saw the traces of the old mammalian inhabitants of
what now is Caldy, and the same train of thought is
entertained by Professor Dawkins in his book on ' Cave
Hunting.' They are sufficiently obvious to all who are
not imbued with a sense of unprovable and needless
cataclysmic forces.

On the eastern side of the upper part of Bristol
Channel, the Mendip Hills, and other large bosses of
Carboniferous Limestone, are seamed by numerous
caverns charged with bones. Taken all in all, the
assemblage is much the same as that found in the caves
already mentioned, and like some of these, the bones,
as remarked by Dr. Buckland, were carried into under-
ground water-channels by streams falling into swallow-
holes. This involves a very considerable change in the
physical geography of the region since these streams
ran. Unless the Carboniferous Limestone be more or
less coated with impermeable strata, such as Red Marl,
Lias clay, or Boulder-clay, the rain immediately sinks
through innumerable joints open to the surface, and
thus it happens that rivers, or even unimportant brooks,
are rare in tracts formed exclusively of masses of lime-
stone. From the evidence of outlying remnants, it
seems probable that the Mendip Hills were once ex-
tensively covered by a thin casing of Lias clay, over
which streams ran in the Pleistocene epoch, and carried
the bones of dead animals into swallow-holes, just as at

474 Wookey Hole.

the present day, in the upper valleys of the Jura, good-
sized streams are engulfed in swallow-holes of marly
Miocene beds, to pass into the Jurassic limestones below,
and again to reappear as ready-made rivers in deep
transverse valleys, as, for example, in the Val de Travers
below Combe Varin. The removal from the surface of
the Mendip Hills of such strata by ordinary denuding
agents, must have occupied a period of time long and
of unknown duration.

There is, however, another view of the subject which
cannot fail to strike a reflective mind with wonder,
speaking as it does so strongly of time. In those
caves which were not hyaena dens, thousands of bones
of grazing animals and of carnivora, are found crowded
together ( in most admired confusion.' Lions and
hyenas did not specially prefer to devour their prey at
the mouths of swallow-holes, nor was the surface of the
ground strewn broadcast with bones of carnivora and
other mammals, like gravel-stones on many a fresh
ploughed field; and when we think of bones, horns,
and teeth, 6 by the thousand,' in so many large caverns,
most of which must have been washed in by very slow
degrees, the mind, for this reason alone, becomes power-
fully impressed with the idea of the long endurance of
so-called Pleistocene time.

On the south side of the Mendip Hills, about a mile
and a half north-west of Wells, there is a hyaena den
called Wookey Hole, which has been hollowed out in
the dolomitic conglomerate, which in so many places
fringes and lies unconformably on the Carboniferous
Limestone.

This cave was discovered in 1852, and from 1859 to
1863 it was systematically explored by Professor Boyd
Dawkins, the Eev. J. Williamson, and Messrs. Willett,

Wookey Hole. 475

Parker, and Ayshford Sanford. Professor Dawkins
gives an admirable account of the work in his ' Cave
Hunting,' to which I must refer my readers for a num-
ber of interesting and graphic details. When first
opened in 1852 'the workmen found more than 300
Roman coins, among which were those of Allectus and
Commodus.' As the work progressed year by year, and
the contents of the cave were cleared out and examined,
vast numbers of bones and teeth and horns were dis-
covered, under conditions which proved that they were
not introduced by water, but that the cavern had been
a veritable hyaBna den, which at intervals had also been
occupied by savage men, as the occurrence of charcoal,
calcined bones, and distinctly formed implements of
flint and chert clearly testified. All of these imple-
ments are of Palaeolithic type (see fig. 112, p. 540).

To give an idea of the quantity of bones, Mr. Daw-
kins states that 'the remains obtained in 1862-3, from
3,000 to 4,000 in number, afford a vivid picture of the
animal life of the time in Somerset. They belong to
the following animals, the implements representing the
presence of Man : —

Man 35 Woolly Rhinoceros . . 233

Cave-Hyaena . . . 467 Rhinoceros hemitsechus . 2

Cave-Lion . . 15 Horse .... 401

Cave-Bear . . .27 The Great Urns . . 16

Grizzly Bear . . .11 Bison . . . .30

Brown Bear . . .11 Cervus Megaceros . . 35

Wolf . 7 Reindeer . . . .30

Fox 8 Red Deer ... 2

Mammoth . . .30 Lemming ... 1

The remains of these animals were so intermingled,
that they must have been living at the same time.' I
cannot refrain from adding Mr. Dawkins' vivid descrip-
tion ' of the condition of things at the time the hyaena

476 Kents Hole.

den was inhabited. The hyaenas were the normal occu-
pants of the cave, and thither they brought their prey.
We can realise these animals pursuing elephants and
rhinoceroses along the slopes of the Mendip till they
scared them into the precipitous ravine, or watching
until the strength of a disabled bear or lion ebbed
away sufficiently to allow of its being overcome by their
cowardly strength. Man appeared from time to time
upon the scene — a miserable savage armed with bow
and spear, unacquainted with metals, but defended
from the cold by coats of skin. Sometimes he took
possession of the den and drove out the hyaenas — for it
is impossible for both to have lived in the same cave
at the same time. He kindled his fires at the entrance
to cook his food and to keep away the wild animals ;
then he went away, and the hyaenas came back to their
old abode.'

Kent's Hole, near Torquay, in Devonshire, has long
been one of the most famous caverns in England. Mr.
Pengelly, F,R.S., has given an extensive account of the
'Literature of Kent's Cavern' in the 'Transactions of the
Devonshire Association,' from which it appears that Mr.
Thomas Northrnore of Exeter first dug through the
stalagmitic covering, and ' exclaiming with joy, " Here
it is ! " pulled out an old worn-down tusk of a Hyaena,
and soon afterwards a metatarsal bone of the Cavern-
Bear,' and among twenty or thirty other teeth and
bones ' were two jaws, upper and lower, of either the
Wolf or the Fox,' In 1827, Mr. (afterwards Sir) Henry
De la Beche mentions the cavern as ' celebrated on
account of the remains of elephants, rhinoceroses,
hyaenas, bears, deer, wolves, &c.,' and specially connects
this discovery with the name of the Rev. John McEnery,
who had previously made a valuable collection of such

Kent's Hole. 477

remains with the intention of publishing a descriptive
account of his CAVERN RESEARCHES. The manuscript,
which was in the possession of Mr. E. Vivian, who pub-
lished portions of it, has wisely been printed entire by
Mr. Pengelly with all its imperfections. When it was
begun no one knows, but ' some portions of it are cer-
tainly not older than the year 1836 . . . and no portion
can be assigned to a later date than 1840, as the
author's decease took place on February 18, 1841.'

To analyse the whole of Mr. McEnery's mutilated
fasciculus is needless in a work like this, and it is
enough to state that under the upper and lower stalag-
mites he recognised the bones and teeth of the Mam-
moth (E. primigenius), Rhinoceros, Horse, Ox, (bison ?)
Irish Elk (Cervus megaceros), Eed Deer, Stag, Fallow
Deer, Reindeer, Bears ( Ursus cultridens, U. Spelceus,
U. Arctoideus, U. Priscus\ Hysena, Wolf, and doubt-
less others unnamed.1 He specially recognised that
the bones had been gnawed, and also insists on the fact
that flint implements occur in intimate association with
the bones. In 1840 Mr. Godwin- Austen makes the re-
mark that ' arrow-heads and knives of flint occur in all
parts of the cave and throughout the entire thickness
of the clay, and no distinction, founded on condition,
distribution, or relative position, can be observed whereby
the human can be separated from the other reliquiaB ; ' 2
and further on he adds, ' there is no ground why we
should separate man from that period and those acci-
dents when and by which the cave was filled.' The
breadth of these remarks (unacceptable at the time), by
an experienced observer, who has on this and other sub-

1 I print these from the imperfect Fasciculus G as they stand,
with the exception of the Wolf, mentioned elsewhere.

2 ' Trans. Geol. Soc.,' London, second series, vol. vi.. t. 2, p. 444.

47 8 Brixham Cave.

jects often been years before his time, left but little in
the way of theory for subsequent observers, though
there still remains plenty of work in detail.

All the flint instruments and flakes found in this
cavern below the upper stalagmite, are of palaeolithic
types, a fact of much importance l in relation to the
antiquity of man.

The last cave that I shall mention is that of Brix-
ham, Devonshire, in the limestone that forms the south
side of Tor Bay. It was discovered in 1858, and Mr.
Pengelly at once saw the necessity of securing the right
of exploration, so as to ensure the most accurate possible
examination of its contents and the mode of their oc-
currence. Of this committee I happened to be one of
the members, and to ' Mr. Pengelly the committee are
indebted for the active and constant superintendence of
the work and for the record of each day's proceedings.' 2
In the same summer I visited the cave with Dr. Falconer
and Mr. Pengelly, and made a plan of it ; and at a later
date it was resurveyed by Mr. Bristow, whose plan is
published in the ' Philosophical Transactions,' to accom-
pany the report drawn up by Mr. Prestwich. At that
time the stalagmitic floor of the cavern was mostly undis-
turbed, and a Reindeer's horn was firmly cemented in
the stalagmite. In the first six weeks of the workings
about 1,500 bones were exhumed, a large number of
which belonged ' to skeletons of small animals, like the
Rabbit and Fox, found near the surface.'

In part of the cave, which has many ramifications,

1 See 'Ancient Stone Implements, &c.' by John Evans, F.R.S.,
F.S.A. &c. pp. 442-466.

2 Keport on the exploration of the Brigham Cave, ' Philosophical
Transactions of the Eoyal Society,' 1873, vol. clxiii. p. 475.

Rrvchdm Cave.

479

the section was subsequently proved to be as follows, in
descending order :

FIG. 96.

1. Devonian Limestone.

2. Stalagmite.

3. Breccia.

4. Black bed.

5. Cave-earth.

6. Shingle.
V. Valley.

The cave is about 66 feet above the bottom of the
valley V.

The exploration, as far as it could conveniently be
followed, was completed in the summer of 1859, the
work having been carried on in galleries, which, with
many ramifications, comprised a space measuring 135
feet from north to south and 100 from east to west, as
reported by Mr. Pengelly.

In the abstract of the report by Professor Prestwich,
published in the ' Proceedings of the Eoyal Society,'
vol. xx. 1872, it is stated that ' mammalian remains
were found sparingly in the stalagmite, No. 2, in
abundance in the cave-earth, No. 5, and rarely in the
shingle, No. 6.' They are of the following species :
Elephas primigenius (Mammoth), Rhinoceros ticho-
rhinus (Woolly Rhinoceros), Equus caballus (common
Horse), Bos primigenius^ Bos taurus (common Ox),
Cervus elaphus (Red Deer), C. tarandus (Reindeer),

480 Brixham Cave.

Capreolus capreolus (Groat), Felis leo (var. spelcea,
Lion), Hyaena spelcea, Ursus spelceus^ Ursus ferox
(Grizzly Bear), Ursus arctos (Brown Bear), Canis
vulpes (Fox), Lepus timidus (Hare), Lepus cuniculus
(Rabbit), Lagomys spelceus (Hare-rat of Siberia),
Arvicola amphibius (Water-rat), and Sorex vulgaris
(Shrew-mouse).

Of these the small mammalia of living species were
found near the surface, and were no doubt of com-
paratively recent introduction. Of the remainder a few
were discovered in the stalagmite, No. 2, but by far the
greater number in the cave-earth, No. 5, while a small
number also occurred in the shingle, No. 6. As in some
other cases, previously mentioned, the cave was some-
times a Hysena den, for the bones bear the marks of
their teeth, and at a period a little later, ' the great
number of very young, or even foetal bones, afford the
strongest possible evidence that the Bear actually in-
habited the cavern.' With regard to the traces of man,
' not a single human bone has been found in Brixham
Cave ; but thirty-six rude flint implements and chips,
referable to man's workmanship, were met with in dif-
ferent parts of the cave ; of these sixteen were found in
the shingle, No. 6 ... In fourteen instances their infra-
position to bones of the Mammoth, Ehinoceros, Hyaena,
Tiger, (? Lion), Bear, Reindeer, Red Deer, Horse,
and Ox, is perfectly well proved, as many as 120 of such
bones having been discovered higher in the cave-earth '
than the place where these flints were found. Woodcuts
of some of the instruments given by Mr. Evans in his
report on the implements discovered, leaves no doubt
that they were fashioned by man, and all of them are
of undoubted early palaeolithic type, more or less similar
to fig. 112, p. 540.

Advent of Man. 48 1

As far as caves are concerned, this concludes the
evidence of the co-existence of savage man with a
mammalian fauna, some of the species of which are ex-
tinct ; but excepting the Victoria Cave, none of the
others yield any direct evidence as to whether man lived
in these regions before or, at least, during part of the
Glacial epoch (see p. 466). Something else, however,
remains to be said on this part of the subject when I
come to treat of river- gravels and alluvia.1

The antiquity of man being thus clearly established,
it becomes obvious that his advent into our area was
either of pre-Glacial or of inter-Glacial date. I say in-
ter-Glacial, because Mr. Skertchly has lately discovered
palaeolithic flint implements in certain brick-earths.
Similar, and I believe identical brick-earths underlie
the ' Chalky boulder-clay ' in the neighbourhood, the
boulder-clay having been removed by denudation from
that portion of the brick-earth in which the implements
were found at Botany Bay near Thetford in Suffolk.
The announcement at once provoked strenuous opposi-
tion, and therefore on a tour of inspection of Mr.

1 A list of cave mammalia is given by Professor Boyd Dawkins in
a memoir in the Journ. Geol. Society, 1869, vol. xxv. p. 194. His
entire list contains 46 or 47 species, as follows ; Man, Rhinolophus
ferum-equinum, Sorex vulgaris, Ursus arctos, U. spelseus, U. ferox ,
Gulo luscus, (the Glutton), Meles taxus, Mustela erminea, M.
putorius, M. martes, Lutra vulgaris, Canis vulpes, C. lupus, Hyaena
spelsea, Felis catus, F. pardus, F. leo, F. lynx, Machairodus latidens,
Cervus megaceros, Alces malchis, Cervus Browni, C. tarandus, C.
capreolus, C. elaphus, Bos primigenius, Bison priscus, Hippopotamus
major, Sus scrofa, Equus caballus, Rhinoceros leptorhinus, R.
tichorhinus, Elephas antiquus, E. primigenius, Lemmus, Lepus
curriculus, L. timidus, Lagomys spelaeus, Spermophilus erythro-

genoides, S. (?), Arvicola pratensis, A. agrestis, A amphibius,

Castor fiber, Mus musculus. Mr. Pengelley has written many
important papers on Bone- Caves and their connection with pre-
historic man.

I I

482 Migration of Animals.

Skertchly's work with Mr. Bristow, we took care to
examine into this point. The result was that I satisfied
myself of the truth of Mr. Skertchly's observations that
the implement-bearing brick-earth in places underlies
a boulder-clay, which in his opinion is not of the earliest
date, in which case the men who made these tools must
have been of inter-Glacial age. If so, why may these
men not have been the descendants of men who inhabited
the country in pre-Glacial times, and who, when the cold
increased, and sheets of glacier-ice advanced far south,
retreated into the Devonshire area, as I have hinted in
page 470. Perhaps we cannot prove it, but there is
nothing improbable in the hypothesis, and I am not the
only one who believes it. One thing is certain, that when
rude man, along with other mammalia, some of them
extinct, first migrated into the British area, he must
have done so over land, and no one doubts that in all
tertiary and post-tertiary time Britain has been again
and again united to the Continent, both before and
after the Glacial epoch. For example :

After the elevation of the country that succeeded
its partial depression under the sea during part of the
Glacial period, the probabilities are more than strong,
that England was united to the Continent, not by a
mass of solid rock above the sea level, but by a plain
formed by the elevation of the Boulder-beds over part
at least of the area now occupied by the German Ocean.
Across this plain many animals migrated into our area,
some of the species probably for the second time. It is
the belief of many geologists, that at the same period
Ireland was united to England and Scotland by a
similar plain across the area now covered by the Irish
Sea, and over this, into Ireland, the Cervus megaceros,
formerly called the Irish Elk, the Mammoth, and other

Migration of Animals. 483

animals migrated into that region. The proof is
equally clear that Ireland during part of the Glacial
period, like England, was partly submerged, so as to
form a group of islands ; and, therefore, to allow of the
country being re-inhabited by large mammals, there
must have been ground over which these mammals
travelled into the Irish area after the re-elevation of the
country.

An excellent surmise was offered us on this subject
by Professor Edward Forbes, who drew attention to
some remarkable observations made by Mr. Thompson
of Belfast with regard to the comparative number of
reptiles that are found in Belgium, in England, and in
Ireland. In Belgium there are in all 22 species of
serpents, frogs, toads, lizards, and the like. In England
the number of species is only 11, and in Ireland 5 ; and
the inference that Professor Forbes drew was, that these
reptiles migrated from east to west, across the old land
that joined our island to the Continent, before the
denudations took place that disunited them. Before
the breaking up of that land, a certain number had got
as far as England, and a smaller number as far as
Ireland, and the continuity of the land being broken up,
their further progress was stopped.

These denudations, of course, did not cease with the
breaking up of the land that joined our territory to
the Continent ; and, in raised beaches and submerged
forests, there are proofs of several oscillations of the
relative levels of sea and land since that period. This
waste of territory is, indeed, going on still, and will
always go on while a fragment of Britain remains.
Before proceeding further I would advance one or two
proofs to show how steady the waste of our country is.

Along the east coast of England, between Flam-
112

484 Coast-cliff Denudations.

borough Head and Kilnsea, the strata are composed of
drift or boulder-clay, sometimes of more than a hundred
feet in known thickness, and forming well-marked sea
cliffs. This district is called Holderness, and many
towns, long ago built upon the coast, have been forced
by degrees to migrate landwards because of the en-
croachment of the sea. ' The materials,' says Professor
Phillips, ' which fall from the wasting cliff' (a length
of 36 miles) 'are sorted by the tide, the whole shore
is in motion, every cliff is hastening to its fall, the
parishes are contracted, the churches wasted away.' The
whole area on which Ravenspur stood, once an impor-
tant town in Yorkshire, where Bolingbroke, afterwards
Henry IV., landed in 1399, is now fairly out at sea.
The same may be said of many another town and farm-
stead, and the sea is ever muddy with the wasting of the
unsolid land. In like manner, all the soft coast cliffs,
from the Humber to the mouth of the Thames, are
suffering similar destruction in places at an average
rate of from two to four yards a year. The line of coast
from Hunstanton to Cromer and Mausley, and much
further south, is wasting away at a rate estimated by
Mr. Reid of the Geological Survey, at probably not less
than an average of about two yards a year east and
west of Cromer. The strata consist of boulder-clay,
laminated clays, fresh-water and marine, and soft sands
and gravels. The cliffs are often lofty, and vast land-
slips are of frequent occurrence down to the shore, where
the restless waves rapidly dispose of the material. High
up on the edges of the cliff we see the relics of old
brick-built walls, that once belonged to vanished farm-
houses, and strongly-built tunnels, now in ruins, that
descended to the sea, and were once used by fishermen,
gape high on the cliffs, themselves a greater ruin. One

Coast-cliff Denudations. 485

notable example is found at Eccles-by-the-sea in Nor-
folk. The town at a comparatively late period extended
beyond the church tower, which is partly buried in-
blown sea-sand, and the church itself has been de-
stroyed.

On the south side of the estuary of the Thames
stands the ruined church of the Reculvers, on a low
hill of Thanet Sand, half surrounded on the land side
by the relics of a Roman wall, that in old times encir-
cled the little town, then probably at least a mile from
the sea. The church has been abandoned, but is pre-
served as a landmark by the Admiralty, and groins
have been run out across the beach to prevent the fur-
ther waste of the cliff by the sea. As it is, all the sea-
ward side of the Roman wall, has long been destroyed,
the waves have invaded the land, and half the church-
yard is gone, while from the cliff the bones of men
protrude, and here and there lie upon the beach. A
little nearer Herne Bay, the same marine denudation
sparingly strews the beach with yet older remains of
man, in the shape of palaeolithic flint weapons of a
most ancient type, washed from old river gravels that
crown part of the cliff.

In the Isle of Sheppy, great slips are of frequent
occurrence from the high cliff of London Clay that
overlooks the sea. Two acres of wheat and potatoes in
this manner slipped seaward in 1863. When I saw
them the crops were still standing on the shattered
ground below the edge of the cliff.

Again, in the Hampshire basin, on the south coast
of England, if we walk along the footpaths that are
used by coastguardsmen, we often find that the path on
the edge of the cliff comes suddenly to an end, and
has been re-made inland. This is due to the fact that

486 Coast-cliff Denudations.

the cliffs, chiefly composed of clay and sand, are so soft,
that, as in Sheppy and Holderness, every year large
masses of country slip out seaward and are rapidly
washed away by the waves.

The waste of this southern part of England and of
Holderness has been estimated at the rate of from two
to three yards every year. In the course of time,
therefore, a great area of country must have been de-
stroyed. At Selsey Bill there is a farmhouse standing,
twenty years ago about 200 yards from the shore, and
since the farmer first settled there, as much land has
been wasted away as that which lay between his house
and the sea. The site of the ancient Saxon Cathedral
Church that preceded that of Chichester is known to be
far out at sea. But this waste is not confined to the
softest kinds of strata, for further west, in Devonshire,
we find the same kind of destruction going on, one
remarkable case of which is the great landslip in the
neighbourhood of Axmouth, which took place in the
year 1839. The strata there consist on the surface of
Chalk, underlaid by Upper Grreensand, which is under-
laid by the Lias Clay. The Chalk is easily penetrated
by water, and so is the sand that underlies it. After
heavy rains, the water having sunk through the porous
beds, the clay beneath became exceedingly slippery, and
thus it happened, that the strata dipping seaward at a
low angle, a vast mass of Chalk nearly a mile in length
slipped forward, forming a grand ruin, the features of
which are still constantly changing by the further
foundering of the Chalk and Green sand. The waves
beating upon the foundering masses destroy them day
by day, and in time they will entirely disappear, and
make room for further landslips. If we walk along the
southern coast of Dorsetshire and Devon, and criticise

Coast- cliff Den uda tions. 487

it with a geological eye, it is obvious that a great num-
ber of similar landslips have taken place in times past,
of which we have no special record.

In the north country the same kind of history is
plain all along the Liassic and Oolitic cliffs of York-
shire, on a coast formed of almost the finest cliffs in
England. Not very many years ago at Rosedale, on the
north horn of Runswick Bay, an important set of iron
works, offices and cottages, with a pier and harbour,
were by a landslip at night utterly ruined and borne
into the sea. The slight seaward dip of the strata,
composed of clays and sands, ought to have warned the
proprietors of the insecurity of the position of their
works, had they possessed sufficient geological know-
ledge.

In parls of our country in the west, the Silurian
rocks, Old Red Sandstone and Coal-measures on the
coast, show equal evidence of waste, though much
slower in its progress ; as for instance at St. Bride's
Bay, in Pembrokeshire (see Map), where the north and
south headlands are formed in great part of hard
igneous rocks that stand boldly out seaward ; while
between these points there are softer Coal-measure
strata, which once filled what is now the bay — and
spread far beyond. But because of their comparative
softness they have been less able than the igneous rocks
of the headlands to stand the wear and tear of the
atmosphere and the sea waves, and thus having been
worn back a large bay is the result. I know of no place
in Britain where the effects of long-continued marine
denudation can be better marked than in this part of
Pembrokeshire. Let the observer cross to Ramsey
Island, opposite St. David's, and ascend one of the
rocky hills. Below he will see that a large part of the

48 8 Coast-cliff Denudations.

island forms a portion of an extensive tableland, which
is continued far into the mainland of Pembrokeshire,
broken on\y by minor hills formed of hard igneous
rocks which have more effectually resisted denudation,
while far to the south the islands of Skomer and Skok-
holm continue the outlines of the upland plain, such as
in Chapter XXX. I have called an old plain of marine
denudation.

All along the west coast, where solid rocks prevail,
the hardest masses usually form promontories, while the
bays have been scooped in softer material ; and this fact,
though the rate of waste may not be detected by the
eye in many years, yet proves the nature of marine and
atmospheric denudation when combined on coast cliffs.
The very existence of sea cliffs proves marine denuda-
tion, for the strata that form these cliffs come abruptly
to an end in precipitous escarpments. To see this in
perfection let any one walk along the coast cliffs formed
of Old Eed Sandstone near Arbroath in Forfarshire.
There the broad inland plain ends abruptly in vertical
precipices, that rise from 150 to 250 feet above the
waves at their base, and while the tide is retreating to
its completest ebb, long reefs and skerries of hard
edged strata tell of the progressive cutting back of a
great modern plain of marine denudation, similar to
that old one which stretches inland from the high edge
of the existing cliff.

The Needle-rock near Fishguard, the Needles of the
Isle of Wight, and many other rocky c stacks' form
excellent cases in point, standing a little aloof from the
high cliffs of rock that form the shore-line ; and the
Orkney Islands themselves are only fragments of an
older land separated by denudation from the mainland
of Scotland. While being deposited. Nature never

Coast-cliff Denudations. 489

ends strata in a cliff-like form. They were hardened
and raised into land. The weather and the waves
attacked them, wore them back, and cliffs are the result.
I re-mention these matters to show that such denu-
dations on a great scale are going on now, and there-
fore, when I speak of former unions and separations of
our island with and from the mainland by denudation
and oscillation of level, the statement is founded on
excellent data.

490

CHAPTER XXIX.

BRITISH CLIMATES AND THEIR CAUSES RAINFALL IN

DIFFERENT AREAS — AREAS OF RIVER DRAINAGE.

BEFORE discussing the subject of rivers and river-
gravels and alluvia, I now come to other phenomena
connected with the physical structure of our island
and its geography generally ; and first, with regard to
the rain that falls upon its surface. If we examine the
best hydrographic maps of the Atlantic, we find on them
numerous lines and arrows showing the direction of the
flow of the ocea.n currents as first drawn by Captain
Maury. One great current flows from the Gulf of
Mexico, where the water in that land-locked area with-
in the tropics is exceedingly heated ; and flowing out of
the gulf, it passes E. and NE. across the ocean, and
so reaches the European area of the North Atlantic.
So marked is the heat of this immense current that, in
crossing from England to America, the temperature of
the water suddenly falls some degrees. Twenty years
ago, in crossing the Atlantic, I was in the habit early
in the morning of taking the temperature of the water
with one of the officers of the steamboat. We then
found that at about five o'clock in the morning for
several days, the temperature of the sea was always
about four degrees above the temperature of the air,
but quite suddenly, in passing out of the Gulf Stream,
at the same hour of the morning, the temperature of

Gulf Stream. 49 T

the water was found to average about four degrees below
tbat of tbe air.

Where in ocean current maps the arrows point
southwards, there are cold streams of water coming
from the icy seas of the north. One of these passes
along the east coast of America, and coming from the
North Sea, many an iceberg detached from the great
glaciers of Greenland is floated from Baffin's Bay across
the banks of Newfoundland into the Western Atlantic,
as far south even as the parallel of New York. The
western half of the North Atlantic is thus kept cool, and
the water is often colder than the air.

The Gulf Stream occupies a very great width in
the Atlantic, and approaches tolerably near to our
own western coast, and the effect of this body of warm
water flowing northward is to divert the isothermal
lines (lines of equal temperature) far to the north, over
a* large part of the Atlantic area, and also of that of the
western half of Europe. Thus a certain line runs
across North America, about latitude 50°, representing
an average temperature for the whole year of 32°.
Across that continent it passes tolerably straight, but
no sooner does it get well into the Atlantic than the
Gulf Stream, flowing northwards, warms the air, and
the result is, that the line bends away to the far north
above Norway ; thus in the west of Europe producing
an average warmer climate, for the whole year, than
exists in corresponding latitudes in North America, the
middle of Europe, and the interior of Asia. Our British
climate, and all the west of Europe, becomes, as it were,
abnormally warm, owing to the influence of the Gulf
Stream, and we at once recognise this fact from the cir-
cumstance that trees of goodly size grow much further
north on the west coasts of Europe than on the east

49 2 Rainfall in Britain.

coasts of North America. Another effect that the Gulf
Stream produces, is to cause a great amount of mois-
ture in the west of Europe, and if we consult a rain
map of the British Islands, we see represented by dif-
ferent shades the average amount of rainfall in different
areas — the darker the shade the greater the quantity of
rain. The prevalent winds in the west of Europe are
from the SW. and therefore during a great part of the
year, the south-west wind warm comes laden with mois-
ture across the land from the sea where the Gulf
Stream flows.

In the extreme south-west of England, in Cornwall,
from 37 to 54 inches of rain falls every year ; and the
average for the county may be taken at about 43 or 45
inches. In Devonshire the rainfall varies from 31*75
and 32*6 at Sidmouth to 53*17 inches on Tavistock.
In Somerset from 28*57 at Langport to 42 at East
Harptree. In Dorset from 18*45 at Abbotsbury to
32*24 inches at Bridport. In Wiltshire from 28*59 at
Swindon to 29*27 inches on Salisbury Plain. In Hamp-
shire from 27 at Aldershot to 38 inches in Petersfield.
In Sussex from 26*37 at Hastings to 29 inches at
Chichester. In Kent and Surrey from 23*82 at Kew to
32*67 inches at Hythe. In Middlesex from 25'85 at
Hampstead to 23*11 inches on Winchmore Hill. The
rainfall in the western part of the south of England is
therefore much greater than in the east.

In like manner in Pembrokeshire the annual rain-
fall varies from about 31 to 40 inches, and may be
averaged at about 36 inches, and in Cardiganshire at
Lampeter about 45*18 inches, in Glamorganshire at
Cardiff about 42 inches, in Caermarthenshire and Brecon-
shire at about 40 inches, and in Montgomeryshire and
Merionethshire at about 54 inches. In Caernarvonshire

Rainfall in Britain. 493

the fall is about the same, but at Beddgelert in 1870 it
amounted to 101-58 inches, and in the Pass of Llanberis
to 76*67, while at Caernarvon close by the sea the rain-
fall was only 38-02 inches. In Anglesea the average fall
is about 34^ inches.

In Staffordshire, further from the west coast and
from the mountains, the average rainfall is about 23
inches, in Leicestershire about 19 inches, in Bedford-
shire about 16 inches, and in Norfolk about 24 to 25
inches, In this southern half of England the rainfall
therefore evidently decreases from west to east. Lan-
cashire is a rainy county. At Manchester the rainfall
varies from 32-59 to 36-77 inches, at Bolton 44-21
to 49, and at Coniston it is as high as 64 inches, but
that is in the Cumbrian region of Lancashire. In Cum-
berland the annual rainfall varies from about 22 at
Cockermouth, on the low ground near the coast, to 154
inches at Seathwaite, in the heart of the mountains, and
in 1871 it is stated to have been still higher, and perhaps
the average rainfall of the whole of that mountain region
may amount to about 70 inches annually. As we pass
eastward it decreases, but on the highest grounds of
Yorkshire and Northumberland there are places where it
rises from 51 to 56 inches, while in the lower ground at
Holbeck, Leeds, it falls to about 22-85, at Newcastle to
about 24, and at North Shields on the coast to about 26
inches.

In Scotland the same kind of observation holds
good with regard to the rainy character of the west.
In Argyleshire the lowest rainfall in 1870 was 42 inches
at Inverary, and the highest 109*20 inches at Lochgoil-
head. The average rainfall for the whole county, and
in the islands, may perhaps be estimated at from 55 to
60 inches. At For tree in Skye, in 1871, it amounted

494 Rainfall in Britain.

to 104*26 inches. The mountainous character of the
country produced that result, for in the Isle of Lewes in
the same year the rainfal] at Stornoway was only 31 '7 9
inches, while at Cromarty on the east coast of Scotland
about 26 inches of rain fell. In parts of Aberdeen-
shire the average fall is from 24 to 33*5 inches, and in
Fife the fall is from about 20 to 30 inches, in Midlo-
thian from 29 to 37, and in Haddingtonshire from 23
to 25. The same rule of decrease of rainfall therefore
prevails in Scotland that prevails in England, and it is
needless to multiply instances. The area, therefore,
of Great Britain varies much in the fall of rain, and
the average temperature of the western area is raised
and rendered agreeable by the influence of the Grulf
Stream. So much is this the case, that certain garden
plants grow through the winter in Wales and the west
of England, and even in the far north-west of Scotland,
which the winter cold of Middlesex kills. I have seen
bamboo canes growing in the open air in a garden in
Angiesea all the year round, and common fuchsias on
the shores of Loch Erribol in Sutherland.

Now the watery vapour in the air that rises from the
heated water of the Grulf Stream, is carried to the British
coast by the prevalent west and south-west winds, and
is partly intercepted on its passage eastward by the
mountains which rise in the west of Ireland and Great
Britain. Everyone who has visited Cumberland and
Wales knows how rainy these regions are compared
with the centre and east of England. The reason is,
that the air laden with moisture from the Atlantic
rises with the winds against the western flanks of the
mountains into the colder regions of the atmosphere,
and the air also expanding at these heights, rain is
precipitated there and upon adjacent lands. The same
is the case in Scotland, where the Highland mountains

Arecs of Drainage. 495

on the west produce a like effect ; and thus, partly
because it is the first land that the wind laden with
moisture reaches, and partly because of the mountains,
it happens that a greater amount of rain is precipitated
in the western than in the eastern parts of our Island.

If we examine our country with regard to special
areas of drainage, we find, that they are exceedingly
numerous. In Scotland the rivers that run into Moray
Firth drain an area of about 2,500 square miles ; the
Spey, which runs into the German Ocean, nearly 1,200
square miles. The Tay drains an area formed by the
Grampian mountains and part of the Old Eed Sand-
stone of 2,250 square miles. The Forth, including its
estuary, drains an area of about 2,000 square miles.
The Clyde, not including the greater part of its estuary,
drains an area of 1,580 square miles, the Tweed 1,870
square miles.

In England, the Tyne drains 1,100 square miles,
the Tees, 774. If we take the Trent and the Ouse as
draining one area, the immense extent, for such a
country as ours, of about 9,550 square miles are drained
into the Humber. The Witham, the Welland, the
Nen, and the Great Ouse, flowing into the old bay of the
Wash, drain 5,850 square miles. The Thames drains
an area of about 6,160 square miles ; and if we include
all the estuary, about 10,000. The Severn drains an
area of 8,580 square miles. The Avon that enters the
sea at Christchurch drains 1,210 square miles ; the Ex,
643 ; the Towey, in Caermarthenshire, 506 ; the Dee,
862; the Mersey, 1,748; the Kibble, 720; and the
Eden, 995 ; and if we take all the rivers that run into
the Solway Firth, including the Eden, the area drained
amounts to nearly 3,000 square miles. This leads to
the question of the origin of river valleys and their
different geological dates.

496

CHAPTER XXX.

ORIGIN OF EIVER VALLEYS THEIR RELATION TO TABLE-
LANDS— ESCARPMENTS CUT THROUGH BY RIVERS — GEO-
LOGICAL DATES OF DIFFERENT RIVER-VALLEYS THE

SEVERN, THE AVON, THE THAMES, THE FROME, AND THE

SOLENT TRIBUTARIES OF THE WASH AND THE HUMBER

THE EDEN AND THE WESTERN-FLOWING RIVERS

SCOTLAND.

IT is difficult, or almost impossible, even approxi-
mately to settle precisely what are the geological dates
of the valleys through which many rivers run ; or, in
other words, when they first began to be scooped out,
and through what various periods their excavation was
intermittently or continuously carried on. No one
has yet thoroughly analysed this subject, and only
of late years have I begun clearly to see my way into
it. Nevertheless a good deal has been done even
now, and a great deal more will be accomplished when,
with sufficient data, the whole subject may come to be
investigated. In Wales, for example, there are vast
numbers of rivers and brooks, small and large, and
when we examine the relation of these streams to the
present surface of the countty, we often find it, very
remarkable. Fig. 97 is a diagram representing no par-
ticular section, but simply the general nature of the
sections across the Lower Silurian strata of Cardiganshire,
as shown by myself in a paper given to the British

Plains of Marine Demidation. 497

Association at Oxford in 1847. The dark-coloured
part represents the form of the country given Fig. 97.
in the original sections on a scale of six inches ^ Jx

to a mile horizontally and vertically. The
strata of this area, and, indeed, of much of
South Wales, are exceedingly contorted. The
level of the sea is represented by the lower line ;
and if we take a straight-edge, and place it on
the topmost part of the highest hill, and incline
it gently seaward, it touches the top of each
hill in succession, in the manner shown by the
line 6 b. This line is as near as can be straight,
and, on the average, has an inclination of
from one to one and a half degrees; and it
is a curious circumstance that in the original p
line of sections there were no peaks rising
above that line — they barely touched it and no
more. It occurred to me when I first observed
this circumstance that, at a period of geologi-
cal history of unknown date, perhaps older than
the beginning of the deposition of the Permian
and New Eed Sandstones, this inclined line that
touches the hill-tops must have represented a
great plain of marine denudation.

Atmospheric degradation, aided by sea
waves on the cliffs by the shore, are the only
powers I know that can denude a country so as
to shave it across, and make a plane surface
either horizontal or slightly inclined. If a
country be sinking very gradually, and the rate
of waste by all causes be proportionate to the
rate of sinking, this will greatly assist in the
production of the phenomena we are now
considering : and a little reflection will show,

K K

498 Plains of Marine Denudation.

that the result would be an inclined plane like that of
the straight line b b in the diagram. Let South
Wales be such a country: then when that country
was again raised out of the water, the streams made
by its drainage immediately began to scoop out
valleys; and though some inequalities of contour
forming mere bays may have been begun by marine
denudation during emergence, yet in the main I believe
that the inequalities below the line b b have been
made by the influence of rain and running water.
Hence the number of deep valleys, many of them steep-
sided, that diversify Wales, all the way from the Towey
in Caermarthenshire to the slaty hills near the southern
flanks of Cader Idris and the Arans.

On ascending to the upper heights, indeed, anywhere
between the Vale of Towey and Cardigan Bay, it is
impossible not to be struck with the average uni-
formity of elevation of the flat-topped hills that form
a principal feature of the country. The country already
described as seen from Kamsey Island is part of this
plain,1 and much further north let anyone ascend Aran
Mowddy or Cader Idris in Merionethshire, and look
south and south-east. From thence he will behold, as far
as the eye can reach, a wide extent of flat-topped hills,
which form the relics of a vast tableland, now inter-
sected by numerous rivers, which, in the long lapse of
untold ages, have scooped out unnumbered labyrinthine
valleys eastward into Montgomeryshire, and far south
into Cardiganshire. Between the rivers Towey and Teifi,
and in other areas, these hills, in fact, form the relics of
a great plain or tableland in which the valleys have been
scooped out ; and in the case of the country repre-
sented in fig. 97, ' the higher land, as it now exists, is
1 See p. 487

Marine Denudation. Escarpments. 499

only the relic of an average general gentle slope, repre-
sented by the straight line (b 6) drawn from the inland
heights towards the sea.' l Mr. Jukes applied and ex-x
tended the scope of the same kind of reasoning to the
south of Ireland, with great success. In various parts
of Europe, notably in those regions that have been
longest above the water — on the banks of the Moselle
and of the Rhine, and in the great coalfield west of the
Appalachian chain in North America — we find unnum-
bered valleys intersecting tablelands, of a form that leads
us to believe that they also have been made by the
long-continued action of atmospheric waste and running
waters ; and I believe that the valleys of South Wales
have been formed in the same way, and in their origin
are even often of latest palaeozoic dates.

Nothing is more remarkable in the history of rivers
than the circumstance that very frequently they run
straight through bold escarpments, which at first sight
we might suppose ought to have barred the course of
the streams.2 The Wye in South Wales, for example,
runs through a bold escarpment of Old Red Sandstone
hills ; and the same is the case with the Usk.

For long it was customary to attribute such breaches
in escarpments, and indeed valleys in general, to dis-
turbances and fractures of the strata, producing a wide
separation, and actually making hills. But when we
realise that thousands of feet of strata have often been
removed by denudation since the great disturbances of
the Welsh strata took place, it becomes clear that the
present valleys are in no way immediately connected
with them ; for even if there be dislocations or faults

1 Reports, British Association, p. 66, 1847.

2 This has already been alluded to in the case of the rivers of the
Wealden, pp. 108-119.

K K 2

500

Valleys and Dislocations.

in some of the valleys, these faults when formed were,
as far as regards the present surface, thousands of feet
deep in the earth. All they could do might have been

FIG. 98.

a Present surface of the ground.

The dotted lines show the continuation of an anticlinal curve
broken by a fault/.

The dotted lines above the surf ace a a represent a certain amount
of strata removed by denudation.

to establish lines of weakness along which subsequent
denudation may have excavated valleys.

The real explanation of such cases as those of the
Wye and the Usk is this. At some period, now un-
certain, the beds of the Old Eed Sandstone, well
seen in the escarpment of the Beacons of Brecon, a-,
and the Caermarthen Fans, once spread much farther
westward, forming a great plain, b b (fig. 99), the result
of earlier denudations. This plain sloped gently east-
ward, and the dotted line shows the general state of
old outcrops of the strata. The river then ran over
ground perhaps even higher than the tops of the hills
of the present escarpment, and by degrees it cut itself a

The Wye and the Usk+

501

$
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pq
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>-<

^ s"

O r-T

5 o 2 Esca rpments and Rivers.

channel approximately in its present course, but varied
and widened by subsequent river action ; and, as it cut
out that valley, the escarpment, by the influence of rain
and other atmospheric causes, gradually receded to the
points marked 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and a, the last being the
present escarpment. For all observation tells us that
escarpments of a certain kind work back in this wa}r,
that is to say, in the direction of the dip of the strata.

One reason of this is, that escarpments often partly
consist of hard beds lying on softer strata. The softer
strata are first more easily worn away along the line
of strike, and thus an escarpment begins to be formed.
Once established, the weather acting on the joints and
other fissures in the rocks, takes more effect on the
steep slope of the scarp than on the gentle slope that
is inclined away from the scarp. The loosened detritus
on the steeper slope slips readily downward, and is
easily removed by floods of rain ; and thus the escarp-
ment constantly recedes in a given direction, while on
the opposite gentle slope, the loosened detritus, smaller
in amount, travels so slowly that it rather tends to
block the way against further waste. In this way we
can explain how the Wye and the Usk break through
the Old Ked Sandstone and find their way to the
estuary of the Severn ; why the Severn itself breaks
through the Upper Silurian escarpment of Wen lock
Edge ; why certain other rivers — such as the Dee in
Wales, and the Derwent in Cumberland — cut through
escarpments of Carboniferous Limestone ; and how,
indeed, the same kind of phenomena are everywhere
prevalent under similar circumstances. Of this I shall
say more when I come to treat of the Oolitic and
Cretaceous escarpments.

But when we have to consider the origin of some of

The Severn. 503

the larger river valleys, there is a great deal that is
difficult to account for. One thing is certain, that
before the Glacial epoch the greater contours of the
country were much the same as they are now. The
mountains of Scotland, Wales, and of Cumberland,
and the great Pennine chain, existed then, somewhat
different in outline, and yet the same essentially ; the
central plains of England were plains then, and the
escarpments of the Chalk and Oolites existed before the
Glacial period. All that the ice did was to modify the
surface by degradation, to smooth its asperities by round-
ing and polishing them, to deepen valleys where glaciers
flowed, and to scatter quantities of moraine-detritus,
partly in the shape of boulder-clay and of marine boulder
beds, and sands and gravels, over the plains that form
the east of England, and the Lias and New Ked Sand-
stone in the middle.

If we examine the valley of the Severn from Bristol
northwards through Coalbrook Dale, we find that for
a large part of its course the river runs down a broad
valley, between the old Palaeozoic hills and the escarp-
ment formed by the tableland of the Cotswold Hills
which are highest in the neighbourhood of Cheltenham.
That valley certainly existed before the Glacial epoch,
because we find boulders and boulder-drift far down
towards Tewkesbury ; and therefore, I believe that
before the Glacial epoch this part of the Severn ran
very much in the same course that it does at present.
During part of the Glacial epoch the country sank
beneath the sea, and Plinlimmon itself, where the
river rises, was perhaps buried in part beneath the
waters. When the country again emerged, the old sys-
tem of river-drainage in that area was resumed ; and
the Severn, following in the main its old course, cut a

504 Early Physical Changes.

channel for itself through the boulder-clay that partially
blocked up the original valley in which it ran. When
that original valley was formed through which the older
Severn ran is the point that I shall now attempt to
discover. This subject is intimately connected with the
origin and geological dates of the channels of many of
the other large rivers of England, most of which, unb'ke
the Severn, flow eastward to the English Channel and
the Oferman Ocean.

I must begin the subject by a rapid summary of
certain physical changes that affected the English
Secondary and Eocene strata long before the Severn,
after leaving the mountains of Wales, took its present
southern and south-western course along the eastern
side of the Palaeozoic rocks that border that old land.

About the close of the Oolitic epoch the Oolitic for-
mations were raised above the sea, and remained a long
time out of water ; and, during that period, those atmo-
spheric influences that produced the sediment of the
great Purbeck and Wealden delta were slowly wearing
away and lowering the land, and reducing it to the
state of a broad undulating plain. At this time the
Oolitic strata still abutted on the mountain country
now forming Wales and parts of the adjacent counties.
They also completely covered the Mendip Hills, and
passed westward as far as the mountains of Devon
passing out between Wales and Devonshire through
what is now the Bristol Channel. The whole of
the middle of England was likewise covered by the
same deposits, overlying the rocks that now form the
plains of Shropshire, Cheshire, Lancashire, and the ad-
joining areas, so that the Lias and Oolites passed out
to the area now occupied by the Irish Sea, over and
beyond the present estuaries of the Dee and the Mersey,

506 Cretaceous Overlap.

which lie between North Wales and the hilly ground of
Lancashire, formed of previously disturbed Carboni-
ferous rocks. In brief, most of the present mountainous
and hilly lands of the mainland of Britain were moun-
tainous and hilly then, and must have been much
higher than now, considering how much they have
since suffered by denudation.

At this period, south of the Derbyshire hills, and
through Shropshire and Cheshire, the Secondary rocks
lay somewhat flatly ; while in the more southern and
eastern areas they were tilted up to the west, so as to
give them a low eastern dip. The general arrangement
of the strata would then be somewhat as in fig. 100.

The submersion of this low lying area brought the
deposition of the Wealden strata to a close, and the
Cretaceous formations were deposited above the Weal-
den and Oolitic strata, so that a great unconformable
overlap of Cretaceous strata took place across the
successive outcrops of the Oolitic and older Secondary
formations. (See fig. 101.)

The same kind of overlapping of the Cretaceous on
the Oolitic formations, took place at the same time in
the country north and south of the present estuary of
the Humber, the proof of which is well seen in the un-
conformity of the Cretaceous rocks on part of the Oolites
and Lias of Lincolnshire and Yorkshire.

At this time, the mountains of Wales, and other
hilly regions made of Palaeozoic rocks, must have beeo
lower than they were during the Oolitic epochs'; partly
by the effect of long-continued waste due to atmo-
spheric causes, but much more because of gradual and
greatly increased submergence during the time that the
Chalk was being deposited. It is even possible that

r~

§

«

508 Miocene Continent.

during the Upper Cretaceous period Wales sunk almost
entirely beneath the sea.

I omit any detailed mention of the phenomena
connected with the depositions of the freshwater and
marine Eocene strata because at present this subject is
not essential to my argument.

The Miocene period of old Europe was essentially
a continental one. Important disturbances of strata
brought it to a close, at all events physically, in what
is now the centre of Europe ; and the formations partly
formed in the great fresh-water lakes that lay at the
bases of the older Alps were, after consolidation, heaved
up to form new mountains along the flanks of the
ancient range ; and all the length of the Jura, and far
beyond to the north-east, was elevated by disturbance
of the Jurassic, Cretaceous, and Miocene strata. The
broad valley of the lowlands of Switzerland began
then to be established, long afterwards to be over-
spread by the huge glaciers that abutted on the Jura,
deepened the valleys, and scooped out all the rock-
bound lakes.

One marked effect of this extremely important
elevation, after Miocene times, of so much of the centre
of Europe was, that the flat, or nearly flat-lying
Secondary formations that now form great part of
France and England (then united), were so far affected
by the renewed upheaval of the Alps and Jura that they
were to a great extent tilted, at low angles, to the
north-ivest. That circumstance gave the initial north-
westerly direction to the flow of so many of the exist-
ing rivers of France, and led them to excavate the
valleys in which they run, including the upper tribu-
taries of the Loire and Seine, the Seine itself, the
Marne, the Oise, and many more of smaller size ; and

Origin of the Severn Valley. 509

SI

I

a

03
CD

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il

5io Severn and Avon, Tewkesbury.

my surmise is, that this same westerly and north-
westerly tilting of the Chalk of England formed a
gentle slope towards the mountains of Wales, as shown
in fig. 1 02, and the rivers of the period of the middle
and south of England at that time flowed westerly.
This first induced the Severn to take a southern course
between the hilly land of Wales and Herefordshire and
the long slope of Chalk then rising to the east. Aided
by the tributary streams of Herefordshire, it began to
cut a valley towards what afterwards became the
Bristol Channel, and established the beginning of the
escarpment of the Chalk, e, fig. 102, which has since
gradually receded, chiefly by atmospheric waste, so far
to the east. If this be so, then the origin of the valley
of the Severn between e and 1 is of immediate post-
Miocene date, and is one of the oldest in the lowlands
of England.1

The course of the Avon, which is a tributary of the
Severn, and joins it at Tewkesbury, is, I believe, of
later date than the latter river. It now rises at the
base of the escarpment of the Oolitic rocks east of
Rugby, and gradually established and increased the
length of its channel in the low grounds now formed of
Lower Lias and New Red Marl as that escarpment
retired eastward by virtue of that law of waste which
causes all inland escarpments to retire away from the
steep slope and in the direction of the dip of the
strata.

If the general slope of the surface of the Chalk of
this part of England had been easterly instead of westerly
at the post-Miocene date alluded to, then the initial
course of the Severn would also have been easterly, like

1 Many of the valleys of Wales must be very much older.

The Avon, Bristol. 5 1 1

that of the Thames and the rivers that flow into the
Wash and the Humber.

One of the best known rivers that enters the estuary
of the Severn is the other Avon, which flows through
Bath and Bristol. Its physical history, on a small scale
almost precisely resembles that of the Rhine between
Basle and Bonn.1

West of Bristol there is a high plateau of Carboni-
ferous Limestone, the flat top of which attains a height
of nearly 400 feet above the level of the sea. Through
a deep narrow gorge in this limestone (fig. 103) the
river flows, between Clifton and Durdham Downs on
the east and Leigh Wood on the west, north-west of
which it enters the low grounds and finds its way to
the estuary of the Severn at King's Road. Above
Bristol, north and south of the river, the country
consists of a number of isolated flat-topped hills, of
which Dundry Hill and the Mendips form conspicuous
members, while in the neighbourhood of Bath, Lans-
down, Charmy Down, Odd Down all the minor Oolitic
plateaux now form portions of what was once a con-
tinuous broad tableland with minor undulations. In
these regions the Avon takes its rise, swelled by many
north-flowing tributaries, one of which, the Chew, rises
on the north flank of the Mendip Hills. North of
Bath, several minor streams flow into the Avon through
beautiful valleys which have been scooped out of
the Oolitic plateau, while the Boyd, the Siston, and
the Frome pass through the soft undulating grounds
of Lias, New Red Marl, and Coal-measures that lie
west of the bold Oolitic escarpment between Bath and
Wotton-under-edge. Some of these streams rise at

1 ' On the Physical History of the Rhine,' * Journ. Geol. Society,'
1874, A. C. Ramsay.

512

The Avon.

heights approximately as high as the summit level of
the limestone gorge through which the Avon flows
below Bristol.

The vulgar notion respecting the Avon and its
gorge is, that before that ravine was formed all the low
ground through which the river and its tributaries flow
was a large lake, that ' a convulsion of nature ' suddenly

FIG. 103.

Gorge of the Avon at Clifton, Bristol, looking down the river.

rent the rocks asunder and formed the gorge through
which the river afterwards flowed, and so drained the
hypothetical lake. It is scarcely necessary to add, that
had there been a large lake in that area, we might
expect to find lacustrine deposits and organisms in some
parts of these valleys, but none exist.

The true explanation is, that in some late tertiary
period of geological history, the surface of the country
on either side of the river above the gorge formed a

The Thames. 513

great plain, somewhat higher than the summit level of
the Carboniferous Limestone plateau. This plain being
slightly inclined to the west at the time the Severn was
scooping out its valley, as I have already explained at
p. 508, the ancient Avon flowed over the top of the
plateau of Clifton and Durdham Downs, through a
minor inequality of the surface, and, as rivers do, it
steadily worked at the deepening of its own channel.
As it did this, so in like proportion the river and its
tributaries in the upper part of their courses gradually
wasted and lowered the hill-sides and valleys through
which they flowed, being aided by rains and snows and
all the ordinary agents of atmospheric denudation ; and
thus it happens, that what was once a high slightly-
inclined tableland, has been converted partly into flat-
topped fragments of a high plain, and partly into undu-
lating hills and vales ; while in the great Oolitic plateau,
that stretches eastward as far as the Chalk escarpment,
we have still remaining a large tract of the ancient
plain, "with this difference, that the average gentle slope
of its surface is now east instead of west.

This naturally leads to the question, Why is it that
the Thames, and some other rivers that flow through
the Oolites and Chalk, run eastward? The answer
seems to be, that after the original valley of the Severn
was well established by its river, a new disturbance of
the whole country took place, by which the Cretaceous
and other strata were tilted eastward, not suddenly, but
by degrees, and thus a second slope was given to the
Chalk and Eocene strata, in a direction opposite to the
dip, that originally led to the scooping out of the
present valley of the Severn. This dip lay east of the
comparatively newly-formed escarpment of the Chalk
indicated by the dark line in fig. 102 marked e. The

L L

514 The Thames.

present Chalk escarpment, in its beginning, is thus of
older date than the Oolitic escarpment (fig. 57, p. 304),
but it would be hard to prove this, except on the hypo-
thesis I have stated.

When this slope of the Chalk and the overlying
Eocene strata was established, the water that fell on
the long inclined plain east of the escarpment of the
Chalk necessarily flowed eastward, and the Thames, in
its beginning, flowed from end to end entirely over
Chalk and Eocene strata.

The river was larger then than now, for I am inclined
to believe, that in these early times of its history, the
south of England was joined to France, the Straits of
Dover had no existence, and the eastern part of the
Thames as a river, not as a mere estuary, ran far across
land now destroyed, perhaps directly to join an exten-
sion of the north flowing river which we now call
the Ehine. At its upper end, west of its present sources,
the Thames was longer by about as much probably as
the distance between the well-known escarpment of the
Cotswold Hills and the course of the Severn as it now
runs, for the original escarpment of the Chalk must
have directly overlooked the early valley of the Severn,
which was then much narrower than now (see p. 509).
But by processes of waste identical with those that
formed the escarpment of the Wealden (figs. 71, 72, 73,
pp. 337-343), the Chalk escarpment gradually receded
eastward, and as it did this the valley of the Severn
widened, and the area of the drainage of the Thames
was contracted.

By-and-by the outcropping edges of the Oolitic strata
becoming exposed, a second and later escarpment began
to be formed, while the valley of the Severn gradually
deepened ; but the escarpment of the Chalk being more

The Thames. 515

easily wasted than that of the Oolite, its recession east-
ward was more rapid, and this process having gone on
from that day to this, the two escarpments in the region
across which the Thames runs are far distant from each
other.

All this time the Thames was cutting a valley for
itself in the Chalk, and by-and-by, when the escarp-
ment had receded to a certain point, its base became in
part lower than the edge of the Oolitic escarpment
that then, as now, overlooked the valley of the Severn,
only at that time the valley was narrower. While this
point was being gradually reached, the Thames by
degrees was joined by the growing tributary waters
that drained part of the surface of the eastward slope of
the Oolitic strata, the western escarpment of which was
still receding ; and thus was brought about, what at first
sight seems the unnatural breaking of the river through
the high escarpment of Chalk between Wallingford and
Reading.

From the foregoing remarks it will be understood
why the sources of the Thames, the Seven Springs and
others, rise so close to the great escarpment of the
Inferior Oolite, east of Gloucester and Cheltenham.
But just as in times long gone, the sources of the
Thames once rose westward of the Seven Springs,
so well known on the Cotswolds, so the sources of
the river now, are not more stationary than those
that preceded. The escarpments, both of Chalk and
Oolite, are still slowly changing and receding east-
ward ; and as that of the Oolite recedes the area of
drainage will diminish and the Thames decrease in
volume. This is a geological fact, however distant it
may appear to persons unaccustomed to deal with geo-
logical time

L L 2

5 1 6 The Frome.

A change in the story of an old river, even more
striking than that of the Thames, has taken place in
the history of what was once an important stream further
south. Before the formation of the Straits of Dover,
the solid land of England, formed of Cretaceous and
Eocene strata, extended far south into what is now the
English Channel. The Isle of Wight still exists as
an outlying fragment of that land. At that time the
Nine Barrow Chalk Downs, north of Weymouth Bay
and Purbeck, were directly joined as a continuous
ridge with the Downs that cross the Isle of Wight
from the Needles to Culver Cliff. Old Harry and his
Wife, off the end of Nine Barrow Downs, and the
Needles, off the Isle of Wight, are small outlying relics,
left by the denudation of the long range of Downs
that once joined the Isle of Wight to the so-called
Isle of Purbeck, and of the land that lay still farther
south of Portland Bill the Isle of Wight and Beachy
Head.

North of this old land, the Frome, which rises in the
Cretaceous hills east of Beaminster, still runs, and, much
diminished, discharges its waters into Poole Harbour.
But in older times the Solent formed part of its
valley, where, swollen by its affluents, the Stour, the
Avon, the Test, and the Itchin, it must have formed a
large river, which, by great subsequent denudations
and changes in the level of the land, has resulted in
the synclinal hollow through which the semi-estuarine
waters of the Solent now flow.1

The same kind of argument that has been applied

1 See Mr. T. Codrington « On the Superficial Deposits of the
South of Hampshire and the Isle of Wight.' Quart. Jour. Geol. Soc.
1870, vol. xxvi., p. 528, and Mr. John Evans, 'Stone Implements,'
Chap. XXV.

The Trent. 517

to the Thames is equally applicable to the Ouse, the
Nen, the Welland, the Grlen, and the Witham, rivers
flowing into the Wash, all of which rise either on or
close to the escarpment of the Oolites, between the
country near Buckingham and that east of Grantham,
which rocks were once covered by the Chalk.

With minor differences, the same general theory
equally applies to all the rivers that run into the Humber.
I believe the early course of the Trent was established
at a time when, to say the least, the Lias and Oolites
overspread all the undulating plains of New Eed Marl
and Sandstone of the centre of England, spreading west
to what is now the sea, beyond the estuaries of the
Mersey and the Dee. A high-lying anticlinal line
threw off these strata, with low dips, to the east and
west ; and, after much denudation, the large outlier of
Lias between Market Drayton and Whitchurch in
Shropshire, is one of the western results. Down the
eastern slopes the Trent began to run across an inclined
plain of Oolitic strata. Through long ages of waste
and decay the Lias and Oolites have been washed away
from these midland districts, and the long escarpments
formed of these strata lie well to the east, overlooking
the broad valley of New Red Marl through which the
Trent flows.

The most important affluent of the Trent is the
Derwent, a tributary of which is the Wye of Derbyshire.
The geological history of the Wye is very instructive.
It runs right across part of the central watershed of
England, formed by the great boss of the Carboniferous
Limestone of Derbyshire. This course, at first sight
seems so unnatural, that the late Mr. Hopkins of
Cambridge stated that it was caused by two fractures
in the strata, running parallel to the winding course of

518 The Wye, Derbyshire.

the river.1 There are no fractures there of any impor-
tance. The true explanation is as follows :

At an old period of the physical history of the
country, the valley north and west of Buxton had no
existence, and the land there actually stood higher than
the tops of the limestone hills to the east. An inclined
6 plain of marine denudation, stretched eastwards,
and gave an initial direction to the drainage of the
country. The river began to cut a channel through
the limestone rocks ; and as it deepened and formed a
gorge, the soft Carboniferous shales in which the river
rose, were also worn away by atmospheric action, and
streams from the north and west began to run into the
Wye. By the power of running water, those valleys
were deepened simultaneously and proportionately to
their distance from the sources of the river ; and the
farther the Wye flowed, the more was its volume
increased by the aid of tributary streams and springs*
Thus it happens that the Wye seems to the uninitiated
unnaturally to break across a boss of hills, which, how-
ever, were once a mere slightly undulating unbroken
plain of limestone. There is no breakage of the rocks,
and nothing violent in the matter. It was and is, a
simple case of the wearing action of running water
cutting a channel for itself from higher to lower levels,
till, where Rowsley now stands, it joined the Derwent,
which flows in a long north and south valley scooped

1 < On the Stratification of the Limestone District of Derbyshire,'
by W. Hopkins, M.A., &c. For private circulation. 1834. In p. 7
he says, ' When two longitudinal faults, ranging parallel, are not
very distant from each other, they sometimes form a longitudinal
valley, of which the valley of the Wye is a splendid instance. In
such cases, however, it is curious that the faults do not generally
coincide with the steep sides of the valley, but are distant from
them by perhaps from 50 to 200 or 300 yards.'

The Number. 519

by itself, chiefly in comparatively soft Yoredale shales
between the high-terraced hard moorland scarps of
Millstone Grit, and the still harder grassy slopes of the
Carboniferous Limestone.

When we come to the other rivers that enter the
Humber north and west of the Trent, the case is more
puzzling. The Oolites in that region were extensively
denuded before the deposition of the Chalk ; so that
between Market Weighton and Kirkby-under-dale in
Yorkshire, the Chalk is seen to overlap unconformably
the Oolitic strata, and to rest directly on the Lower
Lias, which there, as far as it is exposed, is very thin.
The Chalk, therefore, overspread all these strata to the
west, and lay directly on the New Eed beds of the Vale
of York, till, overlapping these, it probably intruded on
the Carboniferous strata of the Yorkshire hills farther
west. At this time the Oolites of the northern moor-
lands of Yorkshire seem also to have spread westward
till they also encroached on the Carboniferous slopes,
the denuded remains of which now rise above the beau-
tiful valleys of Yoredale and Swaledale, the whole, both
Carboniferous and Secondary, strata having gentle
eastern and south-eastern dips. These dips gave the
rivers their initial tendency to flow south-east and east ;
and thus it was that the Wharfe, the Ouse, and the
Swale, cutting their own channels, formed a way to
what is now the estuary of the Humber, while the
escarpments of the Chalk and Oolite were gradually re-
ceding eastward to their present temporary positions.

That the Oolitic strata spread northward beyond
their present scarped edges is quite certain; but
whether or not they extended far enough north to cover
the whole of the Durham and Northumberland coal-
field I am unable to say. Whether they did so or not

520 The Tees, Wear, Tyne, &c.

does not materially affect the next question to be
considered ; for if they did spread over part of these
Carboniferous strata, they must have thinned away to
a feather edge in times long before the Oolitic escarp-
ment began to be formed.

Taken as a whole, from the great escarpment of Car-
boniferous Limestone that overlooks the Vale of Eden
on the east, all the Carboniferous strata from thence to
the German Ocean have a gentle eastern dip ; so gentle,
indeed, that, on Mallerstang and other high hills over-
looking the Vale of Eden, outlying patches of Millstone
Grit, still remain to tell that once the whole of the Coal-
measures spread across the country as far as the edge of
the Vale, and even far beyond in pre-Permian times, for
the Carboniferous Limestone on both sides of the Vale of
Eden, now broken by a fault, was once continuous, and
the Whitehaven coalfield was then united to that of
Northumberland. These gentle eastern and south-eastern
dips, caused by upheaval of the strata on the west and
north-west, gave the initial tendency of all the rivers
of the region to flow east and south-east. Thus it
happens that the Tees, the Wear, the Derwent, the
Tyne, the Blyth, the Coquet, and the Alne, have
found their way to the German Ocean, cutting and
deepening their valleys as they ran, the sides of which,
widened by time and subaerial degradation, now often
rise high above the rivers in the regions west of the
Coal-measures, in a succession of terraces of limestone
bands, tier above tier, as it were in Titanic steps, till
on the tops of the hills we reach the Millstone Grit
itself.

I now turn to the western-flowing rivers, about
which there is far less to be said.

First, the Eden : — This river flows along the whole

The Eden.

If

CO o

o

I

D I

CM' 1

9

$22 Rivers of Wales.

length of that beautiful valley, through various Per-
mian rocks, for nearly forty miles. At the mouth of
the valley, at and near Carlisle, a patch of New Eed
Marl lies on the Permian sandstones, and on the Marl
rests the Lias. Whether the whole length of the Per-
mian strata of the Vale of Eden was once covered by
these rocks it is impossible to determine, but I believe
that it must have been so to a great extent, and also
that the Lias may have been covered by Oolitic strata.
A great fault east of the Eden has thrown these forma-
tions down on the west, so that the faulted edge of the
Permian beds now abuts on the high Carboniferous
hills that form the eastern side of the valley. As these
Permian and Secondary were denuded away by time,
the present river Eden began to establish itself, and
now runs through rocks in a faulted hollow, in the
manner shown in fig. 104. What is the precise geological
date of the origin of this great valley and its river
course in their present form, I am unable to say ; but
I believe that it may approximately be of the same age
as the valleys last described : that is to say, of later date
than the Oolites, and probably it is later than the Creta-
ceous and Eocene, or even than the Miocene epoch. And
so with the other rivers of the west of England — the
Lune, the Eibble, the Mersey, and the Weaver.

In Wales, the Dyfi partly runs in a valley formed
by denudation along an old line of fault ; and the Teifi
in Cardiganshire, and the Towey in Caermarthenshire,
in parts of their courses along lines running in the
direction of the strike of soft Llandeilo flags, sometimes
slaty and easily worn down by water, their valleys being
bounded on either side by hills to a great extent formed
of harder Silurian grits.

To sum up the subject: It seems to me that all

Rivers of Wales. 523

the rivers of Wales, whether flowing through Silurian,
Old Eed, or Carboniferous rocks, have been busy scoop^
ing out their valleys ever since the close of that great
continental epoch that ended with the influx of the
Ehsetic and Liassic sea across the Triassic salt lakes,
and though these valleys were modified by ice, and
partially filled with detritus, during a short episode
of submergence in glacial times, the rivers re-asserted
their rights to their old channels when emergence took
place. All the important rivers, therefore, that flow
east and west and north and south through the Silurian
rocks of Wales, are in their origin approximately of the
same age, and from Cader Idris to Pembrokeshire they
have all cut their way through a tableland with minor
undulations, while here and there remains a higher
hill, the rocks of which were unusually hard. This
old upland was indeed of great extent, and its relics
stretch far and wide into the northern part of Denbigh-
shire, and into Montgomeryshire and South Wales.
As already stated, standing on the summit of Cader
Idris or of Aran Mowddwy, 2,960 feet high, and looking
east and south, the eye, as far as it can reach, ranges
across a vast extent of old tableland, the plane surface
of which near the Arans is about 1,900 feet above
the level of the sea, or more than 1,000 feet below the
summits of the neighbouring mountains. All inter-
sected by unnumbered valleys, to the ordinary observer
it is merely a hilly country, while an eye versed in
physical geology at once recognises that all the
diversities of feature are due to fluviatile erosions that
have scooped out the valleys.

For this reason it also happens that the Dee now
cuts right across the Carboniferous escarpment west
of Erbistock and the lower area of the Permian strata ;

524 The Dee.

for when the Dee began to run, that escarpment had no
existence, and the strata of these formations stretched
further to the west, ending along some line now un-
known in a sort of feather edge, and forming part of
the great inclined plane over which the Dee ran at a
level hundreds of feet above the bottom of its present
valley. By-and-by, as the river channel deepened, the
escarpment began to be formed, its face sloping in a
direction at right angles to the general dip of the strata,
after the habit of all such escarpments. The whole
was strictly analogous to the manner in which the
rivers of the Weald acted at a later date, and also for
the same reason that the Thames now cuts across the
escarpment of the Chalk. Escaped into the low coun-
try of the New Red series, the history of the Dee
becomes simple, and requires no special illustration.

But this process of ordinary fluviatile erosion is not
the only agent that has been at work in Wales, for in
later geological times the Glacial epoch supervened, and
the moving ice of thick glaciers exercised a strong
abrading power. Then it was that in the mountain-region
of the west, ice-smoothing, mammillations, and striations
were so strongly impressed on the sides of so many
valleys, and so many lake-basins were scooped out, and
among others the rock-bound basin of Bala Lake ; and
though the face of the country is always being slowly
changed, the time that has elapsed since the close of
the Glacial epoch is comparatively so short, that the
large essential rocky features of the regions traversed
by the rivers have since that time undergone no impor-
tant alteration.

In the ' Journal of the Geological Society ' for 1876,
I published the Physical History of the Dee. It is
too long, and the necessary diagrams are too large

The Dee. 525

for publication in such a book as this, but the leading
features of the story are, that before entering the plains
of Cheshire, the river, passing through Bala Lake, runs
through the beautiful Vale of Llangollen, which as far
as the behaviour of the river is concerned, may on a
small scale be compared to that of the Moselle (see p. 534,
Chap. XXXI.). At the mouth of its valley the river
passes through a bold escarpment of Carboniferous
Limestone and Millstone Grit, whence suddenly bending
to the north it passes through flats of New Red Sand-
stone to its long shallow estuary beyond Chester.

The greater part of the Silurian region on either
side of Bala Lake, and of the Dee, stood high above
the level of the sea, from remote geological times, and
formed a wide tableland, extending far to the south, and
also to the east and north-east, and on its edges rose
the more mountainous land, formed by the Lower
Silurian volcanic rocks, splendid relics of which still
remain in the peaks of Cadir Idris, the Arans, and
Arenigs.

When, by the drainage of this old land, the Dee,
induced by minor undulations of the ground, began to
flow in its earliest channel, it is clear that its present
source, Bala Lake, had no existence ; for whereas the
river at that time must have flowed on a surface of land
not less high than that on either side of the present
valley near Corwen and Llangollen (now, in places,
from 1,600 to 1,800 feet high), the surface of Bala Lake
is only 600 feet above the level of the sea, while the
neighbouring watershed between the lake and Dolgelli
is only 200 feet higher. As the river could not flow
up hill, it is clear that in that early stage of its history,
the valley of the Dee about Bala, must have been at
least from 1,300 to 1,400 feet higher than it is now, and

526 The Dee.

consisted of a mass of Silurian rocks, great part of
which has since been removed by denudation.

In my opinion this region of North Wales has never
been depressed beneath the sea since the beginning of the
Permian epoch, excepting in part during a short episode
in Giacial times (see p. 413). During that long lapse
of geological ages, there was therefore ample time for the
action of all the ordinary processes of subaerial denu-
dation, the most powerful of which is the action of rain,
rivers, and glaciers, and thus it happened that the Dee,
a river of very ancient date, wandering hither and
thither, by degrees deepened its channel in the same
manner that the Rhine and the tortuous Moselle have
cut out theirs, as described in my memoir ' On the
Physical History of the Valley of the Rhine.' While
this process was going on, minor tributary valleys were
cut by rain and rivers in the tableland to right and
left of the great main channel, and other smaller
rivers in adjacent regions playing the same general part,
this wide tableland of marine denudation was gradually
turned by the scooping out of unnumbered valleys,
into a region of hill and dale.

The Vale of Clwyd is of extreme antiquity, for it
was a valley before the deposition of the New Red
Sandstone, and it may be that the Clwyd has flowed ever
since the end of the Triassic epoch, and the Conwy like
the Dee is at least as old.

I cannot pretend to give a detailed account of the
river systems of Scotland. My personal knowledge of
the subject is less minute, and however minute it might
be, the subject is difficult.1 Something of the subject

1 Professor Geikie, who fully realises the difficulty of the
subject, nevertheless enters into it and explains it, as far as his
present knowledge will allow, in his work, the ' Scenery and Geology
of Scotland.'

Rivers of Scotland. 527

I know myself, but for fuller details the reader must
refer to Professor Geikie's work, from which part of
what I have to say is drawn.

By referring to any good geological map of Scotland
and the north of England, it will be seen that the
country is intersected by two great valleys, running from
north-east to south-west, viz., the valley of Loch Ness
running from Moray Firth to Loch Linnhe, and also
the valleys of the Forth and Clyde. If we go farther
south another valley traverses England from Tyne-
mouth to the Sol way Firth. The general strike of all
the older formations of Scotland is more or less from
south-west to north-east, and starting from the watershed
of the north-west of Scotland between Loch Linnhe and
Cape Wrath, it will be seen that almost all the larger
rivers flow to the east and south-east, transverse to the
strike of the strata. In fact, like the Thames, they
may be said to start from a great scarped watershed
facing the Atlantic, and run from thence more or less
in accordance with the general dip of the strata, or
rather in conjunction with that, down a sloping plain
of marine denudation, till they find their way into the
sea or into the great valley of Loch Ness. Thus, in
some degree, they follow the same general law that
guided the east-flowing rivers of England, though
traversing much more mountainous ground, they have
cut their valleys in hard, greatly disturbed, and meta-
morphic Lower Silurian strata.

South of the Great Valley, the rivers follow a north-
east course, in Strath Dearn and Strath Spey, approxi-
mately parallel to the trend of the Great Valley,
running in valleys probably excavated in lines of strike
occupied by strata, less hard than the general mass of
the country. The Tay does the same in the upper part

528 Rivers of Scotland.

of its course. South of Strath Spey, the rivers find
their way east and south-east to the German Ocean ;
the Tay and the Forth from a high watershed that
crosses Scotland from the neighbourhood of Fraserburgh
on the east to Crinan on the west coast. To a great
extent it is formed of hard granitic rocks and associated
gneiss, and on this account it is high because of its
power to resist denudation.

Like so many other rivers, the Tay has cut its way
in old times over, and now through, a high belt of
ground, that of the Sidlaw Hills just above the estuary ;
and the Forth, the Teith, and the Allan have in like
manner breached that long range of Trappean Hills,
known as the Ochils and the hills of Campsie. ^

The whole of the estuary of the Forth and the
greater part of the valley of the Clyde lie in an exceed-
ingly ancient area of depression. That country is also
covered more or less with Boulder-clay, and with later
stratified detritus of sand and gravel which were
formed in part by the remodelling of the Glacial drifts.
These rivers ran in that area before the commence-
ment of these deposits, and indeed for unknown
ages before that period. But we have no distinct
traces of those earlier epochs when we try to trace
them as regards the history of the rivers of Scotland ;
and we know little besides this, that the Forth
and the Clyde ran in their valleys long before the
deposition of the Boulder-clay, and with other rivers
resumed to some extent their old courses after the emer-
gence of the country.

As of the rivers already mentioned, this may also
be said of the Tweed, that we know nothing for certain
of its history, except that its valley is of later age
than the Old Eed Sandstone and Carboniferous rocks.

Rivers of Scotland. 529

My own opinion is, that all the valleys of the South
of Scotland may be said to have been formed gener-
ally contemporaneously with the valleys of the adjoin-
ing region of the north of England already described.1

Of this we are certain, that some very ancient
valleys in Scotland are older than the Old Red Sand-
stone, the deposition of which has more or less rilled
them with detritus, and they are now being re-exca-
vated by running water. Taken as a whole, most of
them may be said to be as old as the river-made valleys
of Wales and Cumberland, for the disturbances which
affected the Silurian and other palaeozoic formations of
Scotland were coeval with those that first raised the
mountains of Cumberland, Wales, and Ireland high
above the level of the sea.

1 A model of the Thames Valley, by Mr. J. B. Jordan, coloured
geologically, may be seen at the Geological Museum, Jermyn Street.
It clearly explains the relation of the river to the Oolitic and
Cretaceous escarpments, pp. 513-15.

\V r N^

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M M

530

CHAPTEK XXXI.

RELATION OF EIVER VALLEYS AND GRAVELS TO THE GLACIAL
DRIFTS — RIVER TERRACES — BONES OF EXTINCT MAMMALS
AND HUMAN REMAINS FOUND IN THEM — RAISED BEACHES,
ETC,

IT is certain that by far the greater number of the river
valleys of Britain, north of Bristol Channel and the
Thames, have been very much modified, and some of
them deepened during the Glacial period, a fact indeed
sufficiently proved by the Glacial excavation of all the
lakes that lie in rock-bound basins. Some valleys in
England have been greatly modified since the Glacial
period came to an end.

It may, however, be safely said that before the
Grlacial period the larger features of the river systems
of Britain were much the same as now. When, before
and during partial submergence, Boulder-clay over-
spread great part of the country, the river channels of
the lower lands often got filled with that clay entirely,
or in part. When the land emerged and surface
drainage was restored, most of the rivers followed their
old channels. In some cases they nearly scooped the
Boulder-clay entirely out of them from end to end, but
in others, as with the Tyne and the Wear, accidents
partly turned the rivers aside, and having disposed of a
thin covering of Boulder-clay, they proceeded to exca-
vate deep and winding valleys in the Sandstone rocks

Pre-glacial River Valleys.

531

below. This may be well seen at Durham on the
Wear.

' The pre-Grlacial valley,' says Mr. H. H. Howell, in
a letter which I quote, ' runs nearly north and south
from Durham to Newcastle. The river Wear, instead
of following this old valley, meanders about, winding
in and out of it, and at Durham cutting right across
it, and passing into the sandstones of the Coal-mea-
sures, through which it has cut its way in a narrow
gorge. At Chester-le-Street, half-way between Durham
and Newcastle, the river Wear leaves the course of the
old valley altogether, and, turning to the east, makes its
way to the sea at Sunderland, passing principally
through sandstones and shales of the Coal-measures, and
cutting through the Magnesian Limestone, just before
entering the sea.' 1

It is for this reason that coal-miners in Northum-
berland and Durham, while mining a bed of coal, some-

FIG. 105.

1. Boulder-clay filling a valley. 2. Coal-measures with beds of coal.

times find it crop up deep underground against a
mass of Boulder-clay that fills an ancient rocky valley,
of which the plain above gives no indication.

Again, if we examine the channels of other rivers
in the south-east of England, we find that in places the

1 See « Transactions of the North of England Institute of Mining
Engineers,' voL xiii. pp. 69 to 85, especially the Map at p. 69 and
the section p. 77.

M 11 2

532 The Thames Valley.

Ouse, and its tributaries in Bedfordshire, and also many
other streams flow through areas covered with this clay,
and have cut themselves channels through it in such a
way as to lead to the inference that parts of the valleys
in which they run did not exist before the Boulder-bed
period, but that they have excavated their courses
through it and the underlying Oolitic strata, and thus
formed a new system of valleys. These often only apply
to parts of their channels.

Again, with regard to the Thames, I have said that
it is remarkable that it rises in the Seven Springs, not
far from the edge of the Oolitic escarpment of the
Cotswold Hills that overlooks the Severn, which runs in
the valley about 1,000 feet below. The infant Thames

FlG. 106. Thames.

1. Boulder-clay. 2. London Clay. 3. Chalk.

thus flows at first across a broad tableland of Oolitic
rocks, and by-and-by comes to a second tableland
formed of the Chalk, and the wonder is that there its
course was not turned aside by that high escarpment.
Instead of that being the case, a valley cuts right
across the escarpment of Chalk, through which the
river flows, and this I have already explained in Chapter
XXX. This escarpment dates from long before the de-
position of the Boulder-beds, for we find far-transported
boulders and Boulder-clay at its base, while in the same
neighbourhood the drift has not always been deposited
on its slopes, nor yet does it lie on the top. Yet north
of the mouth of the estuary of the Thames in Essex we

River Gravels and Boulder Clay. 533

find Glacial deposits down to the level of the sea and
passing into it ; and near Romford, east of London,
there are tablelands covered with Boulder-clay, which'*
overlook the valley of the Thames. These phenomena,
taken as a whole, certainly show that all the upper
valley of the Thames is of older date than the Glacial
epoch, and though Boulder-beds are found at Southend,
on the north side of the mouth of the estuary, none oc-
curs on its southern shores, nor in the plains and valleys
of the Weald. Therefore, I now~see no reason why the
lower valley of the Thames west and east of London
should not be entirely pre-Glacial, in which case it may
be that some of its high-level gravel terraces belong to
that date. The question is still in debate among geo-
logists. I use the term high-level gravels to express
the fact that thick deposits of gravel and loams having
been formed in the valley, this alluvial detritus was
subsequently cut into a succession of river-terraces in
consequence of changes, slight but effective, in the phy-
sical geography of the area, and it is obvious that the
highest terrace overlooking the river must be the oldest,
and so on in succession till we reach the river-bank of
to-day.

Before describing the relation of the river-gravels
of the south of England to the Glacial epoch and palae-
olithic implements and mammalia, it is desirable to ex-
plain some of the details of the manner in which rivers
have excavated their own valleys in solid rocks where
no valleys existed before the drainage of the country
took the general direction of its present flow. On the
Continent, the Moselle and the Seine form excellent
examples, and on a smaller scale many British rivers,
including the Thames, have followed the same law.

Suppose a river flowing in a sinuous channel in the

534

River-slopes.

direction in which the arrows point in the following

diagram : —

FIG. 107.

If the banks be high, they almost always have the
shape shown in the section lines a and b across two of
the greater curves of the river. The water rushing on

FIG. 108, a.

is projected with great force against the concave part
of the curve, c, fig. 108, and in like manner it is
again strongly projected against the concave cliff, d,

FIG. 109, ft.

fig. 109. The result is, that the water wears back
the cliffs, c and d ; or, what tends to the same end,
in conjunction with the wearing action of the water,
the debris, loosened by atmospheric causes on the steep
slopes, c and d, readily slips down to the level of the
river, and is carried away by the force of the stream,
thus making room for further slips.

Cliffs- 535

When we think of the meaning of this, it at once
explains the whole history of these constantly recurring
forms, in all winding rivers that flow between rocky
banks higher than broad alluvial plains and deltas.
Take the history of the curve, fig. 107, as an example.
On a high tableland the river, r, at an early period
of its history, flowed where it is marked in fig. 110,
the beginning of the curve, c, fig. 107, having al-
ready been established, but without any high cliffs.
Then the stream, being driven with force against the
concave curve, c, by degrees cut it back, we shall sup-
pose, to c1, at the same time deepening its channel. A

cliff was thus commenced at c1, and, as the river was
changing its bed by constant encroachment in the same
direction, a gentle slope, s, began to be established,
facing the cliff c1, and so, on and on, through long ages,
to c2, c3, and c4, where the present cliff stands, itself as
temporary as its smaller predecessors. This is the
reason why in river curves, the concave side of the curve
is so often opposed by a high rocky bank, while the con-
vex side so generally presents a long gentle slope, s s,
often more or less covered with alluvial detritus. In
countries free of glacial debris, these effects are often
best seen in their perfect simplicity ; and in this way
the Moselle, and the Seine near Eouen are, so to speak,
model rivers. In many a British river it is clearly
seen — on the Wye in South Wales, in many a river and

536 River Terraces.

minor stream in Derbyshire, Lancashire, and Yorkshire,
and on the Thames, on the banks of its long sweep-
ing curves where it passes through the Cretaceous es-
carpment between Appleford and Wallingford. In
this way rivers must act and have always acted. It was
during a residence on the banks of the Moselle in 1860
that I first learned this lesson.

On the banks of the Thames below Maidenhead, and
on those of many other rivers, there are frequent ter-
races, often cut out in more ancient gravels, which it
had previously deposited. This is one of the effects of
the past and present progressive action of rivers, close
to or at various distances from any river as it now
exists, according to its size and other circumstances.
Sometimes these terraces have even been cut in solid
rock, but more frequently in Boulder-clay, or in old
gravels. Cases such as the following are frequent. The
hills or tablelands on either side are, perhaps, made of
solid rock, and the terraces lying between the higher
slopes and the rivers consist of gravel of comparatively
old date. The river at one time flowed over the top
of the highest gravel terrace, and winding about from
side to side of the valley, and cutting away detritus, it
formed the terraces one after another, the terrace on
the highest level being of oldest date, and that on the
lowest level, that bounds the modern alluvium, the
latest.

Thus, in the following figure, No. 1 represents the
solid rocks of a country, covered on the top of the
tableland with Boulder-clay, No. 2, these bounding a
wide valley partly filled with ancient gravel, No. 3,
which originally filled the valley from side to side as
high as the uppermost dotted line, 4 ; but a river flow-
ing through, by degrees bore part of the loose detritus

Mammalia and Flint Implements. 537

to a lower level, thus cutting out the terraces in succes-
sion, marked Nos. 5, 6, and 7.

It often happens, that alluvial and gravelly deposits s
that sometimes even cap minor hills are left marking
ancient levels of rivers ; and in such gravels, sands, and
loams, the bones of animals of extinct and living species
have been often found, together with the palaeolithic
handiwork of ancient races of men.

Viewed as a whole, the remains of mammalia found
in these river beds, have been generally believed to be of
post-Glacial age, and in this opinion I coincide with re-
gard to some of the rivers. One circumstance is, however,

FIG. ill.

worthy of special remark, that to a great extent they are
identical in the river gravels of the southern half of
England, with the species found in the British bone-
caves, a list of which is given at page 48 1.1 They
consist of the White and Cave Bears, the Ermine, the
Otter, Fox, Wolf, Hyaena (spelcea), Lion, the Red-deer,
Reindeer, and Cervus megaceros, the Musk-sheep, Ox and
Bison, Hippopotamus (major). Pig, Horse, two species
of Rhinoceros (JR. leptorkinus and It. hemitcechus),tvfo
species of Elephants (E.primigenius&nd E. antiquus),
Hare-rat (Lagomys spelceus\ Spermophilus (a

1 The Cave Mammalia, also known in river deposits, are Rliino-
loplms, ferum-equinum, Vespertllio noctula, Sorex vulgaris, Ursus
Arotos, Gulo luscus, Meles taxus, Mustela putorius, M. martes, Felis
catus, F. pardii, F. lynx, Macliairodus latidens, A Ices malchis, Cervus
JBroivni, Rhinoceros leptorMnus (?), Leptis cnniculus, Lagomys spel&us,
Spermophilus erytlirogenoides, Arviwla pratensis, A. agrestis, A.
s, and Castor fiber. — DAWKINS,

538 Man and the Mammoth.

Squirrel ), Rabbits, Mice, and some other small animals.
With the extinct Mammals mentioned above, the works
of man in the state of flint weapons, &c. have of late
years become familiar to English geologists. For long
they shrunk from the idea with excessive caution, and
the full proof first came before them from France.

In the year 1847, a French savant, Mons. Boucher
de Perthes, of Abbeville, published an account, in the
first volume of his ' Antiquites celtiques,' of flint
implements, the work of man, found in association with
the teeth of the Mammoth (Elephas primigenius) in
the old river gravels of the Somme. The strata con-
sisted of surface soil, below which were nearly five feet
of brown clay, then loam, then a little gravel containing
land shells, and along with these shells the teeth of the
Mammoth. Below that level there occurred white sand
and fresh-water shells, and again the bones and teeth of
the Mammoth and other extinct species ; and along
with these bones and teeth, a number of well-formed
flint hatchets of what we now call the palaeolithic type.

Geologists were for long asleep on this subject. M.
de Perthes had printed it many years, bat none of them
paid much attention to him. At length, Mr. Prestwich
having his attention drawn to the subject, began to
examine the question. He visited M. de Perthes, who
distinctly proved to him, and afterwards to other
English geologists, that what he had stated was incon-
testably the fact. These implements are somewhat
rude in form, but when I say ' rude,' I do not mean
that there is any doubt of their having been formed
artificially. They are not polished and finished, like
those of later date in our own islands, or the modern
ones brought from the South Sea Islands ; but there
can be no doubt whatever that they were formed by

t

Man and the Mammoth. 539

the hand of man ; and I say this with authority, since,
for more than thirty years, I have been daily in the
habit of handling stones, and no man who knows howv
chalk flints are fractured by nature, would doubt the
artificial character of these ancient tools or weapons.

The same kind of observations have been made
in our own country. In the neighbourhood of Bedford,
on the Ouse, there are beds of river gravel of this
kind which rise about twenty-five feet above the level
of the uiver, in broad terraces ; and in one of these,
far above the river, there have been found a consider-
able number of flint hatchets, associated with river
shells, the bones of the Mammoth, old varieties of
oxen, and various other mammalia. By the river
Waveney also, on the borders of Norfolk and Suffolk,
at Hoxne near Diss, the same phenomena have been
observed in old gravel pits, made for the extraction of
road materials ; and it has been proved that near the
mouth of the estuary of the Thames, between the
Keculvers and Herne Bay, flint hatchets of Palaeolithic
type have fallen from the top of a cliff of Eocene sand,
which is capped with high-level river-gravel of the
ancient river. These were first found by Mr. T. Leech
(see fig. 112). Later I found one on the beach partly
water-worn by the waves, and at the same time, Prof.
T. McKenny Hughes found another, fresh and unworn,
and both are of palaeolithic type. No bones have as yet
been observed in that precise locality along with the
implements, but in many places further up the Thames,
the remains have been found of extinct mammalia. For
example, at Acton, a few miles west of London, at a
height of about twenty feet above high-river mark,
Colonel Lane Fox found Elephas primigenius, Rhi-
noceros hemitcechus, Hippopotamus major, Bosprimi-

54-O Paleolithic Implements and

genius, Bison prisons, Cervus tarandus, and other
species in a middle terrace ; and at a height of seventy

FIG. 112.

Palseolithic flint hatchet, Herne Bay. In the Museum of
Practical Geology.

feet above high-water mark, near the same village, he
found a palaeolithic flint implement, besides flint flakes.

Extin ct Mammalia . 541

They lay in a bed of ochreous sandy clay, about one foot
in thickness, which reposed immediately on the blu§
London Clay.

On the south side of the Thames, on the Cray, a
tributary of the Darent, which enters the Thames at
Dartford Marshes, palaeolithic implements have been
found near Green Street Grreen ; and in other places, in
the valley of the Medway near Maidstone, and elsewhere
in Kent, worked flints have been found by Professor
Hughes, Mr. Whi taker, and others.1 It is therefore
very clear that the bones of Elephas primigenius and
other mammalia, some of them extinct, occur in many
places associated with the works of pre-historic man.
As yet, however, the bones of man have never been
discovered along with extinct mammals in British
river gravels, unless we get a hint on the subject
from the discovery of human skulls, fifty-three feet be-
neath the surface, at the Car on tin stream-works, north
of Falmouth, 'mingled with bones of deer and other
animals, among wood, moss, leaves, and nuts,' and ' at
Pentuan human skulls are stated to have been found
under about forty feet of detrital accumulations, also
mingled with the remains of deer, oxen, hogs, and
whales.' 2

There is, of course, plenty of evidence that some of
the alluvial deposits of the Thames and many other
southern rivers are altogether post-glacial, and the
history of these alluvia can often be traced down to

1 For many details see ' Ancient Stone Implements,' by John
Evans, F.R.S., chap, xxiii.

2 < Geological Keport on Cornwall, Devon, and West Somerset,'
1839, p. 407 : « The Geological Observer,' 1853, p. 449. Sir H. T.
De la Beche. The accounts of these discoveries are scarcely suf-
ficiently definite for an opinion to be formed with respect to their
comparative antiquity.

5 4 2 Post-glacial A lluvia.

historical times, as, for example, in the case of the
alluvial meadows of the Ouse, once a commodious
estuary, in which the Saxon fleets could ride as far up
as Alport, a mile above Lewes. Further north the peats
and broad marshy alluvia of the Wash lie on Boulder-
clay, and the same is the case with what may be called
the recent warps of the Humber and much of the
loamy alluvial strata that cover the broad plain of
York and pass northward to the Tees, between the
Oolitic escarpment and the uprising of the western
slopes of the Magnesian Limestone and Carboniferous
rocks. The gravels and clayey alluvia of the Wear and
the Tyne play the same part, beautiful examples of the
latter being well seen on the banks of the Tyne below
Newcastle, and above that town at the junction of the
North Tyne with the larger river. In great part of
the Severn valley the same kind of phenomena are
apparent, and indeed in many of the river valleys of
England the occurrence of old river detritus above the
Boulder-clay is not to be doubted.

These gravels and other alluvia were therefore often
made by rain and the wasting action of the rivers
sometimes working on the Boulder-clays, and some-
times partly wearing out new valleys, and when flooded
spreading sediments abroad on their banks. As in the
older alluvia, so in these more recent deposits, it is
natural that many bones of Mammalia should be found,
a few of which may be of extinct species. It is, how-
ever, certain, that in the subject of river-gravel
Mammalia, there has been a good deal of confusion
arising from the habit of their having been assumed to
be all of the same age.

I have already stated (p. 482) that after the deposi-
tion of the Glacial deposits, Britain, by a considerable

The P re-historic Rhine. 543

elevation of the land and sea-bottom, was re- united to
the Continent, chiefly by a broad plain of Boulder-clay.
Through this plain I think that the Rhine must have
wandered in pre-historic times to what is now a
northern part of the North Sea, and all the eastern
rivers of England — the Thames, the rivers of the Wash
and the Humber, the Tyne — and possibly some of the
rivers of Scotland, were its tributaries.

This Boulder-clay, from the manner in which it was
formed had a very irregular surface, enclosing lakes
and pools, some of which may still be seen on the
plains of Holderness. I have said that after the
deposition of the Boulder-clay, Britain was re-united to
the Continent, but it is well known that various oscilla-
tions of the relative level of the land to the sea took
place during the Glacial epoch, and under these circum-
stances it may, not improbably, have been partly joined
to the mainland during inter-Glacial episodes, or again,
when glacier ice covered broad tracts of country.

At such times the present mouths of many British
rivers could have had no immediate relation to their
ancient mouths, for the places of their present mouths
then lay far inland. Under such circumstances it
seems not unlikely that alluvial gravels, such as those
of Bedford Level, may have been deposited in lakes
dammed up by some old Boulder -clay that formed part
of the plain through which the rivers flowed. The wide
gravel plain within the circuit of the great moraine of
the Dora Baltea in Piedmont forms a sort of case in
point, for, according to Gastaldi, an old lake-hollow
has there been entirely filled with gravel borne by the
river from the Val d'Aosta.

It is often difficult to account for the great
thickness of these lowlying gravels on any other hypo-

544 Flint Implements.

thesis, since in many cases they are not estuarine, for
they contain no sea-shells, but only land and fresh-
water species, mingled with occasional trunks of trees,
and the bones of mammalia, some of which are of
extinct species.

I have previously stated that bone-caves in Britain as
caves, may have been of pre-Grlacial date, and the
occurrence of worked flints along with extinct mam-
mals in the Victoria Cave, shows that there man is
either of inter-Grlacial or pre-Grlacial age, for, at the
mouth of the cavern, Boulder-clay lay over the sedi-
ments that contained these remains, as proved by Mr.
Tiddeman (see p. 465). In like manner I am satisfied
that Mr. Skertchly has nearly proved to demonstration
the occurrence of flint implements in brick-earth
beneath the Chalky Boulder-clay of the neighbourhood
of Brandon, this brick-earth being probably of inter-
Glacial age, for the Chalky Boulder-clay is, in his
opinion, not one of the earliest glacial deposits. I
have also shown, by the testimony of many accurate in-
vestigations, that in the bone-caves of Somersetshire and
Devonshire the works of man occur with extinct mam-
mals, and the same is the case in the ancient gravels
of the Thames and other rivers.

Arguing on these points, Mr. James Greikie says :
' If palaeolithic deposits have a very limited range, such
is not the case with those of neolithic age (fig. 113).
Implements belonging to this latter age occur every-
where throughout the British Islands. From Caithness
to Cornwall, and from the east coast of England to the
western borders of Ireland they are continually being
picked up. Even in the bleak Orkney and Shetland
Islands, and all over the inner and outer Hebrides, relics
of neolithic times have been met with, so that the wide

Flint Implements.

545

distribution of these implements is in striking contrast
to the limited range of palaeolithic remains.

We know that neolithic man was accompanied by a

FIG. 113.

Neolithic hatchet in the Museum of Practical Geology.
from the bed of the Thames, Erith,

Dredged

mammalian fauna that differed very much from that
with which palaeolithic man was associated. Dogs,

N N

546 Man and the Glacial Epoch.

horses, pigs, several breeds of oxen, the bison, the
red deer, the Irish elk, and such like, were the charac-
teristic forms of neolithic times. . . .

How then are all these facts to be accounted for ?
. . . The answer which I give to all these queries is
simply this — the palaeolithic deposits are of pre-Glacial
and inter-Glacial age, and do not, in any part, belong to
post-Glacial times. They are either entirely wanting,
or very sparingly represented, in the midland and
northern counties, in Wales, Scotland, and Ireland,
because all those regions have again and again been
subjected to the grinding action of land-ice, and the
destructive influence of the sea. But in those districts
which were not submerged during the last great depres-
sion of the land, and in such regions as were never
overwhelmed by the confluent ice-masses, the valley
gravels form a continuous series of records from pre-
Grlacial times to the present day. ... To the last
inter-Grlacial period, then, we must refer the great bulk
of the palaeolithic river-gravels of the south-east of
England.'1

I go further than this, for though it cannot be
proved to a demonstration that man inhabited our area
in pre-Grlacial times, yet the concurrence of probabilities
that he did so is so great, that I have a profound
conviction that, at that epoch, here he must have been.
I have already more than hinted at his presence in the
south, in the caves of Devon shire, while the more northern
areas were shrouded in ice (p. 462). If he inhabited
the British area during inter-Glacial times, why should
he have come at that precise period and not before. It
seems to me much more probable that he did live here
before the Glacial epoch began, and that he retired to
1 « Great Ice Age,' pp. 530 and 531.

Reliquicz Aquitanicce. 547

the south before the advancing glacier ice-sheets. The
changing climate might by degrees suit him well
enough, for do not the Greenlanders of our own time
live in comfort in their own way among and on the
edges of the snows and glaciers of Greenland. Ethno-
logically, Professor Boyd Dawkins, in ' Cave Hunt-
ing,' has compared them to our own Palaeolithic Man.
If- in Britain such men survived the Glacial epoch,
their blood, much diluted, may even be among us still.

Before quitting this part of the subject I may repeat
that on the Continent, in caves on the Meuse, Dr.
Schmerling found bones of men mingled with those of
the Cave Bear, Hyaena, Elephant, and Rhinoceros.

In a magnificent work, ' Reliquiae Aquitanicae,' by
the late Messrs. Edouard Lartet and Henry Christy,
ably edited by Professor T. Rupert Jones, an account is
given of the caves of Dordogne in the south of France.
These, in the valley of the river Vezere, have yielded
bones of Hycena andFelis spelcea (Lion), Ursus spelceus,
Wolf and Fox, the Mammoth, Musk Sheep, Aurochs,
Chamois, Ibex, Reindeer, Red Deer, Megaceros Hiber-
nicus, Horse, and a few others, and among these were
found numerous implements both of flint and bone.
The caverns were inhabited by man, and numbers of
the bones have been broken, partly for the extraction of
the marrow. Among the bone implements are needles,
harpoons, and daggers, while of stone there are
numerous flint knives, spear-heads, &c., all made by
chipping, and, unlike neolithic implements, quite un-
polished. More interesting still, on the bones and horns
themselves are carved prehistoric drawings, executed with
considerable skill, of the Reindeer, Horse, Ibex, Bison,
Birds, and most important of all, from the Cave of La
Madelaine, in Dordogne, an unmistakable incised draw-

K N 2

548 Man and extinct Mammalia.

ing of the Mammoth with shaggy mane, executed on
part of a tusk of the gigantic beast. Should anyone
still feel inclined to doubt the strati graphical evidence
that man was contemporary with the Mammoth, he will
probably feel compelled to admit the evidence yielded
by this tusk.1

Further, in the surface strata of the Meuse, called
Loess near Maestricht, human skeletons with some
abnormal peculiarities are said to have been found. I
have seen these bones, which certainly have an antique
look, but some doubt exists as to the precise circum-
stances under which they were discovered. In the
same neighbourhood, however, it is certain that a human
jaw was found in strata containing the remains of
Mammoths, &c. Many other examples might be given.,
of the remains of old races of men in such like caverns
or in river deposits ; but enough has been said to show
that there can be no doubt that man was contemporary
with extinct Mammalia ; and there can be little doubt
that his origin in our island dates back to a time when
the country was united to the mainland, and that,
along with the great hairy Mammoth, the Ehinoceros,
the Hippopotamus, Lion, Hyaena, and other mammalia
partly extinct, he travelled hither at a time when the
arts were so rude, that he had no means of coming
except on foot.

One word more on a kindred subject. Round great
part of our coast we find terraces from twenty to fifty
feet above the level of the sea, and in some places the

1 A fine specimen of this cave bone-breccia, with a needle and
flint implement, may be seen in the Museum of Practical Geology,
together with casts in plaster of some of the carved figures. The
originals, including the figure of the Elephas primigenius, belong
to the British Museum.

Sea Terraces. 549

terrace runs with persistence for a number of miles.
Eound the Firth of Forth, for example, on both shores,
there is an old sea cliff of solid rock, overlooking a
raised beach or terrace, now often cultivated, and then
we come to the present sea beach. This terrace usually
consists of gravel and sea-shells, of the same species
with those that lie upon the present beach, where the
tide rises and falls. The same kind of terrace is found
on the shores of the Firth of Clyde, and round the Isle
of Arran, and in almost all the other estuaries of Scot-
land, and in places round the coast of the West High-
lands. Old sea caverns are common in these elevated
cliffs, made at a time when they were daily washed by
the waves. Similar or analogous raised beaches occur
on the borders of Wales, and in the south of England.
In Devon and Cornwall there are the remains of old
consolidated beaches clinging to the cliffs from twenty
to thirty feet above the level of the sea. It is clear,
therefore, that an elevation of the land has occurred in
places to the extent of about forty feet, at a very re-
cent period, long after all the living species of shell-
fish inhabited our shores. In Scotland other old sea
terraces occur at heights of a hundred feet and more.

Further, in the alluvial plains that border the Forth,
and on the Clyde in the neighbourhood of Glasgow, at
various times, in cutting trenches, canals, and other
works, the bones of whales, seals, and porpoises, have
been found, at a height of from twenty to thirty feet
above the level of high-water mark. Now it is evident
that whales did not crawl twenty or thirty feet above
high-water mark to die, and therefore they must either
have died upon the spot where their skeletons were
found or been floated there after death. That part of
the country, therefore, must have been covered with

55O Sea Terraces.

salt water, which is now occupied simply by common
alluvial detritus. But the story does not stop there,
for together with the bones of the whales in the up-
raised marine clays of the Forth, implements of bone
and wood have been obtained, and in beds on the Clyde,
canoes were found in a state of preservation so perfect
that all their form and structure could be well made
out. Some of them were simply scooped in the trunks
of large trees, but others were built of planks nailed
together — square-sterned boats indeed, built of well-
dressed planks — and the inference has been drawn
by my colleague, Professor Greikie, who has described
them, that this last elevation took place at a time that
is possibly historical.

There is one piece of evidence with respect to the
possible recent elevation of these terraces which I think
is deserving of attention, and it is this : — In the neigh-
bourhood of Falkirk, on the south shore of the Firth
of Forth, there is a small stream, and several miles up
that stream, beyond the influence of the tide of the
present day, there were, at the end of last century,
remains of old Eoman docks, near the end of the
Roman Wall, usually called the Wall of Antoninus,
that stretched across Scotland from the Firth of Clyde
to the Firth of Forth. These docks are now no longer
to be seen ; but so perfect were they, that General Eoy,
when commencing the triangulation of Scotland for the
Ordnance Survey, was able to describe them in detail,
and actually to draw plans of them. When they were
built they were of course close to the tide, and stood on
the banks of a stream called the Carron, believed by
Professor Geikie to have been tidal ; but the sea does
not come near to them now. He therefore naturally
inferred that when they were constructed the relative

Wa II of A nto n in us. 551

height of the land to the sea must have been less than
at present.

Again, the great Wall of Antoninus, erected as a
barrier against invasions by the northern barbarians of
the territory conquered by the Eomans, must have been
brought down close to the sea level at both ends. Its
eastern termination is recognised by most antiquaries
as having been placed near Carriden, where the great
Falkirk flats disappear along the shore. Its western ex-
tremity, not having the favourable foundation of a steep
rising ground, now stands a little way back from the sea-
margin of the Clyde. When it was built it was pro-
bably carried to the point where the chain of the
Kilpatrick Hills, descending abruptly into the water,
saved any further need for fortification. But owing to
a probable rise of the land, a level space of ground,
twenty or twenty-five feet above the sea, now lies
between high-water mark and the base of the hills,
and runs westward from the termination of the wall
for several miles as far as Dumbarton. Had this belt
of land existed then, there appears little reason to
doubt that the Romans would not have been slow to
take advantage of it, so as completely to prevent the
Caledonians from crossing the narrow parts of the river,
and drive them into the opener reaches of the estuary
below Dumbarton.

While the position of marine shells in situ proves
the former presence of the sea at a height of 20 or 25
feet above its present level, along both sides of the
island, it is possible that in the case both of the Clyde
and Forth, the change of level within the human period
may be partly due to silting up, though it must always
be extremely difficult to draw a line between the results
of the two operations.

552

CHAPTEE XXXII.

QUALITIES OF RIVER-WATERS DISSOLVING OF LIMESTONE

ROCKS BY SOLUTION.

I HAVE already given a sketch of the chief river areas
of Great Britain, but I did not enter upon one
important point connected with them, namely, the
qualities of their waters. If we examine the geological
structure of our island with regard to its watersheds
and river-courses, we find, as already stated, that the
larger streams, with one or two exceptions, run into the
German Ocean ; the chief exception being the Severn
and its tributaries, which drain a large proportion of
Wales, and a considerable part of the interior of
England. A much larger area of country is, however,
drained towards the east than to the west.

When we examine the qualities of the waters of our
rivers, we find that this necessarily depends on the
nature of the rocks and soils over which they flow.
Thus the waters of the rivers of Scotland are, for the
most part, soft. All the Highland waters, as a rule,
are soft ; the mountains being composed of granitic
rocks, gneiss, m'ica-schist, and the like, a very small
proportion of limestone being intermingled therewith,
and the other rocks being, for the most part, almost
free from carbonate of lime. Only a small proportion
of lime, soda, or potash, is taken up by the water that
falls upon, flows over, or drains through these rocks,

Waters of Paltzozoic Rocks. 553

the soda or potash being chiefly derived from the
felspathic ingredients of the various formations, and
therefore the waters are soft. For this reason, at a vast
expense, Glasgow has been supplied with water from
Loch Katrine, which, lying amid the gneissic rocks, is,
like almost all other waters from our oldest formations,
soft, pure, and delightful. The same is the case with
the waters that run from the Silurian rocks of the
Lammermuir Hills ; and the only fault that can be
found with all of these waters, excepting by anglers in
times of flood, is that they are apt to be a little
flavoured and tinged by colouring matter derived from
peat.

The water of the rivers drained from the Silurian
Cumberland mountains is also soft, and so little of the
waters of that country rises in the lower plateaux of
Carboniferous Limestone that it scarcely affects their
quality.

The water from the Welsh mountains is also in
great part soft, the country being formed of Silurian
rocks, here and there slightly calcareous, from the
presence of fossils mixed with the hardened sandy or
slaty sediment, that forms the larger part of that
country. So sweet and pleasant are the waters of Bala
Lake, compared with the impure mixtures we some-
times drink in London, that it has been more than once
proposed to lead it all the way for the supply of water
for the capital; and the same proposition has been
made with regard to the waters of Plinlimmon 1 and
the adjacent mountains of Cardiganshire. But when
in Wales, and on its borders, we come to the Old. Red
Sandstone district, the marls are somewhat calcareous,
and interstratified with impure concretionary limestones,
1 Properly Plymlumon.

554 Waters of the Pennine Chain, &c.

called cornstones, and the waters are harder. The
waters are apt to be still harder in the Carboniferous
Limestone tracts that sometimes rise into high escarp-
ments round the borders of the great South Wales
coalfield, and in Flintshire and Denbighshire.

Again, the waters that flow from the northern part
of the Pennine chain, as far south as Clitheroe and
Skipton, are apt to be somewhat hard, because they
drain kreas composed partly of Carboniferous Lime-
stone. But, as a rule, wherever they rise in, and flow
through strata formed of Yoredale shales and sand-
stones and Millstone Grit, the waters are soft ; and
this is one reason why so many reservoirs have been
constructed in the Millstone Grit regions of Lancashire,
Yorkshire, and Derbyshire, for the supply of large
towns and cities such as Bradford, Preston, Manchester,
and Liverpool. All the waters of the Carboniferous
Limestone of Derbyshire, such as the Dove and the
Wye, are hard. All the rivers that flow over the
Permian rocks and New Red Sandstone and Marl, are,
as a rule, somewhat hard, and the waters of the Lias,
and the Oolitic and the Cretaceous rocks, are of necessity
charged with those substances in solution that make
water hard, because the Lias and Oolites are so largely
formed of limestones, and the Chalk is almost entirely
composed of carbonate of lime.

It thus happens that, as a general rule, most of the
rivers that flow into the sea on the eastern and southern
shores of England, as far west as the borders of Devon-
shire, are of hard water. The waters of the Severn are
less so, but still they contain a considerable amount of
bicarbonate of lime in solution. The waters of the
Mersey, the Dee, and the Clwyd, are also somewhat
hard, while those that flow westward in Wales are soft

Bath Wells. 555

and pleasant, and would always be wholesome were it
not that many are polluted, and the fish killed in them,
by the refuse of the crushed ores of lead and copper
mines.

Before proceeding to other subjects, I must try to
give some idea of the quantity of some of the salts
which are carried in solution to the sea by the agency
of running water.

The first case I shall take is at Bath, where there is
a striking example of what a mere spring can do. The
Bath Old Well yields 126 gallons of water per minute,
which is equal to 181,440 gallons per day. There are
a number of constituents in this water, such as carbonate
pf lime, nearly nine grains to the gallon ; sulphate of
lime, more than eighty grains ; sulphate of soda, more
than seventeen grains ; common salt, rather more than
twelve and a half grains ; chloride of magnesium, four-
teen and a half grains to the gallon, &c. &c. —
altogether, with our minor constituents, there are 144
grains of salts in solution in every gallon of this water,
which is equal to 3,732 Ibs. per day, or 608 tons a year.
A cubic yard of limestone may be roughly estimated to
weigh two tons. If, therefore, these salts were pre-
cipitated, compressed, and solidified into the same bulk,
and having the same weight, as limestone, we should
find the annual discharge of the Bath wells capable of
forming a column 3 feet square in diameter, and about
912 feet high. Yet this large amount of solid mineral
matter is carried away every year in invisible solution
in water which, to the eye, appears perfectly limpid and
pure. There are many other salt springs in England,
such as those of Cheltenham, and numberless others
nominally fresh, each of which brings to the surface its
proportion of salts in solution. Indeed, it has been

556 Thames Water.

shown by the late Professor Rogers that all springs
contain an appreciable proportion of common salt
besides other ingredients in solution. This being the
case, and rivers* being fed by springs that rise in rocks,
in addition to the water drained from the surface, it is
obvious that all rivers must contain various proportions
of substances soluble in the rocks, and, indeed, it is
known that even small quantities of silica may be dis-
solved in pure distilled water.

The Thames is a good type of what may be done in
this way by a moderate-sized river, draining a country
which, to a great extent, is composed of calcareous
rocks. It rises at the Seven Springs, near the western
edge of, and therefore not far from the highest part of
the Oolitic tableland of the Cotswold Hills, and flows
eastward through all the Oolitic strata, composed mostly
of thick formations of limestone, calcareous sand, and
masses of clay, which often contain shelly bands and
scattered fossil shells. Then, bending to the south-
east, below Oxford, it crosses the Lower Greensand, the
Grault, the Upper Grreensand, all calcareous, and the
Chalk, the last of which may be roughly stated as
consisting of nearly pure limestone : then through the
London Clay and other strata belonging to the great
Eocene formations of the London basin, which are
nearly all more or less calcareous. The Thames may
therefore be expected to contain substances of various
kinds in solution in large quantities ; and to those
derived from the rocks must be added, all the impurities
from the drainage of the villages and towns that line
its banks between the Seven Springs and London.

At Teddington, on a rough average for the year,
1,337 cubic feet of water (equal to 8,343 gallons)
pass seaward per second : and, upon analysis, it was

Thames Water. 557

found that about twenty-two and a half grains of various
matters, chiefly bicarbonate of lime, occur in solution
in each gallon, thus giving 187,717 grains per second
passing seaward. This is equal to nearly 96,540 Ibs.
per hour, 2,316,960 Ibs. per day, or 377,540 tons a
year : and this amount is chiefly dissolved out of the
bulk of the solid rocks and surface soils of the country,
aided by sewage matter derived from the drainage of
towns, and mineral and animal manures used in agri-
culture, the whole passing out to sea in an invisible
form, known only to the analytical chemist. What
proportion of this is exclusively derived from substances
contained in the rocks I am unable to say, but Professor
Prestwich in his Presidential Address to the Geological
Society in 1872 mentions that, according to different
estimates, the average daily discharge of the Thames at
Kingston has been variously estimated by Mr. Beard -
more at 1,145 millions, and by Mr. Harrison at 1,353
millions of gallons.

' Taking,' says Professor Prestwich, ' the mean daily
discharge at Kingston at 1,250 million gallons, and the
salts in solution at 19 grains per gallon, the mean
quantity of dissolved mineral matter there carried down
by the Thames every twenty-four hours is equal to
3,364,286 Ibs. or 1,502 tons, which is equal to 548,230
tons in a year. Of this daily quantity, about two-thirds,
or say 1,000 tons, consist of carbonate of lime, and 238
tons of sulphate of lime ; while limited proportions of
carbonate of magnesia, sulphates of soda and potash,
silica, and traces of iron, alumina, and phosphates con-
stitute the rest. . . . Therefore' (with some minor
eliminations) 'the quantity of carbonate of lime
carried away from the area of the Thames basin above
Kingston (2,072 square miles) is equal to 797 tons

558 Salts in Sohition in Rivers.

daily, or 290,905 tons annually. Adding the other
ingredients not included in Professor Prestwich's
calculation, such as chlorides of sodium and potassium,
sulphates of soda and potash, carbonate of magnesia,
silica, alumina, &c., the sum total of substances annually
carried to the sea in solution, will closely approximate
to my earlier calculation.

If we consider that this is only one of many rivers
that flow over rocks which contain lime and other
substances easily soluble, we then begin to comprehend
what an enormous quantity of matter by this — to the
eye — perfectly imperceptible process is being constantly
carried into the sea. If we take all the other rivers
of the east, and those of the south of England (exclusive
of those of Devon and Cornwall), we find that they drain
more than 18,000 square miles, to a great extent con-
sisting of limestone and other calcareous rocks ; and if
we assume the amount of outflow from the sum of these
rivers to be only three times that of the Thames (and I
believe it must be more), we may have about 872,715
tons of bicarbonate of lime and other substances passing
with these rivers annually to the sea in solution.

The rivers of the west coast of England and of the
whole of Wales drain about 30,000 square miles ; and
the waters, as a rule, are much softer than those of the
east of England. But it does not necessarily follow, in
the course of a year, that these rivers, in proportion
to rainfall and the areas which they drain, do not each
carry off as much matter in solution as those of the
east of England. Their softness is due to the circum-
stance, that the rock-formations of the west are much
less calcareous than those of the eastern division of
the kingdom. I have already shown that the greatest
amount of rainfall for given areas is in the west of

Salts in Solution in Rivers. 559

England and Wales, especially in the mountain regions,
and this extra amount of rainfall must have the effect-
of producing an extra amount of solution of the alkaline
and other constituents that so largely form the con-
stituents of those palaeozoic rocks that form the hilly
regions. If so, then, for given areas, the quantity of
matter carried to the sea by the western areas, may be
approximately equivalent in a year to that which is
found in the eastern-flowing rivers. This idea, new
to me, was first impressed on my mind by reading the
Presidental Address of Mr. T. Mellard Reade to the
Liverpool Geological Society, 1877, in which, among
other important matters, he states that ; a total of
68,450,936,960 tons of water run off the area of Eng-
land and Wales annually, equal to 18'3 inches in depth,
which leaves 13*7 inches for evaporation. The total
solids in solution amount to 8,370,630 tons, about
equal to 558,042 tons in a year, if reduced to a solid
state. This would cover four square miles of ground
with a stratum of limestone one foot thick, assuming
that 1 3^ cubic feet go to a ton, and also, for the sake of
argument, that all the matter in solution is in the
state of bicarbonate of lime. We know this not to be
the case, but this makes no difference in respect of the
amount of the various salts dissolved out of the rocks.
According to Mr. T. Mellard Eeade's estimate of 1 5 feet
to the ton, c the amount of denudation, if distributed
equally over England and Wales, reckoned at 58,300
square miles, would be *0077 of a foot per century, that
is, it would take 12,978 years to reduce it one foot.'
There is no doubt, however, that the quantity carried
away in solution varies much in different geological
areas, for of all the rocky formations, limestones are
most easily acted upon by carbonic acid in rain water.

560 Sohitions from,

If we could take all the rivers of the world into the
calculation, how great the amount must be. The St.
Lawrence alone drains an area of 297,600 square miles,
three and a third times larger than the whole of Great
Britain, and that of the Mississippi is 982,400 square
miles, or more than three times as large as the area
drained by the St. Lawrence. The Amazon drains an
area of 1,512,000 square miles, but it is needless to
multiply cases.

It is a necessary part of the economy of Nature that
this dissolving of the constituents of rocks should
always be going on over all the world, for it is from
solutions of lime and oth'er salts thus obtained by the
sea, that plants and shell-fish derive part of their
nourishment, plants for their tissues, and Mollusca and
other creatures for their shells and bones. As it is now,
so has it been through all proved geological time, and
doubtless long before ; for the oldest known strata, the
Laurentian rocks, were themselves originally formed
of ordinary sediments, and consist in part of thick
strata of limestone that must have been formed by the
life and death of organic creatures in the sea.

This waste of material by the dissolving of rocks is
indeed evident to the practised eye over most of the
solid limestone districts of England, and I shall there-
fore say a little more on the subject. On the flat tops
of the Chalk Downs, for example, over large areas in
Dorsetshire, Hampshire, and Wiltshire, quantities of
angular unworn flints, many feet in thickness, com-
pletely cover the surface of the land, revealing to the
thoughtful mind the fact, that all these accumulations
of barren stones have not been transported from a dis-
tance, but represent the gradual destruction by rain
and carbonic acid, of a vast thickness of chalk with

L imestone Rocks. 5 6 1

layers of flint, that once existed above the present sur-
face. The following diagram will explain this : —

FIG. 114.

1, Chalk without flints. 2, Chalk with flints, a a, the present
surface of the ground marked by a dark line, b J, an old surface of
ground, marked by a light line. Between a a the surface is covered
by accumulated flints, the thickness of which is greatest where the
line is thickest between a' and x , above which surface a greater
proportion of chalk has been dissolved and disappeared.

An irregular mixture of clay with flints, often
several feet thick, is also frequent on the surface of the
Chalk Downs on both sides of the valley of the Thames.
The flints, though sometimes broken, are in other respects
of the shape in which they were left by the dissolving
away of the Chalk, and the clay itself is an insoluble
residue, originally sparingly mingled with that lime-
stone.

There is no doubt but that the plateaux of Car-
boniferous Limestone of the Mendip Hills, of Wales, of
Derbyshire, and of the north of England, have suffered
waste by solution, equal to that of the Chalk, only
from the absence of flints in these strata we have no
insoluble residue by which to estimate its amount. In
Lancashire, north of Morecambe Bay, in Westmore-
land, and in Yorkshire, east, north-east, and north-
west of Settle, the high plateaux of limestone are often
for miles half bare of vegetation. The surface of the
rock is rough and rugged from the effects of rain-water
and the carbonic acid it contains ; looking, on a large
scale, like surfaces of salt or sugar half dissolved. The
joints of the rock have been widened by this chemical

o o

562 Solutions in the Sea.

action, and it requires wary walking, with your eyes
on the ground, to avoid, perhaps, a broken leg. The
Oolites must have suffered in the same way, especially
where not covered by Boulder-clay; for, it must be
remembered, that such effects are chiefly the result of
the exposure of limestones on the actual surface of the
ground.

Let me, in concluding this chapter, once more
recall to the mind of the half-instructed reader that the
sea is the final recipient of all invisible solutions and of
all visible sentiments.

All mountain rivers lost, in the wide home
Of thy capacious bosom ever flow.

Rain and rivers are the unwearied destroyers of all lands,
aided by the restless beating of the waves on rock-bound
coasts. These destroy but to reconstruct new strata, by
the upheaval of which future lands shall rise. As the
Ocean is now, so has it been throughout all authentic
geological history, and

Its voice mysterious, which whoso hears,

Must think of what will be, and what has been —

is always present to the mind of the physical geologist,
ever since the time when John Eay, in 1691, published
his far-seeing work ' On the Wisdom of Grod manifested
in the Works of Creation.'

5^3

•LIBRA {{ . Y

.

-UNIVEKSI'fy

CHAPTEE XXXIII.

SOILS.

THE soils of a country necessarily vary to a great
extent, though not entirely, with the nature of the
underlying geological formations. Thus, in the high-
lands of Scotland the gneissic and granitic mountains
are generally heathy and barren, because they are so
high and craggy, and their hard rocky materials some-
times come bare to the surface over considerable areas.
Strips of fertile meadow land lie chiefly on narrow
alluvial plains, which here and there border the rivers.
Hence the Highlands mainly form a wild and pastoral
country, sacred to grouse, black cattle, sheep, and red
deer.

Further south, Silurian rocks, though the scenery is
different, produce more or less the same kinds of soil,
in the broad range of hills that lies between the great
valleys of the Clyde and Forth, and the borders of
England, including the Muirfoot and the Lammermuir
Hills, and the high grounds that stretch southwards
into Carrick and Gralloway. There, the rocks, being
chiefly composed of hard, untractable, gritty, and slaty
material, form but little soil because they are difficult
to decompose. Hence the higher ground is to a great
extent unfilled, though excellently adapted for pastoral
purposes. Where, however, the slopes are covered more
or less with old ice-drifts and moraine matter, the soil,

o o 2

564 Soils of Scotland.

even high on the slopes, is deep, and the ground is
fertile, and many beautiful vales intersect the country.
Through this classic ground run the Whitader and the
Tweed, the Teviot and the Clyde ; the White Esk, the
Annan, the Nith, and the Dee, which run through the
mountains of Galloway to the Solway Firth. Most of
these rivers have often a bare, unwooded, and solitary
pastoral character in the upper parts of their courses,
gradually passing, as they descend and widen, into well
cultivated fields and woodlands.

The great central valley of Scotland, between the
metamorphic series of the Highland mountains and the
less altered Silurian strata of the high-lying southern
counties, is occupied by rocks of a more mixed charac-
ter, consisting of Old Eed Sandstone and Marl, and of
the shales, sandstones, and limestones of the Carboni-
ferous series, intermixed with considerable masses of
igneous rocks. The effect of denudation upon these
formations in old times, particularly of the denuda-
tion which took place during the Glacial period, and
also of the rearrangement of the ice-borne debris by
subsequent marine action, has been to cover large
tracts of country with a happy mixture of materials —
such as clay mixed with pebbles, sand, and lime. In
this way one of the most fertile tracts anywhere to be
found in our island has been formed, and its cultivation
for nearly a century has been taken in hand by skilful
farmers, who have brought the agriculture of that dis-
trict up to the very highest pitch which it has attained
in any part of Great Britain.

Through the inland parts of England, from North-
umberland to Derbyshire, we have another long tract
of hilly country, composed of Carboniferous rocks,
forming in parts regions so high that, except in the

Derbyshire and Yorkshire. 565

dales, much of it is unfitted for ordinary agricultural
operations.

The Derbyshire limestone tract, for the most part
high and grassy, consists almost entirely of pasture
lands, intersected by cultivated valleys. On the east
and west that region is skirted by high heathy ridges
of Millstone Grit. North of the limestone lies the
moss-covered plateau of Millstone Grit, called Kinder
Scout, nearly 2,000 feet in height; and beyond this,
between the Lancashire and Yorkshire coalfields, there
is a vast expanse of similar moorland, intersected by
grassy valleys. Still further north, all the way to the
borders of Scotland, east of the fertile Vale of Eden,
the country may also be described as a great high
plateau, sloping gently eastward, through which the
rivers of Yorkshire and Northumberland have scooped
unnumbered valleys.

The uplands are generally heathy, with occasional
tracts of peat and small lakes ; but when formed partly
of limestone, grassy mountain pastures are apt to pre-
vail, through which in places those ' blind roads ' run
northward into Scotland, so graphically described in
chapters xxii. and xxiii. of Scott's ' Guy Mannering.'
Here and there the deeper valleys are cultivated, dotted
with villages, hamlets, the seats of squires, farms, and the
small possessions of the original Statesmen. Of this
kind of land the Yorkshire dales may be taken as a
type. Nothing is more beautiful than these dales, so
little known to the ordioary tourist. The occasional
alluvial flats of the Calder, the Aire, Wharfdale,
Niddesdale, Wensleydale, Swaledale, Teesdale, Wear-
dale, the Derwent, and the valleys of the North and
South Tyne, all alike tell their tale to the eye of the
geologist, the artist, and the farmer. The accidental

566 North of England.

\

park-like arrangement of the trees, the soft grassy
slopes leading the eye on to the upland terraces of
limestone or sandstone, which, when we look up the
valleys, are lost in a long perspective, the uppermost
terrace of all sometimes standing out against the sky,
like the relic of a great Cyclopean city of unknown
date, as in the time-weathered grits of Brimham Bocks.
These together present a series of scenes quite unique
in the scenery of England.

The larger part of this northern territory is there-
fore, because of the moist climate of the hilly region,
devoted to pasture land, as is also the case with large
portions of Cumberland and the other north-western
counties of England, excepting the Vale of Eden and
the southern shores of the Solway, where the Permian
rocks and the boulder-clays of that noble valley gene-
rally form excellent soils, well watered by the Eden and
all its tributary streams that rise in the mountains of
Westmoreland and Cumberland, and the high broad-
topped hills of Northumberland and Durham. The
high mountain tracts of Cumbria are known to all
British tourists for their wild pastoral character, inter-
sected by exquisite strips of retired green alluvial
valleys, and the famous lakes, sometimes wild and bare of
trees, but often so well-wooded and luxuriant. This is
essentially the lake-country of Britain south of the
border, for all the lakes in Wales would probably not
suffice to fill Windermere with water.

The same general pastoral character that is charac-
teristic of Cumberland and Westmoreland is also
observable in Wales, where disturbance of the Palaeozoic
rocks has resulted in the elevation of a great range, or
rather of a cluster of mountains — the highest south of
the Tweed. In that old Principality, and also in the

Wales. 567

Longinynd of Shropshire, there are tracts of land,
amounting to thousands upon thousands of acres, where
the country rises to a height of from 1,000 to 3,500
feet above the level of the sea. Much of it is mostly
covered with heath, and is therefore fit for nothing but
pasture land : but on the low grounds, and on the
alluvium of the rivers, there is often excellent soil.
The more important valleys also are much larger than
those of Cumbria, and the width of the alluvial flats is
proportionate to the size of their rivers.

The Vale of Clwyd, in Denbighshire — the substra-
tum of which consists of New Eed Sandstone, covered
by Grlacial debris, and bounded by high Silurian hills —
is fertile, and wonderfully beautiful. The Conwy, the
Mawddach, the Dovey, the Ystwyth, the Aeron, and
the Teifi, are all bordered by broad, fertile, and well
wooded margins, above which rise the wild hills of
North and South Wales. The Towey of Caermarthen-
shire, the Cothi, and all the large rivers of Glamorgan-
shire, the Usk and the Wye, are unsurpassed for
quiet and fertile beauty. No inland river of equal
volume in Britain surpasses the Towey in its couise
from Llandovery to Caermarthen. Eapid, and often
wide, it flows along sometimes through broad alluvial
plains, bounded by wood-covered hills, the plains them-
selves all park-like, but with many a park besides, and
everywhere interspersed with pleasant towns, farms,
seats, and ruined castles.

Taken as a whole, the eastern part of the country
of South Wales, in Breconshire and Monmouthshire,
and in the adjacent parts of England in Herefordshire,
and parts of Worcestershire, occupied by the Old Red
Sandstone, though hilly, and in South Wales occasion-
ally even mountainous, is naturally of a fertile kind.

568 Wales.

This is especially the case in the comparatively low-
lying lands, from the circumstance that the rocks are
generally soft, and therefore easily decomposed; and
where the surface is covered with drift, the loose ma-
terial is chiefly formed of the waste of the partly cal-
careous strata on which it rests, and this adds to its
fertility, for the soil is thus deepened and more easily
fitted for purposes of tillage. If anyone is desirous to
realise the exquisite beauty of the scenery of the Eng-
lish Old Eed Sandstone, let him go to the summit of
the Malvern Hills, or of those above Stoke Edith, and
cast his eye north and west, and there in far-stretching
undulations of hill and dale, with towns and villages,
farms and parks, he will survey a vast tract, unrivalled
in varied beauty, dotted with noble woods and orchards,
and fruit trees set in every hedge, while through the
fertile scene wander the Teme, the Lug, and the stately
Wye, in many a broad curvature, winding its way from
the distant Plynlimmon to lose itself in the wide estuary
of the Severn.

On the whole, however, the moist character of the
climate of much of Wales and Cumberland, and of the
north of England in its western parts, renders these
regions much more fitted for the rearing of cattle than
for the growth of cereals.

In the centre of England, in the Lickey Hills, near
Birmingham, and in the wider boss of Charnwood Forest,
where the old Palaeozoic rocks crop out like islands
amid the Secondary strata, it is curious to observe
that a wild character suddenly prevails in the scenery,
even though the land lies comparatively low, for the
rocks are rough and untractable, and stand out in
miniature mountains. Much of Charnwood Forest is,
however, covered by drift, and is now being so rapidly

New Red Sandstone. 569

enclosed, that, were it not for the modern monastery
and the cowled monks who till the soil, it would almost
cease to be suggestive of the England of mediaeval
times, when wastes and forests covered half the
land.

If we now pass to the Secondary rocks that lie in
the plains, we find a different state of things. In the
centre of England, formed of New Ked Sandstone and
Marl, the soils are for the most part naturally more
fertile than in the mountain regions of Cumberland and
Wales, or in some of the Palaeozoic areas in the ex-
treme south-west of England. When the soft New Red
Sandstone and especially the Marl are bare of drift, and
form the actual surface, they often decompose easily,
and form deep loams, save where the conglomerate beds
of the New Red Sandstone come to the surface. These
conglomerates consist to a great extent of gravels barely
consolidated, formed of water-worn pebbles of various
kinds, but chiefly of liver-coloured quartz-rock, like
that of some of the conglomerates of the old Red Sand-
stone, derived from some unknown region, and of sili-
cious sand, sometimes ferruginous. This mixture forms,
to a great extent, a barren soil. Some of the old waste
and forest lands of England, such as Sherwood Forest
and Trentham Park, part of Beaudesert, and the ridges
east of the Severn near Bridgnorth, lie almost entirely
upon these intractable gravels, or on other sands
of the New Red Sandstone, and have partly remained
uncultivated to this day. As land however becomes in
itself more valuable, the ancient forests are being cut
down and the ground enclosed. But a good observer
will often infer, from the straightness of the hedges,
that such ground has only been lately taken into culti-
vation, and at a time since it has become profitable to

570 New Red Marl.

reclaim that which at no very distant date was devoted
to forest ground and to wild animals.1

In the centre of England there are broad tracts of
land composed chiefly of New Red Marl and Lias clay.
If we stand on the summit of the great escarpment,
formed by the Oolitic tableland, we look over the wide
flats and undulations formed by these strata. The
marl consists of what was once a light kind of clay,
mingled with a small percentage of lime ; and when it
moulders down on the surface, it naturally forms a fertile
soil. A great extent of the arable land in the centre
and west of England is formed of these red strata, but
often covered with Glacial debris.

It is worthy of notice that the fruit tree district of
Great Britain lie chiefly upon red rocks, sometimes of
the Old and sometimes of the New Eed Series. The
counties of Devonshire, Herefordshire, and Gloucester-
shire, with their numerous orchards, celebrated for
cider and perry, lie in great part on these formations,
where all the fields and hedgerows are in spring white
with the blossoms of innumerable fruit trees. Again,
in Scotland, the plain called the Carse of Gowrie, lying
between the Sidlaw Hills and the Firth of Tay,
stretches over a tract of Old Red Sandstone, and is
famous for its apples. What may be the reason of this
relation I do not know ; but such is the fact, that
soils composed of the New and Old Red Marl and
Sandstone, are generally better adapted for such fruit
trees than any other in Britain.

The Lias clay in the centre of England, though often

1 There are many other forest lands in England, too numerous
to mention, some on Eocene strata, some on Boulder-clay, which,
by help of deep draining, are gradually becoming cultivated
regions.

Lias. 571

laid down for cereals, forms a considerable proportion
of our meadow land. It is blue when unweathered,,
and includes many beds of limestone, and bands of
fossil shells are scattered throughout the clay itself.
From its exceeding stiffness and persistent retention of
moisture, it is especially adapted for grass land, for it
is not easy to plough, and thus a large proportion of it
in the centre of England is devoted to pastures, often
intersected by numerous footpaths of ancient date,
that lead by the pleasant hedge-rows to wooded villages
and old timbered farmsteads. When we pass into the
Middle Lias, which forms an escarpment overlooking
the Lower Lias clay, we find a very fertile soil ; for
the Marlstone, as it is called, is much lighter in cha-
racter than the more clayey Lower Lias, being formed
of a mixture of clay and sand with a considerable pro-
portion of lime, derived from the Marlstone Lime-rock
itself, and from the intermixture of fossils that often
pervade the other strata. The course of the low flat-
topped Marlstone hills, well seen in Gloucestershire, and
on Edgehill, and all round Banbury, striking along the
country and overlooking the Lower Lias clay, is thus
usually marked by a strip of peculiarly fertile soil,
often dotted with villages and towns with antique
churches and handsome towers, built of the brown lime-
stone of the formation.

Ascending the geological scale into the next group,
we find the Oolitic rocks formed, for the most part, of
beds of limestone, with here and there interstratified
clays, some of which, like the Oxford and Kimeridge
Clays, are of great thickness, and spread over large
tracts of country. The flat tops of these limestone
Downs, when they rise to considerable height, as they
do on the Cotswold Hills, were, until a comparatively

572 Oolites and Lower Greens and.

recent date, left in a state of natural grass, and used
chiefly as pasture land. They formed a feeding ground
for vast numbers of sheep, whence the origin of the
woollen factories of Gloucestershire, but are now to a
great extent brought under the dominion of the plough,
and on the very highest of them we find fields of turnips
and grain. The broad flat belts of Oxford and Kime-
ridge Clay, that lie between the western part of the
Oolite and the base of the Chalk escarpment, are in
part in the state of grass land.

In the north of England the equivalents of the
Lower Oolites form the broad heathy tracts of the
Yorkshire moors, and the fertile Vale of Pickering is
occupied by the Kimeridge Clay.

If we pass next into the Cretaceous series, which in
the middle and south of England forms extensive tracts
of country, we meet with many kinds of soil, some, as
those on the Lower Grreensand, being excessively silicious,
and in places intermingled with veins and strings of
silicious oxide of iron. Such a soil still remains in
many places intractable and barren. Thus, on the
borders of the Weald from Leith Hill to Petersfield,
where there is very little lime in the rocks, there are
many wide-spread unenclosed heaths, almost as wild and
refreshing to the smoke-dried denizens of London, as
the broad moors of Wales and the Highlands of Scot-
land. These, partly from their height, but chiefly from
the poverty of the soil, have never been brought into a
state of cultivation. Kunning, however, in the line of
strike of the rocks, between the escarpments of the
Lower Grreensand and the Chalk, there are occasionally
many beautiful and fertile valleys rich in fields, parks,
and noble forest timber.

One of these, between the slopes of the Grreensand and

Wealden. 573

the escarpment of the Chalk, consists of along strip of stiff
clay-land formed of the Grault, which, unless covered^
by drift or alluvium, generally produces a wet soil
along a band of country extending from the outlet of
the Vale of Pewsey in Wiltshire north-eastward into
Bedfordshire.

In Kent, Surrey, and Sussex, the Weald Clay occu-
pies an area, between the escarpment of the Lower
Grreensand and the Hastings Sands, of from six to
twenty miles wide, encircling the latter on the north,
west, and south. It naturally forms a damp stiff soil
when at the surface ; but is now cultivated and im-
proved by the help of deep drainage. In many places
there are deep beds of superficial loam, on some of
which the finest of the hop-gardens of that area lie.
Loamy brick earths often occupy the low banks of the
Thames and Medway, in Kent, also famous for hop-
grounds and cherry orchards, and for those extensive
brick manufactories so well known in the neighbourhood
of Sittingbourne. Similar loams sometimes overlie the
Kentish Kag (Lower Greensand), and the Lower Eocene
strata on the south bank of the estuary of the Thames.

The Hastings Beds for the most part consist of very
fine sand, interstratified with minor beds of clay, and
they lie in the centre of the Wealden area, forming the
undulating hills half-way between the North and South
Downs, extending from Horsham to the sea between
Hythe and Hastings. They form on the surface a fine
dry sandy loam ; so fine, indeed, that when dry it may
sometimes be described as an almost impalpable sili-
cious dust. Much of the country is well wooded, espe-
cially on the west, where there are still extensive remains
of the old forests of Tilgate, Ashdown, and St. Leonards.
Down to a comparatively late historical period, both

574 Chalk.

clays and sands were left in their native state, partly
forming those broad forests and furze-clad heaths that
covered almost the whole of the Wealden area. Hence
the name Weald or Wold (a woodland), a Saxon, or
rather Old-English term, applied to this part of
England, though the word does not now suggest its
original meaning, unless to those who happen to know
something of Grerman derivatives.

In the memory of our fathers and grandfathers, these
wild tracts were famous as resorts for highwaymen and
bands of smugglers, who transported their goods to the
interior from the seaport towns of Kent and Essex by
means of relays of pack-horses.

The Chalk strata of the South Downs stretch far
into the centre and west of England in Hampshire
and Wiltshire. South of the valley of the Thames the
same strata form the North Downs, and this Chalk
stretches in a broad band, only broken by the Wash
and the Humber, northward into Yorkshire, where it
forms the well-known Yorkshire Wolds. Most Lon-
doners are familiar with the Downs of Kent and Sus-
sex. In their wildest native state, where the ground lies
high, these districts were probably, from time imme-
morial, almost bare of woods, and ' the long backs of the
bushless downs,' are still often only marked here and
there by ' a faintly shadowed track ' winding ' in loops
and links among the dales,' and across the short turf of
the upper hills. Yet here, also, cultivation is gradu-
ally encroaching.

On the steep scarped slopes overlooking the Weald,
chalk often lies only an inch or two beneath the
grass, and the same is the case on the western and
north-western slopes of the long escarpment which
stretches in sinuous lines from Dorsetshire to York-

Chalk. 575

shire, where it ends in the lofty sea cliffs on the
south side of Filey Bay, near Flamborough Head.-
Many quarries, often of great antiquity, have been
opened in the escarpments that overlook the Lower
Grreensand, and some of great extent, now deserted and
overgrown with yews and other trees, form beautiful
features in the landscape. The steep scarped slopes,
and even the inner dry valleys are likewise frequently
sparingly dotted with yew-trees and numerous bushes
of straight-growing juniper.

West and north of the London basin the Chalk
generally lies in broad undulating plains, forming a
tableland of which Salisbury Plain may be taken
as a type. Within my own recollection, these plains
were almost entirely devoted to sheep, but they are now
being gradually invaded by the plough, and turned
into arable land. Many of the slopes of the great
Chalk escarpments on the North and South Downs in
the West of England, on the Chiltern Hills and else-
where, are however so steep, that the ground, covered
with short turf, and in places dotted with yew and
juniper, is likely to remain for long unscarred by the
ploughshare.

In many places the surface of the Chalk, as already
stated, is covered by thick accumulations of flints, and
elsewhere over extensive areas by clay, a residue left
by the dissolving of the carbonate of lime of the Chalk.
This clay invariably forms a stiff cold soil, and is
plentiful on parts of the plains of Wiltshire, Berkshire,
and Hertfordshire, and also on the Chalk of Kent and
Surrey. It has often been left uncultivated, and forms
commons, or furze-clad and wooded patches. The loam
which accompanies it is occasionally used for making
bricks. In the east part of Hertfordshire, Essex, and

576 Eocene Series.

Suffolk, the Clnlk is almost entirely buried under thick
accumulations of glacial debris, which completely alters
the agricultural character of the country.

Various formations of the Eocene beds occur on all
sides of London. They are often covered by superficial
sand and gravel. Through the influence of the great
population centred here, originally owing to facilities
for inland communication afforded by the river, this is
now, in great part, a highly cultivated territory. Here
and there, however, to the south-west, there are tracts
forming the lower part of the higher Eocene strata,,
known as the Bagshot Sands, which produce a soil so
barren that, although not far from the metropolis, it is
only in scattered patches that they have been brought
under cultivation. They are still for the most part
bare heaths, and being sandy, dry and healthy, camps
have been placed upon them, and they are used as exer-
cise grounds for our soldiers.

Higher still in this Eocene series of Hampshire, lie
the fresh-water beds on which the New Forest stands,
commonly said to have been depopulated by William
the Conqueror, and turned into a hunting ground.
But to the eye of the geologist it easily appears that
the wet and unkindly soil produced by the clays and
gravels of the district form a sufficient reason why in
old times, as now, it never could have been a cultivated
and populous country, for the soil for the most part is
poor, and probably chiefly consisted of native forest-land
even in the Conqueror's day.

The wide -spreading Boulder-clay of Holderness
north of the Humber, of Lincolnshire on the coast, and
of Norfolk, Suffolk, Hertfordshire, and Essex, for the
most part forms a stiff tenacious soil, somewhat light-
ened by the presence of stones, and often sufficiently

The Wash. 577

fertile when well drained. In Suffolk and Essex the
chalky Boulder-clay covers wide tracts of flat land,
and was formerly much used as a dressing for other soils,
and it forms an excellent soil in itself.

The great plain of the Wash consists partly of peat
on the west and south, but chiefly of silt. These
broad flats, about seventy miles in length from north to
south, and forty in width, include an area of more than
1,700 square miles. The whole country is traversed by
well-dyked rivers, canals, drains, and trenches. Stand-
ing on the margin of the flat, or walking on the long
straight roads or dykes, cheerfulness is not the pre-
vailing impression made on the mind. The ground
looks as level as the sea in a calm, broken only by
occasional dreary poplars and willows, and farm houses
impressive in their loneliness. The soil of these fens ere
the crops grow, is often as black as a raven, the ditches
are sluggish and dismal, and the whole effect is sug-
gestive of ague. Windmills of moderate size stand out
from the level as conspicuous objects, and here and
there the sky-line is pierced by the ruins of Crow-
land Abbey, Boston tower, and the massive piles of the
Cathedrals of Ely and Peterborough on the margins of
the flat. Yet it is not without charms of a kind ; as,
when at sunset, sluice, and windmill, and tufted willows,
combined with light clouds dashed with purple and gold,
compose a landscape such as elsewhere in Western Europe
may be seen in the flats of Holland. The same impres-
sion, in less degree, is made on the banks of the Humber,
where the broad warped meadows, won from the sea by
nature and art, lie many feet below the tide at flood,
for walking in the fields behind the dykes, when the
tide is up, good-sized vessels may be seen sailing on the
rivers above the level of the spectator's head. An old

P P

5 7 8 Boulder- Clay.

and entirely natural loamy silt, somewhat of the same
character, follows the course of the Ouse, and, to a
great extent, covering the fertile vale of York, passes
out to sea in the plains that border the Tees.

On the west coast the wide plains of the Fylde in
Lancashire, north and south of the estuary of the Eibble,
in some respects resemble those of the Wash.

Such is a very imperfect sketch of the general nature
of the soils of Great Britain, and of their relation to the
underlying rocks. We have seen that throughout large
areas, the character of the soil is directly and powerfully
influenced by that of the rock-masses lying below. It
must be borne in mind, however, that the abrading
agencies of the Glacial period have done a great deal
towards commingling the detritus of the different
geological formations, producing widespread drift
soils of varied composition. This detritus is far from
being uniformly spread over the island. In some
districts it is absent, while in others it forms a thick
mantle, obscuring all the hard rocks, and giving rise to
a soil sometimes nearly identical with that produced by
the waste of the underlying formation, and sometimes
of mixed clay and stones, as in Holderness. Thus the
Boulder-clay, though often poor, sometimes forms soils
of the most fertile description, as for instance in certain
upper members of the formation in parts of the Lothians,
and in the chalky Boulder-clay of Norfolk and Suffolk.

579

CHAPTER XXXIV.

RELATION OF THE DIFFERENT RACES OF MEN IN BRITAIN
TO THE GEOLOGY OF THE COUNTRY.

I SHALL now give a brief account of the influence of the
geology upon the human inhabitants of different parts
of our Island.

Great Britain is inhabited by several peoples, more
or less intermingled with one another. It requires but
a cursory examination to see that the more mountainous
and barren districts, as a whole, are inhabited by two
Celtic populations, very distinct from each other, and
yet akin. The lowland parts are chiefly occupied by
the descendants of Teutonic and Scandinavian races,
now intimately intermixed, in some degree with the
earlier Celtic inhabitants, who themselves on their
coming undoubtedly mingled with yet earlier tribes.

It will be remembered that both in England and
on the Continent of Europe, remains of man (his bones
and weapons) have been found in caves and river
gravels, associated with bones of the Mammoth,
Rhinoceros, Reindeer, and other mammalia, some of
which are now extinct. That these early people, who
at least date back to the Glacial epoch, were savage
hunters, often living in caves, when they could find
such ready-made accommodation, there can be but little
doubt ; but to what type of mankind they belonged, or
whether they are represented by any unmixed modern

pp 2

580 The Silures.

type, no man knows. Possibly the cave men of
Dordogne in France, who carved daggers out of Rein-
deer horns, and cut the figure of the Mammoth on his
own tusk, may now be represented in Europe by the
Laplanders (Mongolian), gradually driven north by the
encroachment of later and more powerful nations. Or
they may have been dark-complexioned, black-haired
and black-eyed Melanochroi, of whom the Basques of
Spain are the least obliterated representatives, and
traces of whom, according to Professor Huxley, are still
among us in the black-haired portion of our Celtic
population, and in the swarthy sons of Italy and
Spain.1

' Early Greek writers,' says Mr. William F. Skene in
his ' History of Celtic Scotland ' (1876), ' seem to have
had a persuasion that the portion of the inhabitants of
Britain who were more particularly connected with the
working of tin, possessed peculiarities which distin-
guished them from the rest.' These people — the Silures
— inhabited the Cassiterides, now called the Scilly
Islands, and as quoted from Diodorus, were ' singularly
fond of strangers, and, from their intercourse with
foreign merchants, civilised in their habits.' This in-
tercourse arose from traffic in tin. In ' Critiques and Ad-
dresses ' (1873), Professor Huxley states that, 'Eighteen
hundred years ago the population of Britain comprised
people of two types of complexion — the one fair and the
other dark. The dark people resembled the Aquitani
and the Iberians, the fair people were like the
Belgic Gauls,' and the Silures who had ' curly hair
and dark complexions,' within historical times 'were
predominant in certain parts of the west of the
southern half of Britain, while the fair stock appears
1 « Journal of the Ethnological Society,' vol. ii. 1871, pp. 382, 404.

The Iberians. 581

to have furnished the chief elements of the population
elsewhere.'

Mr. Skene is of opinion that ' an examination of
the ancient sepulchral remains in Britain gives us reason
to suppose, that a people possessing certain physical
characteristics (those of the Silures), had once spread
over the whole of both the British Isles.' Quoting
from Professor Dawkins' ' Cave Hunting,' that author
states, on the authority of Dr. Thurnham, that in the
'long barrows and chambered-gallery graves of our
island ' the ( crania belong, with scarcely an exception,'
to ' the Dolichocepbali or long-skulls ' of the neolithic
age, as shown by f the invariable absence of bronze and
the frequent presence of polished stone implements.'
' In the round barrows, on the other hand, in which
bronze articles are found, they belong mainly to the
Brachycephali or broad-skulls.' These belonged to
Celtic people.

On the evidence of skulls and flint implements, it
has been reasonably surmised that an Iberian population
once spread over the whole of Britain and Ireland.
But from the dawn of definite European history, the
dark populations of Iberian type have constantly been
losing ground in the world. In Spain their language
remains, but their blood is now far from pure, but in
Britain if any trace of their ancient tongue is left,
it has been so largely overlapped and worn away by
succeeding waves of Celtic invasion, that probably its
existence is scarcely recognisable, though the influence
of their blood is perpetuated in the black hair and dark
eyes of many of the inhabitants of Wales, both South
and North.

At what time the first appearance of a Celtic people
in Britain took place no one knows, but however this

582 Welsh and Gaelic.

may be, it is certain that before the landing of Julius
Caesar, more than 1,900 years ago, both sides of the
English Channel were inhabited by people speaking a
Celtic tongue, mingled, in the south-east of England,
with fair-haired and blue-eyed Belgse, who in time
had been absorbed among the Celtic population, and
spoke their language. The modern descendants of these
people are the Welsh (Cymry) and Cornish men ; but
I consider that at that period distinct tribes of Celts,
the Gael, inhabited the greater part of what is now
termed Scotland, the Isle of Man, and Ireland, and at
least all the western, and part of the southern, coasts of
Wales.

Analyses of modern Welsh and Gaelic prove that
these Celtic branches, now so distinct, yet sprung from
the same original stock. Nevertheless, I believe that
the Gael, as a people, are more ancient in our islands
than the Cymry ; and I think there is strong presump-
tive evidence that the ancestors of the Pictish Gael (who,
however, afterwards became so largely intermixed with
Scandinavian blood ) once spread, not only much further
south than the borders of the Highlands, but that before
the .Roman invasion they occupied the Lowlands of
Great Britain generally, excepting what are now the
more southern countries, where the Cymry had obtained
a firm footing, and were steadily pressing northward
and westward.

From intimate personal knowledge of Wales, its
topography and people, I for long held the opinion that
the Gwyddel (Irish Gael) were the earliest Celtic in-
habitants of Wales. This is not the popular view, and
it was with much satisfaction that I lately found, that
twelve years before the first edition of this book was
published, the subject had been ably discussed by the

Welsh ana Gaelic. 583

Eev. William Basil Jones (now Bishop of St. Davids)
in his celebrated essay entitled ' Vestiges of the Gael in
Gwynnedd.' As late as the sixth century we find great
part of the western coast of Wales and all Anglesea in-
habited by the Gwyddel. From Caernarvonshire to
Pembrokeshire and Glamorganshire, the word Grwyddel
forms a frequent part of compound names of places,
such as Llan-y-G\\yddel (Holyhead), Trwyn-y-Gwyddel,
the extreme promontory of Lleyn in the north horn of
Cardigan Bay, Murian-'r-Gwyddel, ancient fortifications
near Harlech, and many others. The special frequency
of such names near the coast seems to point to the cir-
cumstance, that the fortified positions there formed
the last refuges of the retiring Gael against the onward
march of the encroaching Cymry. One of these, Cytiau-
'r-Gwyddelod (the Irishmen's cots), is a skilfully fortified
position on Holyhead mountain, where tradition tells
of a battle, in which the Gwyddel were utterly defeated
by Caswallawn Law Hir, late in the sixth century.
Subsequent piratical invasions of Wales by the Irish
are recorded, which even come down to Norman times,
but without permanent results.1

There is a little feeble evidence that Christianity
had obtained a slight footing in Britain early in the
third century, and it is certain that early in the fourth
century it began to be largely established, and although
4 when the Koman left us, and their law relaxed its
hold upon us,' in the year 409, England, overwhelmed
by successive hosts 6of heathen swarming o'er the
northern sea,' again became pagan, this forcible con-

1 Mr. Skene in his « Four Ancient Books of Wales,' and in
' Celtic Scotland,' has treated this subject with his usual skill and
vigour. He dissents from the opinion of the Bishop of St. David's
respecting the priority of the Gwyddel in Wales.

584 Welsh and Gaelic.

version did not extend to the inhabitants of the moun-
tains of Wales, where the early Church still continued
to flourish among the Gwyddel. This throws an in-
teresting light on the circumstance that so many of the
churches in the western part of the mainland of Wales
and in Anglesea were dedicated to Gaelic saints, where
the Grwyddel still ruled the land. The names, also, of
many of the rivers in England and even in Wales have
a Gaelic and not a Welsh origin, complete or in com-
bination. Thus, all the rivers called Ouse, Usk, Esk
( Uisge), the Don, and others, derive their names from
the Gaelic.

Again, it is a characteristic of rivers often to retain
the names given them by an early race long after that
race has been expelled, and thus the Gaelic Uisge
(water) has not in all cases been replaced by the archaic
Welsh word Givy. This old Welsh word we constantly
find in a corrupt form, as in the Wye, the Medway, the
Tawe, the Towey, and the Teifi, the Dyfi or Dovey, and
the Dove ; or the water of the rivers is expressed in
another form by the later dwfr or dwr, as in Stour,
Aberdour, &c. In both languages river (Afon or
Avon) is the same.

In his chapter on the Ethnology of Scotland,1 Mr.
Skene remarks that ' Uisge in Gaelic, and Wysg in
Welsh, furnish the Esks, Usks, and Ouses, which we
find here and there ; ' but it seems to me that these
names, common both in England and Scotland, have,
as now pronounced, more of a Gaelic than a Welsh
twang, and afford a hint of the early occupation of
England and Wales by the Gael. In Anglesea, by the
side of Afon Alaw, the river of the water-lilies, there is
a farm called Tyddyn Wysgi — the farm by the water —
1 < Celtic Scotland,' vol. i. p. 215.

Welsh and Gaelic. 585

the final word being the precise equivalent in sound to
the Graelic Uisge, though it cannot be denied that it
may come directly from the Welsh Wysg, which also is
an old word for water.

Again, in Wales, on Cader Idris, there still remains
the name of a lake, Llyn Cyri (pronounced Curry),
a word unintelligible to the Welsh (as Arran is to
the Grael), but easily explained by the Graelic word
Coire, a cauldron, or Corrie, a word applied to those
great cliffy semi-circular hollows or cirques in the
mountains, in which tarns so often lie. Other places
called Cyri, of like form, are also found in Merionethshire.

If, then, the earlier inhabitants of Britain were
Graelic, they were driven westward into Wales, and
northward into the mountains of Scotland, by the
superior power of another and later Celtic population
that found its way to our shores, and pushed onwards,
occupying the more fertile districts of England and the
south of Scotland, and possibly even creeping round the
eastern coasts north of the Tay, and occupying the
lowlands of Caithness. The Grael, including the Picts,
would not willingly have confined themselves to the
barren mountains if they could have retained a position
on more fertile lands. One proof of this as regards
Wales is, that as late as the early part of the sixth
century all that part of the country west of a line
roughly drawn from Con way to Swansea was inhabited
by an Erse-speaking people, the Grwyddel * of the
Welsh,2 who were slowly retiring before the advancing
Cymry, and their last unabsorbed relics expelled from
the coast finally sought refuge with their kindred

1 Gwyddel literally means dwellers in the Forest, Forestieri,
Waldmen, Welsh.

2 See « The Four Ancient Books of Wales,' Skene, vol. i., p. 43.

586 Welsh and Gaelic.

people in Ireland. In the same century, according
to Mr. Skene, 'from the Dee and the Humber to
the Firths of Forth and Clyde, we find the country
almost entirely possessed by a Cymric population,' and
though it may be presumptuous to differ from an
authority so distinguished, I do not stand alone in
the opinion that the Cymry spread still further north,
and pressed upon the Gael, at all events on the west of
Scotland, as far as the verge of the mountains of the
Highlands.

It is remarkable that a number of the names of
places in the centre and south of Scotland are not
Gaelic, but have been given by the later conquering
race, and can be translated by anyone who has even
a superficial knowledge of Welsh, and it is certain that,
from the Lowlands of Scotland all through the midland
and southern parts of Britain, the country was inhabited
in later Celtic times by the same folk that now
people Cornwall and Wales. The names of scores of
places now unintelligible to the vulgar, prove it. Thus
there are all the Coombs (Cwm) of Devon, Somerset-
shire, and even the south-east of England ; Dover, so
named from the river Douver (dwfr, water), still cor-
rectly pronounced by the French ; and at Bath, by the
Avon, we have 'Dolly (dolau) meadows'; near Bir-
mingham, the 'Lickey hills' (llechau) ; near Maccles-
field, the rocky ridge called * the Cerridge ' (cerrig) ;
and in the hills of Derbyshire ' Bull gap,' the Welsh
bwlch* translated, just as in another instance dolau is
repeated in the English word meadows. Again, in
Scotland we have the islands of the Clyde called the
Cumbraes (Cymry), Aran, Welsh for a peaked hill,
Aberdour (the mouth of the water), Lanark (Llanerch,
an open place in a forest, or clearing), Blantyre (Blaen-

Welsh and Gaelic. 587

tir, a promontory or projecting land), Penny cuik (Pen-
y-gwig, the head of the thicket), and many other cor-
rupted Welsh names. The wide area over which this
language was spoken is indeed proved by the ancient
Welsh literature, for the old heroic poem of the
Grododin was composed by Aneurin, a native of the
ancient kingdom of Strath Clwyd, which stretched
through the west country beyond Dumbarton over
Cumberland as far south as Chester.1 In Mr. Skene's
opinion, it records a battle, fought on the shore of the
Firth of Forth some time between A.D. 586 and 603,2
while others, and I incline to this view, suppose the
battle to have taken place at or near Catterick in
Yorkshire.

However this may be, it is certain that the British
Celts, when the Romans invaded our country, over-
spread the whole of Great Britain south of the Firths
of Forth and Clyde. By-and-by they mixed with their
conquerors, but the Eomans, as far as blood is concerned,
seem to have played an unimportant part in our country.
They may have intermarried to some extent with the
natives, but they occupied our country very much in
the manner that we now occupy India. Coming as
military colonists, they went away as soon as their time
of service was up, and finally abandoned the country
altogether.

Partly before, but chiefly after, the retirement of
the Romans, invasions took place by the Teutonic

1 See ' Freeman's History of the Norman Conquest,' vol. i. p. 35.

2 In the learned work by Mr. Skene, the author with great force
and probability shows good reason, not only for the actual existence
of Arthur, but he even traces his march through the country and
shows where his battles were fought, ending with the crowning
victory at Badon or Bouden Hill, in Linlithgowshire.

588 A ngles and Distribution of Races.

people from the shores of the Baltic near the mouth of
the Elbe (Angles\ and Scandinavia ; and, in the long
run, they permanently occupied the greater part of the
land. Then the native tribes, absorbed, slain, or dis-
possessed of their territories, and slowly driven west-
wards, retreated to join their countrymen into the
distant and mountainous parts of the country, where
the relics of this old Celtic people are still extant in
Devon and in Cornwall, while among the mountains of
Wales the same Celtic element yet forms a distinct and
peculiar people. There, till after the Norman conquest,
they still held out against the invader, and maintained
their independence in a region barren in the high
ground, but traversed by many a broad and pleasant
valley. Living, as the relics of the old Britons are apt
to do, so much in memories of the past, the slowly
dying language, and even the antique cadences of their
regretful music, speak of a people whose distinctive
characters are gradually waning and merging into a
newer phase of intellectual life.

It appears then that the oldest tribes now inhabit -
iug our country, both in Scotland and in the south, are
to be found among those most ancient of our geological
formations, the Silurian rocks, which, by old palaeozoic
disturbance, form the less accessible mountain lands ;
while the lower and more fertile hills, the plains and
tablelands, and Scotland south of the Grampians, are
chiefly inhabited by the descendants of the heathen, who
made good their places by the sword after the de-
parture of the Eomans.

On the east of Scotland, also, along the coasts of
the Moray Firth, in Caithness, and in the Orkney and
Shetland Islands, the people are of Scandinavian origin
and speak Scotch, thus standing out in marked contrast

Angles and Distribution of Races. 589

with the Gaelic clans, who possess the wilder and higher
grounds in the interior and western districts. There
is here a curious relation of the human population to
the geological character of the country. The Scandi-
navian element is strongly developed along the mari-
time tracts, which, being chiefly composed of Old Red
Sandstone, stretch away in long and fertile lowlands ;
while the Celts are pretty closely restricted to the
higher and bleaker regions where the barren gneissic
and schistose rocks prevail.

590

CHAPTER XXXV.

INDUSTRIAL PRODUCTS OF THE GEOLOGICAL FORMATIONS

ORIGIN OF LODES QUANTITIES OF AVAILABLE COAL

IN THE COALFIELDS ORIGIN OF THEIR BASIN-SHAPED

FORMS — CONCEALED COAL-FIELDS BENEATH PERMIAN,
NEW RED, AND OTHER STRATA — SUMMARY.

To enter into detail upon the peculiar effect of geology
on the industry of the various races or the populations of
different districts, would lead me far beyond the proposed
scope of this work. I shall, therefore, only give a mere
outline rather than attempt to exhaust the subject.

First, let us turn to the older rocks. In Wales, as I
have already stated, these consist to a great extent of
slaty material. The largest slate quarries in the world
lie in the Cambrian rocks of Caernarvonshire. One
single quarry, that of Penrhyn in Nant Ffrancon, is
half a mile in length, and more than a quarter of a
mile from side to side. Other quarries of equal impor-
tance collectively occur in the Pass of Llanberis, and
there are large quarries in the same strata at Nant-y-
llef, but none of these are of the same vast size. Im-
portant quarries also lie in the Lower Silurian rocks
near Ffestiniog in Merionethshire, and there are large
slate quarries in the Wenlock shale, near Llangollen,
and others of minor note scattered about Wales, but
always in Cambrian or Silurian rocks.

Slate Quarries. 591

In these districts there is a large population which
is chiefly supported by the quarrying and manufacture
of slates. The Penrhyn slate quarry, near Bangor, pre-
sents a wonderful spectacle of industry. It is about
half a mile in length, and a quarter of a mile wide,
and forms a vast amphitheatre, which is worked all
round, on one side in thirteen high and broad terraces,
like the steps of a Titanic stair. The periodical
blastings sound like the firing of parks of artillery.
Vast mounds of rubbish, the waste of the quarry, cover
the hills on either side. More than 3,000 men are
there employed in the making of slates, which are ex-
ported to all parts of the world. The quarries at Llan-
beris employ nearly an equal number of men ; and the
rubbish there shot down the high slopes into Llyn
Peris was lately rapidly destroying the beauty of one
of the most romantic lakes in Wales, and unless the
waste be disposed of on the hill-sides, it threatens in the
long run to fill Llyn Peris from end to end. The same
ruthless disposal of waste material has of late years
been exercised on the south-western side of Llyn Padarn,
in long banks of ugly shingle, that encroach on the
water of the lake and spoil the natural curving symme-
try of its shore. Areas occupied by water are often
considered to be places specially designed for the ac-
commodation of rubbish, and if the quarries on the
Dolbarn side of the lake were successful and largely
worked, in time it might be quite possible to fill the
whole of that beautiful sheet of water with an un-
sightly debris of slate.

In Merionethshire, near Ffestiniog, some slate
quarries are worked in caverns and some in open day.
The number of men and boys employed in the Ffesbi-

592 Slate Quarries.

niog district in January 1872 was about S^O.1 There
are also slate quarries in South Wales, but few of them
have been worked to much advantage, and in Cumber-
land, where slates are or have been worked in the green
slates of the volcanic rocks of the Lower Silurian
series. The material composing these slates is simply
very fine volcanic dust, hardened by intense pressure, and
rendered fissile by slaty cleavage.

In Scotland, in the small island of Easdale, in the
Firth of Lorn, there are slate quarries that have been
worked for many years, which produce a good, coarse-
grained slate, but they are of small importance compared
with the immense quarries of North Wales. It is pro-
bably not an over-estimate to say that about 15,000 men
are employed in the slate quarries of Britain, involving,
perhaps, the direct support of about 50,000 people.

So steady is the profit sometimes derived from slate
quarries, that every here and there in North Wales,
where the rocks are more or less cleaved, speculators go
to work, and opening part of a hill-side, find a quantity
of rotten stuff, or of slate full of iron pyrites, or cut up
by small joints, or imperfectly cleaved; and after a
time, when money runs short, they sell the property to
other speculators, who sometimes ruin themselves in
turn.

In various districts of Great Britain the rocks
abound in the ores of certain metals, which, generally
occurring in hilly regions, the workers in these mines are
rarely congregated in great crowds like the slate
quarriers of North Wales, or the miners of coal and
iron. I will first allude to the case in which the
mineral wealth is derived from what are termed lodes, or

1 This fact was supplied to me by the kindness of Mrs. Percival
of Bodawen.

Lodes and Gold. 593

fissures in the rocks, sometimes running for miles, and
more or less filled with quartz, calc-spar, and ores of
metals, which yield our chief supplies of copper, tin,
zinc, and lead.

It is worthy of remark that these lodes are almost
wholly confined to our oldest or Palaeozoic rocks. The
Devonian rocks are intersected by them in Devon and
Cornwall, and the Lower Silurian formations in Wales,
Cumberland, the Isle of Man, and the hills of the south
of Scotland, and here and there throughout the High-
lands. In the Carboniferous Limestone they are also
largely worked in North Wales, Yorkshire, and Derby-
shire.

The chief districts in England where copper and tin
are found are in Devon and Cornwall ; and in the Lower
Silurian rocks of Wales, especially in Cardiganshire and
Montgomeryshire, there are ores of copper, and many
lodes highly productive in ores of lead, some of which
are rich in silver. No tin mines occur in that district.
Gold also has been long known in Merionethshire,
between Dolgelli, Barmouth, and Ffestiniog, sometimes,
as at Clogau, in profitable quantity, but generally only
in sufficient amount to show reason for starting com-
panies which occasionally lure unwary speculators to
their loss. This Welsh gold is found in lodes generally
in and near the base of the Lingula flags, which in that
area are talcose, and pierced by eruptive bosses of
igneous rocks and greenstone dykes.

In older times extensive gold mines were worked
in Caermarthenshire at the Gogofau (ogofau, caves),
near Pumpsant, between Llandovery and Lampeter.
These excavations were first made open to the day in
numerous irregular extensive quarryings and caverns,
where the gold-bearing quartz-veins and strings were

QQ

594 Gold and L ead.

followed into the hill. So extensive are these old works,
that a minor valley was in the course of ages scooped
out in the hill-side, and in the wood close by there is a
deep artificial excavation now called Cwm-henog, which
in English means Old-cave-valley. Later, lofty well
made galleries were driven, which cut the lodes deeper
underneath. Gold was also found in washings of the
superficial gravel, for more than a mile in length, on the
banks of the river Cothy, and in the little upland valley
that runs from the Grogofau towards the village of Cynfil
Cayo. The well cut galleries are Roman, but it has been
surmised that the ruder caverns date from more ancient
British times. The washing of the gravels for gold may
probably^be both of the old British and Eoman ages,
and for aught that is known the mines may have been
worked in both ways in later times. It is not many
years since the quartz veins were again systematically
worked by an enterprising and skilful miner, but though
gold was got, the result was not sufficiently profitable to
warrant the continuance of the work.

The huge excavations must have made ugly scars
on the hills in the days when they were freshly worked,
but time has healed them. The heaps of rubbish are
now green knolls, and gnarled oaks and ivy mantle the
old quarryings.

In the Carboniferous Limestone districts of North
Wales, Derbyshire, Lancashire, and the Yorkshire dales,
there are numerous lead mines ; and, as I have already
said, lead ore occurs in the underlying Silurian strata,
as in South Wales, and also in the Lead Hills in the
south of Scotland, where lead associated with silver,
and even a little gold, has long been worked.

I must now endeavour to give an idea of what a lode
is. A lode is simply a crack, more or less filled with

Lodes. 595

various kinds of mineral matter, such as layers and
nests of quartz, carbonate of lime, carbonate of copper,
sulphide of copper, sulphide of lead, oxide of tin, or
with other kinds of ores. Various theories have been
formed to account for the presence of ores in these
cracks. Formerly, the favourite hypothesis was, that
they were formed by sublimation from below, somehow
or other connected with the internal heat of the earth ;
and the ores were supposed to have been deposited in
the cracks through which the heated vapours passed.
A great deal also has been said on the effect of electric
currents passing through the rocks, and aiding in de-
positing along the sides of fissures the minerals which
were being carried up by sublimation, or were in solu-
tion in waters that found their way into the fissures. I
dare not utter any positive statement on the question,
but my opinion is that the ores of metals in lodes have
generally been deposited from solutions.

We know that water, especially when warm, can
take up silica in solution and deposit it, as in the case
of the Greysers in Iceland ; and we also know that
metals may, in some states, be held in solution in water,
both warm and cold. This is proved by the accurate
results of chemists, who, it is said, have detected silver,
gold, and copper in solution in sea water. We must
remember that when the lodes or cracks were originally
formed, those parts of them that we explore were not
so near the surface as we now see them ; but in a
great many cases they lay deep underneath, covered
by thousands of feet of rock that have since been
removed by denudation. They were probably, in all
cases, channels of subterranean filtration, both in their
upper portions that have been removed by denudation,
and in the parts originally deeper that now remain.

QQ2

596 Iron.

It is not unlikely, also, that these subterranean waters
must often have been warm, seeing that they some-
times lay deep in the interior of the earth, and came
within the influence of internal heat, whatever may
be its origin. If so, it is all the more likely that the
ores which we meet with in these cracks or lodes were
formed by infiltration of solutions, followed by deposi-
tion ; for strings of copper, lead, and tin, for example,
occur in the mass, just in the same way that we find
mixed with them strings of carbonate of lime or quartz.
This being so, then, just as the lime and silica may have
been derived from the percolation of water through the
rocks that form the country on each side of the lode, so
the metalliferous deposits seem to have been derived
from metalliferous matter minutely disseminated
through the neighbouring formations. We are, how-
ever, still in the dark as to many of the conditions under
which the process was carried on.

Ores of iron are common in lodes, and in hollows or
pockets, both in the limestones of the Devonian and
Carboniferous periods. In North Lancashire, at and
near Ulverstone, rich deposits of haematite lie among
the joints and other fissures of the limestone, and often
fill large ramifying caverns deep underground. A vast
trade has sprung up in the district in consequence of
these discoveries within the last twenty-five years.

In the Coal-measures, however, we have our greatest
sources of mineral wealth, because they have been the
means of developing other kinds of industry besides
that which immediately arises from the discovery of
the minerals which the Coal-measures contain. In the
great coalfields of this formation occur all the beds of
coal worth working in Britain. In the South Wales
coalfield there are more than 100 beds of coal, about

Coal. 597

70 of which are worked somewhere or other. The
quantity of available coal in that coalfield has been
estimated by Mr. Vivian and Mr. Clark at about 36,500
millions of tons. In the Forest of Dean at least 23
beds of coal occur ; and the quantity untouched and
still available has been stated by Mr. Dickinson to be
265 millions of tons. In the Bristol and Somersetshire
coalfields, where there are about 87 beds of work-
able coal, according to Mr. Prestwich, the quantity
of coal still available is said to be nearly 4,219 mil-
lions of tons. In South Staffordshire, in the south part
of the field, there are seven well-known beds, one of
them 40 feet thick, and a greater number in the
north ; and in Coalbrook Dale there are 18 beds, all
partly worked. The unexpended portions of these,
added to the available coals of the Forest of Wyre
and Glee Hill coalfields, amounts to nearly 2,000 mil-
lions of tons still available, as estimated by Mr. Hartley.
In Leicestershire there are about 30 beds of coal
over one foot thick, and Mr. Woodhouse states that
nearly 837 millions of tons are available; and in
Warwickshire, where five chief beds are worked, about
458-| millions. In Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire, and
Yorkshire, one large coalfield, about 19 beds are
worked somewhere or other in the coalfield, and,
according to Mr. Woodhouse, more than 18,000
millions of tons are still available. In North Staf-
fordshire, there are about 28 workable beds of well-
known coal, and others besides not yet worked, and it
is stated by Mr. Elliot that 4,826 millions of tons
still lie there at available depths. In Lancashire
and Cheshire more than 40 beds of coal over one
foot of thickness are known, many of them of great
value, and about 5,636 millions of tons according to

598 Coal and Coal Miners.

Mr. Dickinson are still available. In North Wales
there are probably about 41 beds of coal over one foot
in thickness, and according to Mr. Dickinson more than
2,100 millions of tons may still be extracted. In the
Northumberland and Durham coalfield at least 9
beds are worked, and the amount still available is
about 10,000 millions of tons, according to Mr. Foster ;
and in Cumberland the same authority states that
about 405 millions of tons still remain un worked and
available.

In the foregoing estimates, taken from the Coal
Commission Eeport (1871), all coals over one foot
in thickness are included, and it has been assumed that
all coals under 4,000 feet in depth may be available,
though this may possibly be an over-estimate as to
the depth at which coals may be worked, in conse-
quence of increase of temperature as we sink to lower
depths. The total amounts to more than 90,000 mil-
lions of tons.

The population employed in working coal-pits was
said by the Inspectors of Coal-mines in 1870 to be
350,894 persons, and the quantity of coal raised in the
same year is calculated by Mr. Hunt to have been about
110 millions of tons. In 1875, the coal-pit population
was 535,845, and in 1876,515,845. The quantity of
coal raised in 1875 was 133,306,485 tons, extracted
from 4,445 collieries, and in 1876, 134,125,166 tons,
from 4,329 collieries. These figures are taken from
the annual statistics compiled by the Inspectors of
Mines, and a curious calculation is made by Mr.
Thomas Bell, that if all the coal raised in 1876 were
averaged at 12 inches thick, it would require 158
square miles of coal to yield the amount given above.
A statement such as this brings the quantity more

Coal Basins. 599

vividly before the mind than figures, or words, viz. one
hundred and thirty-four millions, one hundred and
twenty-five thousand, one hundred and sixty-six tons.

Besides coal and iron, the Coal-measures yield quan-
tities of clays, which are of considerable value. The
chief of these is fire-clay, which is used so largely
in the manufacture of crucibles and fire bricks, and in
furnaces.

If we look at the geological map of England, we
see that large patches are coloured black. These are
the Coal-measure districts of Great Britain. Some
of these coalfields, as for instance, the coalfields
of South Wales and the Forest of Dean, lie obviously
in basin-shaped forms, and the coal-beds and other
strata crop to the surface all round the basin. But in
other parts of England, the coal-formation does not
occur in obvious basins, but seems merely to form a
portion of the ordinary surface of the country.
Nevertheless, the basin-shaped form of the Coal-
measures is often continued under the overlying
Permian and New Red formations, one half or more of
these basins being hidden from view, and buried
under hundreds of feet of more recent strata that lie
uncomformably upon them. The reason of this is that
the Carboniferous strata were disturbed and thrown
into anticlinal and synclinal folds before the beginning
of Permian and New Red Sandstone times, as shown in
fig. 115, p. 601.

The coalfields marked No. 1 now show at the surface.
Strata marked 2 separate them. These consist of Car-
boniferous Limestone lying in an anticlinal curve, as
in Derbyshire, and part of the original coalfield shown
by the dotted lines 3, in old times covered 2. The
remaining parts of this original coalfield on the east

6oo Coal.

and west are now partly covered by Permian and New
Eed Sandstone rocks 4, shrouding parts of the strata
that lie in synclinal curves. The high rising strata
of the upper part of the anticlinal curve were destroyed
by denudation, and great part of the synclinal curves
have been preserved because they were bent down so
low, and partly covered by newer rocks, and have there-
fore been protected from the wasting effects of rain,
rivers, and the sea in older times. This, I repeat, is the
reason why so many coalfields lie in basin-shaped
forms. And this form is quite independent of Permian
and Secondary strata lying accidentally on the coal-
beds. Thus the South Wales and Forest of Dean
coalfields were never covered by these formations, and
both are basin-shaped, and form with the Bristol and
Mendip Coalfield parts of one original coalfield, now
turned into three coal-basins by disturbance and denu-
dation.

North of South Wales and Dean Forest all the other
coalfields of England, and I think I may add of
Scotland, probably once formed one coalfield ; and
these have been separated by disturbances which threw
their strata into long anticlinal and synclinal curves.
The Staffordshire, North Wales, and Lancashire coal-
fields were certainly one, and these were united to the
Warwickshire, Leicestershire, and Nottingham and
Derbyshire coalfields, which again joined that of Durham
and Northumberland, which again was united to the coal-
fields of Cumberland, and probably of Scotland. They
have since been disjoined by curvature of the strata com-
bined with denudation, and the Northumberland and
Yorkshire coalfields are now independent basins, partly
buried under Permian and New Red Sandstone strata.
And so, of the other visible coalfields, Warwick, Leicester,

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602 Faults and Denudations.

South Stafford, North Stafford, Cheshire, Lancashire,
and the North Wales coalfields, are still probably one
or almost one coalfield, only great parts of them are
buried and. concealed deep under Permian and New
Red strata, in some places several thousand feet deep.

Thus it sometimes happens, by a combination of
the curvature of strata and faults, that only by a series
of geological accidents have the Coal-measures been
brought to the surface and exposed to view. We may
take the South Staffordshire coalfield as an example,
where the New Red Sandstone and Permian rocks are
thrown down against the coalfield on both sides.
Originally, before these faults took place, the New Red
Sandstone and other rocks spread entirely over the
surface. The New Red Sandstone and Marl, where
thickest, are more than 2,000 feet thick ; above it lies
the Lias, 900 to 1 ,500 feet thick ; then comes the
Oolites, and lastly, all the Cretaceous strata. This
enormous mass of superincumbent strata, once lying
above the South Staffordshire Coal-measures, was after-
wards dislocated by faults, which brought the lower
Permian and New Red portions of them down against
the sides of the present coalfield. A vast denudation
ensued, whereby many of the formations nearest the
surface were removed, and the whole country was worn
down to one comparatively general level. It is by such
processes that some of our large and productive coal-
fields have been exposed at the surface. Hence we now
find a great manufacturing population all centred in
areas (like those of South Staffordshire, Warwickshire,
and Ashby-de-la-Zouch) which might never have been
known to contain coalfields, had it not been for the
geological accidents of those faults and denudations
which I have explained.

Coal-fields and Population. 603

In my report as a member of the Coal Commission
(1871), I have shown that under Permian and New
Eed strata, north of the Bristol coalfield, there may
probably be about 55,000 millions of tons of coals
available, at all events under 4,000 feet in depth, and
to this Mr. Prestwich has added 400 millions of tons
for the Severn Valley on the south side of the estuary.

The busy population that now covers the coalfields,
and to which so many railways converge, may there-
fore some day spread over adjoining agricultural areas,
and render them as wealthy, smoky, and repulsive to
the outward eye as many visible coalfields now are.
Between the mouth of the Plrth of Clyde and the
mouth of the Firth of Forth the whole country is one
great coalfield, and this is the part of Scotland where
the population is thickest. Bordering Wales and the
mountains of Lancashire and Derbyshire, on the east
and west, are three great coalfields, and these districts
also contain dense populations. Further north lies the
great Newcastle coalfield, where, again, the population
is proportionately redundant. All the central part of
England, which is dotted over with coalfields, teems
in like manner with inhabitants. The South Wales
coalfield, which is the largest of all, however, does
not, except in places such as Swansea, Llanelly, Dowlais,
Merthyr Tydvil, and other centres, show everywhere the
same concentration of population. A great part of this
area has till lately not been opened up by railways, and
the coal has been heretofore not worked to the same
extent as in the coalfields of the middle and northern
parts of England, which have been extensively mined
for a longer period.

Some years ago, after the publication of Mr. Hull's
'Coalfields of Great Britain,' Professor Jevons, in a

604 Duration of Coal.

work ' On the Coal Question,' showed that if the
increase of our population goes on as it has been doing
in years past, and if the productive industry of the
country keep pace with the population, the whole of
the coal now available in the country would be
exhausted in 110 years. Mr. John Stuart Mill, taking
alarm, in his place in Parliament urged upon the
nation to act as worthy trustees for their descendants,
to save money while there is yet time, and to pay off
as much as possible of the national debt ; and by-and-by,
at the instance of Mr. Vivian, a Coal Commission was
appointed to examine into this alarming state of
affairs.

The result as regards the duration of coal was stated
in the three following hypotheses :— the first is, that
the population and manufactures of the country have
nearly attained a maximum amount, or will merely
oscillate without advancing. In this case our coal may
last for about 1,273 years, an opinion to which Mr. Hunt
of the c Mining Eecord ' Office still adheres. The
second, according to Mr. Price Williams, is this : — The
population of Great Britain in 1871 was 26,943,000.
According to a given law of increase, in the year 2231,
the population may be 1*31,700,000, in fact, near
1 32,000,000, or rather more than five times the present
number. It is hard to realise this crowded population
in our little country, but allowing the assumption to
be correct, in a hundred years from 1871 the popu-
lation of Britain would be very nearly 59,000,000, and
the home consumption of eoal 274,200,000 tons a
year, in which case our coal will only last about 360
years. A third view is that adding ' a constant
quantity equal to the annual increase (of consumption)
of the last 14 years, which we may take at 3,000,000

Smoke. 605

of tons .... at the end of a hundred years the
consumption would be 415,000,000 tons per annum,
and the now estimated quantity of coal available for
use would represent a consumption of 276 years.' l I
offer no positive opinion on this subject, but I suspect
the first view is likely to be nearer the truth than the
last.

However this may be, it is certain that some day or
other our coal must be practically exhausted, but so
many things may happen ere that time that it is
doubtful if even we, the trustees of the future, need to
concern ourselves very much about the matter. Per-
sonal prudence, selfishness, or the love of money, will
not be hindered by anxiety about people who are to
live hundreds of years hence, and great part of Eng-
land will still .continue smoky as long as coal lasts
in quantity, or at all events till the laws are enforced
against the production of unnecessary smoke. All the
centre of England is thick with it, floating from every
coalfield, and from all the dependent manufacturing
towns. The heaths and pastures of Derbyshire and
Yorkshire between the two great coalfields are blackened
by smoke, and even in the rainiest weather the sheep
that ought to be white-wooled are dark and dingy.
Every coalfield in England as it happens, is a centre
of pollution to the air. But this does not affect the
manufacturing population of these districts excepting
in a sanitary, and therefore in a moral, point of view,
and this state of affairs is too apt to be considered un-
avoidable in the present state of economics and unscien-
tific practice, though it is not so of necessity.

What will be the state of Britain when all the coal
is gone ? The air at all events will be purified, and the
1 ' Keport of the Coal Commissioners,' pp. 16 and 17.

606 Coal Exhausted.

hideous heaps of slag, so suggestive of wealth, power,
culture, and prosperity, that disfigure South and North
Staffordshire, and all the other iron-making districts,
will in time crumble into soil, and, covered by grass
and trees, they will one day become beautiful features in
the landscape ; for man cannot permanently disfigure
nature. Even when this thing takes place will there
be any necessity for the country being reduced to abso-
lute poverty ? Our mountain lands, like the Schwarz-
wald, may be more woody than at present, and yield
supplies of fuel, the plains and tablelands more richly
cultivated, and who knows besides what motive powers
may by that time be economised other than those that
result from the direct application of artificial heat ?
Holland and the lowlands of Switzerland without coal
are two of the happiest and most prosperous countries
in Europe, and it appears as if Italy would follow in
their steps, but on a larger scale. In the far future,
Britain may still be prosperous, powerful, and happy,
even though all its coal be exhausted.

Of late years a great deal of valuable iron ore has
been obtained from the top of the Lower Lias and from
the Marlstone of Yorkshire, and this tends still more
rapidly to exhaust our coal. The result has been the
rapid growth of the enterprising district and port of
Middlesborough on the Tees. At night the whole
country is aglow with iron furnaces, and the time may
arrive when the beautiful Oolitic valleys of North
Yorkshire will become a black country as smoky as
the Lancashire and Staffordshire coalfields.

The Northampton Sands of the Oolites also yield
large quantities of silicious ironstone. It must not,
however, be supposed that ironstone is everywhere
plentiful in that formation, nor yet in the Marlstone,

Iron Ores. 607

and far less in the Lower Lias. I have seen pro-
spectuses of mining companies in the middle of Eng-
land, in which it was stated that all the ironstone
bands of Middlesborough are present in ground where
scarce an ounce of them exists.

In older times, in the Weald of the south of England,
a considerable amount of iron ore used to be mined
and smelted with wood or charcoal, before the Coal-
measures were worked extensively, and when the Weald
was covered to a great extent with forest. Then the
chief part of our iron manufactures was carried on in
the south-east of England. Indeed, late in the last
century, there were still iron furnaces in the Weald of
Kent and Sussex. The last furnace is said to have
been at Ashburnham ; and here and there we may even
now see heaps of slags overgrown with grass, and the
old dams that supplied the water which drove the
water-wheels that worked the forges of Kent and
Sussex. It is said that cannon used in the fight
with the Spanish Armada came from this district ;
and the rails round St. Paul's and other churches of the
time of Sir Christopher Wren were forged from the
Wealden iron.

I have already remarked that a large part of the
wealth which we owe to our Carboniferous minerals,
arises, not so much from the commercial value of the
coal and ironstone of the coalfields, as from the fact
that they form the means of working many different
branches of industry. To the vast power which steam
has given us, very much of our extraordinary pros-
perity as a nation is due. Yet were it not for our
coal-beds, the agency of steam would be almost
wholly denied to us. And hence it is that our great
manufacturing districts have sprung up either in, or in

608 Kaolin and other Clay.

the vicinity of coalfields. There iron furnaces glare
and blow day and night, there are carried on vast
manufactures in all kinds of metal, and there our
textile fabrics are chiefly made. In these busy scenes
a large part of the population of our island finds em-
ployment, and thence we send to the farthest parts of
the earth those endless commodities which, while they
have supplied the wants of other countries, have given
rise in large measure to the wealth and commerce of
our own.1

There are some other geological formations which
afford materials for manufactures other than coal and
ores of metals. Thus, in the south-west of England, in
the granitic districts of Devon and Cornwall, a great
proportion of the finer kinds of clays occur, which are
used in making stoneware and porcelain. In Devon
and Cornwall the decomposition of granite affords the
substance known by the name of Kaolin, from which
all the finer porcelain clays are made. It is formed
by the disintegration of the felspar of granite. This
felspar consists of silicates of alumina, and soda or
potash. The soda and potash are comparatively easily
dissolved, chiefly through the influence of carbonic acid
in the rain-water that falls upon the surface ; and the
result is that the granite decomposes to a considerable
depth. In some cases I have seen granite, undisturbed
by the hand of man, which for a depth of twenty feet
or more might be easily dug out with a shovel. Owing
to this decomposition, a portion of the felspar passes
into kaolin, which is washed down by rain into the
lower levels, where, more or less mixed with quartz

1 At least it was so till lately, and there is no reason to suppose
that the mining and manufacturing industry of Britain has de-
clined except for a time.

Kaolin and other Clays. 609

and the other ingredients of granite, it forms natural
beds of clay. This is dug out, and the clay is trans-
ported chiefly to the district of the Potteries in North
Staffordshire. The same process is sometimes secured
by art, when the decomposed granite being dug out,
is washed by artificial processes, and the more alumi-
nous matter is separated from the quartz with which it
was originally associated. Then, in the Potteries, it is
turned into all sorts of vessels — fine porcelain, stone-
ware, and common-ware in every variety of size, and
form, and texture.

In the Eocene tertiary beds, in the neighbourhood of
Poole, there are large lenticular beds of pipe-clay, in-
terstratified with the Bagshot Sand. Great quantities
of this clay are exported into the Pottery districts to be
made into the coarser kind of earthenware, and they
are also mixed with the finer materials from Devon and
Cornwall, to make intermediate qualities of stone-ware
and china.

But in addition to clay, the chalk is brought into
requisition to furnish its quota of material for this
manufacture. The flints that are found embedded in
the chalk, chiefly in layers, are also transported to the
Potteries, and ground up with the aluminous portions
of the clay, since it is sometimes necessary to use a
certain proportion of silica in the manufacture of
porcelain.

Many other formations, such as the Old and New
Red Marls, are also of use when clay is required for the
manufacture of bricks. The Oolitic and Liassic strata
are to a great extent composed of clay, such as Lias
Clay, Fullers' Earth Clay, Oxford and Kimeridge
Clay ; there is also the Weald Clay, and the Gault lies
in the middle of the Cretaceous strata. The Boulder-

6io Jet* Glass-sand, &c.

clay is also often used in manufactures, and the silts of
the Wash and of many another river. An abundance of
material is found in all of these formations for the
manufacture of bricks, earthenware pipes, and so on ;
and it is interesting to observe how in this respect
the architecture of the country is apt to vary accord-
ing to the nature of the strata of given areas. In
Scotland and the north of England, where hewable
stone abounds, almost all the houses are built of sand-
stone, grey and sombre; in many of the Oolitic dis-
tricts they are of limestone, and generally lighter and
more graceful ; while on the Eed Marls, Lias, and in the
Woodland area of the Weald we have still the relics of
an elder England in those beautiful brick and timbered
houses that speak of habits and manners gone by.

In the upper Lias clay in Yorkshire, beds of lignite
and jet are found near Whitby, which locally forms a
not unimportant branch of manufacture.

The glass-sand used in this country is chiefly derived
from the Eocene beds of the Isle of Wight, and from
the sand-dunes on the borders of the Bristol Channel.
In the Isle of Wight, the sandy strata lie above the
London Clay, and are the equivalent of part of the
Bagshot sands. They are remarkably pure in quality,
being formed of fine white silicious sand. These sands
are largely dug and exported to be used in glass-houses
in various parts of the country, as in Birmingham and
elsewhere,

A large proportion of the cement-stones of our
country comes from the Lias limestone. These lime-
stones are not pure carbonate of lime, but are formed
of an intermixture of carbonate of lime and aluminous
matter. It is found by experience that the lime from
this kind of limestone is peculiarly adapted for setting

Building Stones. 6 1 1

under water. Hence the Lias limestone has always
been largely employed in the building of piers and
other structures that require to be constructed under
water. Cement stones are also found to some extent in
the Eocene strata, and are obtained from nodules
dredged from the sea-bottom at Harwich, and the south
of England. These are transported hither and thither,
to be used as occasion may require.

The chief building stones of our country, of a
hewable kind, are the limestones of the Oolitic rocks,
the Magnesian Limestone, the Carboniferous Lime-
stone, the Carboniferous sandstones, and the sandstones
of the Old and New Eed series. The Caradoc Sand-
stone, also in Shropshire near Church Stretton, yields
a good building stone. The chief Oolitic building
stones are from the Isle of Portland and the Bath Oolite.
St. Paul's and many other churches in London were
built of Portland stone, and the immense quantities
of rejected stones in the old quarries, show how
careful Sir Christopher Wren was in the selection of
material. The Bath stone also affords a beautiful
yellow limestone, which comes out of the quarries in
blocks of great size, and is easily sawn and hewn into
shape. Nearly the whole of Bath has been built of
this stone, and it has been largely used in Westminster
Abbey and other buildings in London. Excellent
building stones are also got from the Inferior Oolite
limestone, especially in the neighbourhood of Chelten-
ham, from the Cotswold Hills.

In England the Magnesian Limestone is extensively
quarried for building purposes. It is of very various
qualities, sometimes exceedingly durable, resisting the
effects of time and weather, and in other cases decom-
posing with considerable rapidity. The Houses of

R R 2

6 1 2 Building Stones.

Parliament were chiefly built of this stone. In dis-
tricts where it occurs, in Nottinghamshire and York-
shire, there are churches, and castles such as Conisbro',
built of it, wherein the edges of the stones are as sharp
as if fresh from the mason's hands. You can see the
very chisel-marks of the men who built the castle, in
days possibly before, but certainly not long after the
landing of William the Conqueror.

The Carboniferous Limestone also is an exceedingly
durable stone. The Menai bridges were built of it.
In Caernarvon Castle the preservation of this lime-
stone is well shown. The castle is built of layers of
limestone and sandstone, the sandstone having been
chiefly derived from the Millstone Grit, or from sand-
stones interstratified with the limestone, and the lime-
stone from quarries in Anglesea, and on the shores of
the Menai Straits. The limestone has best stood the
weather. Sandstone, though durable, is rarely so good
as certain limestones, which, being somewhat crystal-
line, and sometimes formed to a great extent of
Encrinites, also essentially crystalline in structure, have
withstood the effect of time.

The Carboniferous Sandstones in Lancashire, Derby-
shire, Yorkshire, and in Wales and Scotland, afford
large quantities of admirable building material, which
has been used almost exclusively in the building of
Leeds, Edinburgh, Glasgow, and many other towns.
Some of it is exceedingly white, is easily cut by the
chisel, and may be obtained in blocks of immense size.
But in some of the beds there is so much diffused iron,
not visible at first sight, that in the course of time this,
as it oxidises, produces stains which discolour the ex-
terior of the buildings.

Unlike limestones, basalts and other hard and tough

Road Metal. 613

rocks, such sandstones as the Millstone Grit and Gannister
beds of the Coal-measures, are ill adapted for macada-
mising roads, for traffic rapidly grinds it into its
original state of loose sand. Nevertheless, in some
regions they have nothing else to use, and to obviate
its defects the following process is used near Barnsley
and in other parts of Yorkshire. The rocks in question
were made from the debris of granites and gneiss, simi-
lar to those of the Scotch Highlands. The stone being
quarried in small slabs and fragments, is built in a pile
about 30 feet square, and 12 or 14 feet high, somewhat
loosely ; and while the building is in progress, brush-
wood is mingled with the stones, but not in any great
quantity. Two thin layers of coal, about 3 inches thick,
at equal distances, are, so to speak, interstratified with
the sandstones, and a third layer is strewn over the top.
At the bottom facing the prevalent wind, an opening
about 2 feet high is left, something like the mouth of
an oven. Into this brushwood and a little coal is put
and lighted. The tire slowly spreads through the whole
pile, and continues burning for about six weeks. After
cooling the stack is pulled down, and the stones are
found to be vitrified. Slabs originally flat have become
bent and contorted like gneiss, and stones originally
separate, get, so to speak, glued together in the process
of vitrification, aided by the soda, potash, and iron, which
form part of the constituents of felspar and mica and
act as a flux.

In the year 1859 I visited a vitrified fort called
Knockfarril, near Strathpeifer in Ross-shire, ( and came
to the conclusion that the vitrification had been done
of set purpose, and that the effect had been pro-
duced by burning wood.' In the first volume of Dr.
John Hill Burton's 'History of Scotland,' 1866, he ex-

6 1 4 Vitrified Forts.

presses a wish that science would explain the manner in
which vitrification of forts was effected. Having formed
the opinion that the Yorkshire method of vitrification
most closely resembled that used by the old fort-
builders, I wrote to Mr. Burton giving an account of
it, and the letter with sundry blunders in geological
names is printed in a paper by Mr. John Stuart, LL.D.
in the ' Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of
Scotland,' 1868-9. All the vitrified forts in Scotland
are either in the Highlands, or in Berwickshire and
Galloway, where rocks easily vitrified abound, and but
that there are neither vitrified forts nor native celts in
modern Yorkshire, one would almost be tempted to
speculate on the art of vitrification having descended
there, from an ancient Pictish people of the bronze
age, such as are supposed by Dr. Julius Ernest Fodisch
to have erected the scorified ramparts of the forts in
Bohemia. The vitrification of rocks in Yorkshire I
have thought worthy of being recorded, throwing as it
does some light on the method employed in the con-
struction of forts in times that seem to us to be pre-
historic.

The New Eed Sandstone also yields its share of
building stones, but much of it is very soft and easily
worn by the weather, a notable example of which was
seen in the Cathedral at Chester before its restoration.
The white Keuper Sandstone of Grrinshill, north of
Shrewsbury, the Peckforton Hills, and Delamere Forest,
is an excellent stone. The Old Bed Sandstone is also
used as a building stone in its own area, and, as already
stated, the Caradoc Sandstone of Shropshire, near Church
Stretton, yields a beautiful white material.

The rock-salt of Worcestershire and Cheshire is a
valuable commodity. It lies in the New Eed Marl,

Rock Salt and Gypsum. Granites. 6 1 5

low in the series, and, as already explained, was the
result of the solar evaporation of an inland lake,
like, for example, the great salt lake near Utah, in the
Eocky Mountains, or of the salt lakes of central
Asia. The waters that ran into it contained quantities
of salt in solution ; and as the lake had no outlet, and
only got rid of its water by evaporation, concentration
of the chloride of sodium ensued, till at length super-
saturation being induced, precipitation of rock-salt
took place. The same formation yields the greater part
of the gypsum quarried in England, though some also
occurs in the Red Marl of the Magnesian Limestone
series.1

In Devonshire and Cornwall, on Shap Fell in West-
moreland, and in Scotland chiefly near Aberdeen, the
granite quarries afford much occupation to a number
of people. Now that it has become the fashion to
polish granites, these rocks are becoming of still more
importance. But as they are not so easily hewn as
sandstone, they do not come into use as ordinary
building stones, except in such districts as Aberdeen,
where no other good kind of rock is to be had.
Basalt, Greenstones, and Felspathic porphyries from
North Wales, Scotland, Charnwood Forest, and other
districts in England, are also largely employed for
building and road-making, and the Serpentines of
Cornwall and Anglesea, and the Marbles of the Car-
boniferous Limestone of Derbyshire, yield beautiful
materials for ornamental purposes.

I have now attempted to give an idea of the general
physical geography of our country, both in ancient and

1 For a full account of the physical formation of these deposit s>
see ' Journ. Geol. Soc.' 1871, vol. xxvii, pp. 189 and 241. — Ramsay.

^6 T 6 Summary.

modern times, as dependent on its geology. I have
described the classification of all the formations in serial
order, and showed the distribution of these rocks over
our country, and in doing this I have tried to give a
sketch of the physical geography of our area, during
the deposition of each successive group of formations.
At various times they have all been affected by dis-
turbances and denudations, and the grand result is, that
where most disturbed, hardened, and denuded, there we
have mountainous districts ; for the greater prominence
and ruggedness of surface of these regions, arises partly
from the hardness of the igneous, metamorphic, and
common stratified rocks, partly from the denudations
which they have undergone. The Secondary and
Tertiary rocks being younger and not so much dis-
turbed, have in our country not been so much denuded,
and therefore generally form plains and tablelands.

Moreover, we saw that over all these surfaces, in ad-
dition to the vast amount of erosion which must have
been effected in Palaeozoic, Secondary, and older Tertiary
times, renewed denudations, accompanied by great cold,
occurred at a very late epoch. The result of this
abrasion has been to cover the surface more or less with
loose superficial detritus, upon which part of the fertility
of portions of the country and the peculiarity of some
of its soils depend.

I then passed on to notice what I considered to be
a very remarkable result of this last great denudation,
brought about under the influence of ice, by which the
chief part— I by no means say all — but by which the
chief part of the lakes of our country have been formed ;
and not of our country alone, but of a large part of
the northern, and I have no doubt also of the southern
hemisphere. It is a remarkable thing, indeed, to con-

Summary. 6 1 7

sider, if true — and I firmly believe it to be true — that
so many of those hollows in which lakes lie have
been scooped out by the slow and long-continued passage
of great sheets of glacier ice, quite comparable to those
vast masses that cover the extreme northern and
southern regions of the world at this day.

The water-drainage of the country is likewise seen
to be dependent on geological structure. Our larger
rivers chiefly drain to the east, and excepting the Severn,
the Dee (Wales), the Mersey, the Solway, and the Clyde,
the smaller ones to the west, partly because certain axes
of disturbance happened to lie nearer our western than
our eastern coasts. Again, the quality of water in these
rivers depends, as we have seen, on the nature of the
rocks over which they flow, and of the springs by which
they are supplied.

Then, when we come to consider the nature of the
population inhabiting our island, we find it also to be
greatly influenced by this old geology. The earlier
tribes were in old times driven into the mountain
regions in the north and west, and so remain to this
day — still speaking their own languages, but gradually
mingling now, as they did before, with the masses
of mixed races that came in with later waves of
conquest from other parts of Europe. These later
races settling down in the more fertile parts of the
country, first destroyed and then again began to
develop its agricultural resources. In later times they
have applied themselves with wonderful energy to turn
to use the vast stores of mineral wealth which lie in
the central districts. Hence have arisen those densely-
peopled towns and villages in and around the Coal-
measure regions, where so many important manufactures
are carried on. Yet in the west, too — in Devon and

6 1 8 Summary.

Cornwall, and in Wales where some of the great Coal-
measure, metalliferous, and slaty regions lie — there are
busy centres of population, where the operations are
often directed by, and the manual labour connected
with the mineral products is well done by the original
Celtic inhabitants.

It is interesting to go back a little and inquire what
may have been the condition of our country when man
first set foot upon its surface. We know that these
islands of ours have been frequently united to the Con-
tinent, and as frequently disunited, partly by elevations
and depressions of the land, and to a great extent, also,
by denudations. When the earliest human population
of which we have any traces came, Britain was doubtless
united to the Continent. Such is the deliberate opinion
of some of our best geologists, and also that these pre-
historic men inhabited our country along with the great
hairy Mammoth, the Ehinoceros, the Cave Bear, the
Lion, the Hippopotamus, and many modern animals —
and perhaps, in pre-Glacial times, they travelled westward
into what is now Britain from the Continent, along with
these extinct mammalia. The country was then most
probably covered by great forests, swamps, and peaty
flats, unless it may have been that the Chalk downs
and the higher mountain-tops were bare.

But in times much later, denudations and alterations
of level having taken place, our island again became
disunited from the mainland : and now, with all its
numerous firths and inlets, its great extent of coast, its
admirable harbours, our country lies within the direct
influence of that Grulf Stream which softens the whole
climate of the West of Europe, and we, a people of
mixed race, Celt, Scandinavian, Angles, and Norman,
more or less intermingled in blood, are so happily

Summary. 6 1 9

placed that, in a measure, we have the command
of a large portion of the commerce of the world, and
send out fleets of merchandise from every port.

And we are happy, in my opinion, above all things
in this, that by an old denudation we have been dis-
severed from the Continent of Europe, and our bounda-
ries are clear. Thus it happens that, free from immediai }
contact with countries possibly hostile, and not too much
biassed by the influence of peoples of foreign blood,
during the long course of years in which our country
has never seen the foot of an invader,1 we have been
enabled, with occasional disturbance of foreign wars and
political factions, progressively so to develop our own
ideas of religion, political freedom, and political morality,
that we stand one of the freest and most prosperous
countries on the face of the globe.

I have now completed the somewhat arduous task
undertaken in preparing this much enlarged edition of
an old book. It is, after all, but a sketch of a large
subject, and no one can be more sensible than I am of
its imperfections ; but with all its faults and omissions,
I think that this is the first work in which an attempt
has been made to trace in detail the absolute connection
of the Physical Geology and Physical Geography of
old epochs in Britain with that of the present day.
Right or wrong in some of the questions raised, it is the
work of one who, through more than half a lifetime,
has

' pry'd through Nature's store,
Whate'er she in th' ethereal round contains,
Whate'er she hides beneath her verdant floor,
The vegetable and the mineral reigns ;

1 The small French descents of Pembrokeshire and Ireland do
not deserve the name of invasions.

620 Summary.

Or else he scans the globe — those small domains,
Where restless mortals such a turmoil keep, —
Its seas, its floods, its mountains, and its plains :

Let the reader learn from it what he can, and judge of
the result.

INDEX.

ABB

A BBOTSBURY to Shaftesbuiy,
J\. range of Upper Greensand,

221, 222

African lakes, 438
Agassiz, on ancient glaciers, 327,

384
Aix-la-Chapelle, cretaceous flora

of, 255

Allan river, 528
Alne, 520

Alnemouth glacial, 387
Alps and Italy, Rhastic, beds of,

158

Alps, upheaval of, 404
Alpine old glaciers, maps of, 439,

440

Alpine snow and ice, 361-366
Amazons, estuary of, 244, 247, 256

— area of drainage, 560
Analyses of rocks, 48
Aneurin and the Gododin, 587
Anglesey, coal-measures of, 124
- glaciation of, 384, 402-411

— Old Red Sandstone of, 110
Animals, ancient migrations of,

482, 483
Anticlinal and synclinal curves,

33, 346-348

Antoninus' wall and docks, 550
Antrim, chalk of, 257

— Miocene volcanic rocks of, 263,
354

Aqueous and igneous rocks, 3
Aquitani and Iberians, 580, 581

BAG

Aran Mowddwy, 498

glaciers of, 407

view from, 523

Arbroath coast -cliffs, denudation

of, 488

Areas of drainage, Britain, 495
Arenig, slates of, Sedgwick, 69

— fossils of, 70, 71

— and unconformity, 70, 77, 78

— Cumbria, 70

Argyll, Duke of, on Miocene leaf-
beds, Mull, 264

Aristotle, 277

Arran in Glacial epoch, 382

— and Clyde glacier, 398

Ashburnham beds, 206

Ashby-de-la-Zouch coal-field, 125

Ashop and Alport Dale, landslips
in, 327, 328

Atherfield clay and fossils of, 212-
214, 311

Atlantic, Foraminifera, &c., in,

226
— volcanic explosions in, 80

Atlas, old glaciers of, 375

Auvergne, volcanos of, 116

Avebury, 349, 350

Avon, gorge of and tributaries,
511-513

Axmouth, landslip near, 486

"DAGSHOT and Bracklesham
D beds, 238, 248-251, 255, 256

622

Index.

BAL

Bala lake, glacier of, 405, 524,
525

— limestone, 72

— volcanic rr cks near, 76
Beinn More, Mull, 264
Basalts, greenstones, &c., 615
Basques, 580

Bass Rock, 383
Bath Oolite, 176-181

— Old Well, salts in, 555
Battle, Purbeck, and Wealden,

strata of. 206
Beardmore, Mr., on Thames at

Kingston,

Beaumaris, Boulder-clay, 404
Bedford Level, alluvia of, 543
Bedfordshire, Portland beds of,

191

Beeston Cliff, 308
Belford, glacial, 386
Belgre, 582
Belgic Gauls, 580
Bell, Mr. T.. on coal raised, 598
Bembrids-e beds and fossils, 238,

252-254

Berwickshire coal-field, 127
Berwick, glacial phenomena near,

385-386
Berwyn Mountains, Silurian strata

of, 72

, volcanic rocks of, 71

Black, Dr., on Hutton, 280
Black band ironstone, 128
Blackdown Hills, Upper Green-
sand of, 220
Black Sea fauna, 161
Blackpool, shell-beds of, 414
Blocks of Montbey, 368
Blyth, 520
Bone bed, Gloucestershire, 163

— caves, 459

— caves, Meuse, 547

Bouches de Perthes, man and the

mammoth, 538
Boulder-clay, 333, 384-397

— beds, Oolitic, Brora, 199

— beds, Permian, 143

— beds, Old Red Sandstone, 111
Bovey Tracey, Miocene beds and

fossils of, 259-263

BUN"

Bowerbank, Dr., on sponges in
Chalk, 227

Boyd river, Miocene beds and
fossils of, 311

Bracklesham, Bagshot, and Barton
beds, 314

Breidden Hills, volcanic rocks of,
77

Brick- clays, 609-610

Bridlington, glacial, 392

Bristol coal-field, an outlier, 35

Bristol and Somerset, Carbonifer-
ous rocks of, 122

Bristol Channel, origin of, 510

Bristow, Mr., on Alum Bay sec-
tion, 241

— Mr., and Brixham cave, 478
Britain, igneous rocks of, 18

— old glaciers of, 372, 384, 431-455
Britain partial submersion of, 41 2-

418
Britain, prospective population of,

604
British Islands and glacial epoch,

380-448-455
Brixham cave, 478-480
Brodie, Rev. P. B., on Insect

limestones, 163, 164
Brora, Oolites of, 198
Buckland, Dr., on glacial epoch,

384

— Dr., on Bone caves, 461, 473
— Dr., on Paviland cave, 470

— Dr., and Caldy cave, 472
Building stones, 610-615

Oolitic Bath and Portland,

&c., 611
Magnesian Limestone, 611-

612

Carboniferous Limestone,

611
Carboniferous Sandstone,

612
Red Sandstones, old and

new, 611

Caradoc Sandstone, 611

Builth, Upper Llandovery rocks,

92

— Lower Silurian and volcanic
rocks of, 72, 77

Index.

623

BUN

Bunter beds, 152

Burdett Coutts, Baroness, and

Bovey beds, 259
Burdiehouse Limestone, 128
Bure valley beds, 276
Burnet, geological ideas of, 277
Busk, Mr., and Victoria cave, 466

CADER IDRIS, view from, 498
Caernarvon Castle, its stones,
612
Caithness, Old Red Sandstone of,

294

Caldy Island cave, 472
Cambrian and Silurian rocks,

classification of, 56-58
- rocks and fossils, Wales and

Longmynd, 58-61
how deposited, 61

— and Lower Silurian rocks,
disturbance and submergence,
of, 303-305

Cambridgeshire, Lincolnshire, and
the Wash, plains of, 333

Canada, Laurentian gneiss, &c.,
47, 52

Caradoc Sandstone, range of, 72

Carboniferous Limestone, 112

coral reefs, 133-135

Derbyshire, 125

fossils of, 129-131

_ North of England, 305-306

Scotland, 127

waste of, 561

waters of, 554

— epoch, 137

— fossils, 129-133

— series, 119-138, 297-306

— times, physical geography of,
133

— volcanic rocks, 291
Carboniferous rocks Derbyshire,

anticlinal curve, 324-325

— — anticlinal and synclinal
curves of, 330-331

Carden Park, view from, 308-309
Cardigan Bay, glacier of, 405
Carnedd Llewelyn, &c., glaciers of,
408

CHR

Caron tin stream- works and human

skulls, 541
Caspian Sea, 116

— fauna, 148, 161

Caves and potholes, Yorkshire, 461

— ages of, 460-462

— bones and flint implements, 462

— rarity of, in Scotland, 464

— Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Wa^es,
Mendip Hills, and Devon, 460-
469

Cave-men, 579-580
Cayton Bay, glacial, 391
Celtic populations, 579-589

— names, 582-586
Cement-stones, 6, 10
Chalk, 212, 225-230

• and Eocene beds, hiatus
between, 234-235, 237

— Downs and Isle of Wight, 516
waste of, 560-561

— early westerly tilt of, 510

— escarpment of, 318, 333

— extension of, in Eocene epoch,
257

— flints, 227

- fossils of, 226-230

— Ireland, 227

— marl, 226

— potholes in, 318-320

— sea in which deposited, 311

— thickness of, 226-227

— uppermost Continental, 234-
235

— unconformity on Oolites, &c.,
318

— waste of, 318

Chamber, Robert, on glacial

epoch, 384
Cheltenham, Inferior Oolite of,

175

— salt wells of, 555

Chemical action and denudation,

33
Cheshire plains, 330

— Permian strata, 1 42
Chew river, 511

Chillesford clay and fossils, 276
Chloritic marl and fossils of, 226
Christianity in Britain, 583

624

Index.

CIB

Cirques, 429

Clark, Mr., on S. Wales coal-field,

597

Clay and mud, how formed, 10
Clay slate, 42
Clay and sands, of Bovey beds

whence derived, 261
Cleavage and metamorphism, 42
Climate, changes of, 375-380
Close, Rev. M., Irish glaciers, 401

— on Sea-shells, Wicklow, 415
Clwyd, water of, 554

Clyde alluvia and remains, 546

— Beds, shells of, 413

— and Arran,raised beaches of, 549
Coalbrookdale, Carboniferous rocks

of, 123

— Permian strata, 123
Coal-measures, South Wales and

England, 120-126
Coal-measure basins, 128, 599-602

— fossils, 131, 138
Coal-beds, how formed, 136-138
Coal-fields, original continuity of,

600

— exposed by denudation, 6( 2

— concealed by newer strata, 603

— populations of and near, 603
Coal Commission, work of, 596-604

— available, 596-606

— duration of, 604-606

— manufactures, 607
Coal-pits, population employed in,

598

— of Oolitic Series Yorkshire, 195

— Brora, 198
Coniston Limestone, 74

and Upper Silurian, 331

Conisbro' Castle and Magnesian

Limestone, 612
Consolidation of strata, 12
Continental epoch, Old Eed to

Triassic beds 156-158
Continent of Eocene epoch, 256-

257
Contortion and metamorphism of

strata, 45-46
Coquet river, 520
Coral reefs and depression of land,

12

CWM

Coral Rag, Calcareous Grit, and

fossils, 183-186

Battle, 206

Coralline Crag phosphates and

fossils, 270-271, 273-275
Cornstones, 104
Cornbrash, range of and fossils,

181

— and Inferior Oolite, community
of fossils in, 182

Cors-goch, &c., radiation of gla-
ciers from, 406

Coruisk, 451

Cotswold Hills, Inferior Oolite,
175

escarpment and view from,

316-317

Crag, 270-276

— physical features and faunas of,
357-358

Cray river,pal8eolithic implements,

541

Cretaceous series, 212-235, 311
Upper, England, physical

geography of, 230-235

Lower, of Dr. Fitton, 201

Cretaceous escarpment, 331

— rocks, waters of, 554
Crevasses, 364

Croll, Dr. on glacial cycles, 375-80
Crustacea, in base of Old Red

Sandstone, 104
Cumberland, volcanic rocks of, 80

— age of mountains of, 405

— buried in ice, 382

— formations, 324

— ice-stream from, 408-409

— submergence of, 428

— to East of England, structure
and physiography, 331-333

— tributary glaciers of, 399

— valleys of, 529

— waters of, 553

Cumbraes, Bute, and Ailsa Craig,

382
Gumming, Rev. J. G., on glacial

striations, Isle of Man, 399
Curves, anticlinal and synclinal, 33
Cwm-glas glacier, 421
Cwm-y-llan glacier, 422

Index.

625

CYM

Cymry, 582

Cyrenas, Inferior Oolite sand,
192

DANA, Professor, cited, 150
— on fiord-latitudes, 447
Darwin, C., volcanic explosions in
Atlantic, 80

— and evolution of species, 173

— on fiords, 448

— on Llyn Idwal glacier, 423
Dawkins, Professor, on Bone caves,
464, 476

on cave mammalia, 481

on fauna of river gravels, 537

on Greenlanders, 547

on Microlestis antiquus, 162

Dean Forest, Carboniferous rocks

of, 121
Dee, Wales, 523-526

water of, 554

Degradation of land, Ray, 10
Dela Beche and Geological Survey,
Cambrian and Silurian classifi-
cation, 57

on Upper Greensand, Orleigh

Court, 221

Sir H., cited, 163

on Kent's Hole, 476

on Lake of Geneva, 443

Delamere Forest, 308
Deltas, how formed, 8
Denbighshire Permian Strata, 142
Denudation, and chemical action,
33

— and landslips, 33, 34

— and sear waves, 34

— and separation of countries,
482-489

— and valleys of, 32, 33, 499

— definition of, 31-36

— of strata, amount of, 34
Derbyshire hills, 330

— limestone hills view from,
325

— to Scotland, rocks, 324
Derwent, 517, 520

Devizes to Cambridgeshire, Upper
Greensand of, 222

ENG

Devonian and Old Red Sandstone,
99

— fossils, 100-103
Devonshire, culm-measures, 123
Dickinson, Mr., on Dean Forest,

Lancashire, and North Wales

coal-fields, 597, 598
< Dirt-beds,' Purbeck, 203
Dogger Yorkshire, and equivalent,

194
Dolbadarn, roches moutannees, 425-

426

Dolomite and atolls, 149
Dora Baltea, moraine of, 375

— alluvia of, 543

Dordogne, caves of, mammals and

man, 547
Downs, North and South, 337-

340

Drifts, height of, 416-418
Durness, Silurian fossils of, 86
Dyfi river, 522

EARTH, internal temperature of,
50, 51
East and Mid- Lothian coal-fields,

128
Eccentricity of earth's orbit and

glacial epochs, 377-380
Eccles, James, on temperature of

glacier ice, 365
Egaean Sea, insects washed into,

164
Egerton, Sir Philip, on Rhsetic

fish, 162
Elevation and depression of land,

11, 12
Elliot, Mr., on North Staffordshire

coal-field, 597
England, East coast, shells in

boulder-clay, 413
and South, waters of,

554
great flats of, 333

— Miocene features of, 356

— mountains, plains and table-
lands, 323

— North of, and Scotland, coals
of, 137

S S

626

Index.

ENG

England, East coast, and Wales,
typical section across, 302-305

arrangement of forma-
tions in, 302-314

mountain districts of, 315

physical structure 324,

325

retreat of glaciers, 429-

431

— scenery of, 350

— West coast and Wales, rivers of,
558

Eocene epoch, physical geography
of, 255-258

— fauna, 352, 456

— formations and range of, 236-
258,312-314

— riverbeds, and those of Purbeck
and Wealden, 238

— strata, denudation of, 346-350

— strata, earlier extension and
outliers of, 318-320, 344-346

— unconformable on chalk, 237
Epochs, geological, meaning of,

258
Erratic boulders, 368, 369

East of England, 385-396

in Lower Silurian rocks, 83

Escarpments, 336-344

— and rivers, 499-502

— cf chalk, origin of, 510, 532

— of Lias and Oolites, 167, 175,
178

Eskers, 386, 431, 445

Estuarine series, Lower Oolite,
Mr. Judd on, 192, 193

Estuary shales, Loch Staffin, fos-
sils of, 200

Oolitic, Hebrides, 199

Etheridge, Mr., on Permian shells,
147

Yorkshire Oolites, 194

Europe, continental, Miocene
fauna of, 265-269

Evans, Mr., on implements in
Brixham cave, 480

^ALCONER Dr., and Bone
caves, 462, 469, 470, 478

FOS

Faluns of Touraine, Miocene

fauna of, 265

marine shells of, 271

Faroe Islands, Miocene volcanic

rocks and flora of, 264, 354
Fault at base of Grampians, 84,

85
Favre, Alphonse, on Ehone glacier,

441

Faxoe chalk, 234, 235
Fidra Island, 381
Fife and Kinross coal-field, 128
Filey Bay, Red Chalk of, 219, 220
Fiords and lochs, 447-453
Firestone, Upper Greensand, 223,

224
Fish and Crustacea, Upper Ludlow

rocks, 96

— of Old Red Sandstone, 104, 113
Fishguard, Needle-rock, 488
Fitton, Dr., on Atherfield clay, £c.,

201
Forbes,Professor E. on White Lias,

Caspian and Black Sea faunas,

160, 161

on insect limestone,' 164

on Loch Staffin Oolites, 199,

200

on Hempstead beds, 254

on Migrations of animals,

483

on Miocene plants, Mull, 354

on Purbeck beds, 201

Forest bed, flora and fauna, 358-

360, 456

Forest of Dean coal-field, an out-
lier, 35

Wyre, coal-measures of, 123

Permian strata, 142

— bed, Cromer, 276

— marble, range of, and fossils,
176, 180

Foliation and gneiss, 42
Foraminifera, &c., in Chalk, 226
Formations, British, table of, 29
Formation, epoch, series, remarks

on, 282
Forth, and raised beach of, 528,

549
Fossilisation of shells, &c., 13, 16

Index

627

FOS

Fossils, successive deposition of,

23-30
Foster, Mr., on Northumberland

coal-field, 598

Flints and the Potteries, 609
France and Belgium, Eocene

strata of, 256

Franz Joseph Land, Miocene vol-
canic rocks of, 354
Frome river, 511, 516
Frost, a disintegrator, 4
Fuchsel, George Christian, on

succession of strata and fossils,

278, 281
Fuller's earth, rock, and fossils,

176

thinning out of, in Glouces-
tershire, 192

GAEL and Gwyddyl, 582-586
Galloway, tributary glaciers
of, 399

Ganges, estuary of, 247, 256
Gastaldi, Professor, on moraine of
Dora Baltea, 375

on lakes, 454, 543

Gault, 212

- and Upper Greensand, fossils
common to, 224

— how deposited, 231

— range of and fossils, 218
Geikie, J., on fiords, 449

— on interglacial epochs, 459

— on lakes and fiords, 454

— on palaeolithic and neolithic
implements, 544-546

Geikies, Professor, cited, 84
on fault at base of Gram-
pians, 85

on basalts of Mull, 200

on Clyde alluvia, and Roman

docks, 550
on glacial phenomena, 454

— on Kames, 445

— on lias of Skye, 199

on rivers of Scotland, 526, 527

Geological time and unconformity,
36

— epochs, 96-98

GRE

Geological formations, 220
Geology, old notions and defini-
tion of, 1

— and physical geography, rela-
tions of, 2

Glacier ice-currents, 407

— between Alps and Jura, 440
— • cycles, cause of, 375-380

— episode, Permian, 143

— epoch, &c., 276, 361, 455

— lakes, 438-447

— Pass of Llanberis, 419-421

— pools, 392, 393

— striae and roches moutonnees,
368, 369

— submergence, emergence, and
faunas, 457, 458

Glaciers and sediments, 5

— modern, 361-371

— movement of, 362-364

— of Alps, 361-366, 374, 375

— of Old Eed Sandstone epoch,
111, 112

— signs of in Britain, 372
Glamorganshire, Lias limestone

of, 167

Glass-sand, 610
Gneiss and foliation, 42

— different ages of, 45

— Laurentian, Canada, 47, 52
Godwin- Austen on Old Red Sand-
stone, 61, 105

— — on physical geography of
Upper Cretaceous strata, 231-
234

on Kent's Hole, 477

on post-Pliocene strata, 457

Gold and Gogofau mines, 593, 594
Gower caves, Glamorganshire, 470
Graham Island, volcano, 79
Graig-ddrwg, view from, 406
Grampian Mountains, Lower Silu-
rian rocks of, 84, 87

— and Lammermuir Hills, forma-
tions between, 290, 295

Granites, veins of, 39, 40
Granites, composition of, 43

— origin of, 50-54, 615

Great Oolite and fossils of , 176-18

— salt-lake, Utah, 155, 438

s s 2

6s8

Index.

GEE

Great Valley (Loch Ness), rivers

South of, 527

Greenland, Miocene flora of, 264
— if bared of snow, 453
Green slates and porphyries, moun-
tains, 331

Grey wethers, 349, 350
Grinshill, view from, 309
Ground moraine, 395, 396
Gulf stream, 490-492, 494
Gwyn Jeffreys, on fossils of Coral-
line crag, 271

HAAST, Dr., on New Zealand
lakes, 433

on New Zealand geology,

454

Hematite, 596

Harmer, F. W., on boulder- clays,
393

Harrison, Mr., on Thames at King-
ston, 557

Hartley, Mr., on S. Stafford and
Coalbrookdale coal-fields, &c.,
597

Haldon hills, Upper Greensand of,
220

Hampshire basin, 236, 346

— coast, denudation of, 485

— fluvio-marine strata of, 255
Hartlepool and South Shields,

Magnesian Limestone, 140
Hastings sands, 202, 205-207
Hauer, on Saint Cassian and

Hallstatt beds, 159
Headon beds, 238, 241, 251-253
Heath, Mr. T., on Bone caves,

Derbyshire, 467
Hebrides and glacier-ice, 382

— Lias and Oolites of, 199-
200

— Miocene volcanic rocks and
soils of, 263, 354-356

Hector, Dr., on New Zealand

geology, 454
Heer, Professor, on Miocene plants

of Bovey beds, 259, 261-263

Mull, 354

fauna, 265-267

ICE

Helland Amund, on lakes and

fiords, 445, 449

Hempstead beds, 238, 254-255
Herodotus, 277
Hicks, Mr., and Cambrian fossils,

59-60

High Peak, Derbyshire, 325
Highgate, London clay, 245
Highlands, glaciers of, 398

— mountainous character of, 292,
300

Hilsby hill, 308

Himalayah, old glaciers of, 375

Hook on Earthquakes &c., 278-

281
Holderness and boulder clays,

392-394

— and denudation, 484
Hopkins, Mr., on the Wye, 517
Hordwell cliffs, 251
Hornsea, glacial, 392

Houses of Parliament, and Mag-
nesian Limestone, 611

Ho well, Mr., on pre -glacial valley,
531

Hughes, Professor, and flint imple-
ments, 539-541

Hull, Professor, on Irish glaciers,
401

on rock -bound lakes, 446

Humber, 517-519

— and its tributary rivers, 334

— glacial, 393
— warps of, 542

Hunt, Dr. Sterry, cited, 150

— Mr., on coal-pit populations, and
coal raised, 598

on duration of coal, 604

Hutton Captain, on New Zealand
geology, 454

Hutton, Dr., his geological princi-
ples, 277, 279-280

Huxley, Prof essor, on early peoples
of Britain, 580

TCEBEKGS and boulder clay,
1 395

Iceland, Miocene volcanic rocks
and flora of, 264, 354

Index.

629

ICE

Ice-sheet from Scotland, its ex-
tent, 384

Igneous rocks, proportions of in
Britain, 18

— rocks, alteration of strata by, 39

— rocks and mountains, Wales,
303

— rocks, how distinguished, 19-
21, 38-41

— rocks of Scottish coal-field, 127,
135

Industrial products, 590

Inferior Oolite range and fossils
of, 173-176

Hebrides, 199

Sands and Upper Lias, pas-
sage of species through, 174

series, Yorkshire, 194-195

Ingleborough dip-slope of hills
and valleys, 334-335

Ireland, Lingula and Tremadoc
beds absent, 78

Iron ore, Inferior Oolite Sand, 192

Lias, 606

Lower Greensand, 217

— Northampton, 606

Iron ore, Weald, 607

Islands, Lower Silurian, submer-
sion of, 90-92

— and minor glaciers, 413
— in Jurassic sea, 166, 167

Isle of Man, and glacier-ice, 399

— of Purbeck, Portland Lime-
stone of, 191

Upper Greensand near, 223

— Sheppey, fossils in London
clay, 245

— Wight, Wealden strata of, 205

Upper Greensand of, 223

disturbance of strata, 346-

347

section across, 241

the Needles, 488

JACKSON, Mr., and Victoria
cave, 464

Jet of Whitby, 172, 610
Jevons, Professor, on coal question,
604

LAK

Jones, Basil, Bishop of Saint

David's, cited, 583
Jordan, Mr. J. B., model of Thames

valley, 529
Judd, J. W., on Lower Oolite estu-

arine series, 192

Brora Oolites, 198-199

— — Cretaceous rocks of Mull,

227-228

Miocene volcanos of He-
brides, 263-264
Neocomian and Portlandian

beds, 212-213

volcanic lakes, 438

Jukes, Professor, on Devonian and

Carboniferous rocks, 99

lakes, 446, 454

plains of marine denudation,

499
Jura and under-ground rivers,

474
Jurassic series, 166-200

KAMES, Scotland and England,
386

Kaolin, 608
Kelloway Kock, and fossils of,

184-185
Kent and Lune rivers, glacial

striations, 399
Kentish rag, 214
Kent's Hole (cave), 476-478
Keuper marls, 152, 160
— Sandstone Brora, 198

— escarpments, 308
Lossiemouth, 155

— fossils, 153

Kimeridge Clay and fossils, 187-

190, 197, 206
Kinder Scout, 326-327
King, Professor, on Magnesian
Limestone, 140

T AKES and areas of depression,
Jj 437-438

— and denudations, 435

— and fractures and disturbance,
434-436

630

Index.

LAK

Lakes and glacier-ice, 438-447

— and Kames, 386

— and latitudes, 453

— and physical geography, 444-
447

— and red rocks, 61

— British, glacier-scooped, 444

— Europe, Scandinavia, Finland,
&c., 445

— glacier-scooped Swiss and
Italian, 443

— moraine -dammed, 432

— near Ivrea, 432

— North America, 116, 444

— of Geneva, 439-443

— of the Alps, 438-443

— rock-bound, glacial origin of,
432-447

— rock-bound, North Wales, 445
Cumberland, 446

Scotland, 446-447

Ireland, 446

La Madelaine, Dordogne, and the
Mammoth, 471

Lammermuir hills, &c., Lower.
Silurian rocks of, 83

denudation of, 301

Lanarkshire and Ayrshire coal-
field, 128

Lancashire, Permian strata, 142

Land, elevation and depression of,
11-12

Landslips and denudation, 33-34,
327-330

Land plants in uppermost Silurian
beds, 105

— lizards in Magnesian Conglo-
merate, 154-155

Lane Fox, Colonel, on Thames
gravel mammalia and flint
weapons, 539

Lartet and Christie, on Caves of
Dordogne, 547- 548

Laurentian gneiss, Canada, 47-52

— and Cambrian rocks, Scotland,
55-56, 85

Lead mines, 594

Leech, Mr. T.,and flint weapons, 539

Lias and Oolitic series, 166-200

— and Oolites, outliers of, 316

LON

Lias Brora, 198

— divisions of, 309

— fossils of, 168-172

— Hebrides, 199

— Lower, range and escarpments
of, 167

— seas and assemblages of life in,
172, 311

Lignite and underclay, Eocene,

Isle of Wight, 256
- Western Isles, 355

Limestone, how formed, 16-18

Limestones, Upper Silurian of
England, 93

Lingula and Tremadoc beds ab-
sent in Ireland, 78

— flags, fossils of, 63

thinning out of, 77

Lincolnshire, Inferior Oolite of,

192

Lister, geological ideas of, 277
Llanberis, thickness of glacier,

424
Llandeilo and Bala,beds and fossils

of, 71-74
volcanic rocks of, 71, 75-

77
Llandovery rocks, Lower and

Upper, 89
Llangollen, Upper Silurian rocks

of, 93

Lleyn, glaciation of, 409
-- shell-beds of, 414
Llyn Llydaw glacier, 422
Llyn-du'r Arddu glacier, 423
Llyn Idwal glacier, 423

— Padarn and Llyn Peris glacier,
425-426

Loch Broom, 449

— Erriboll, 449

— Etive, 451

— Fyne and glacier, 398, 451

— Katrine, water of, 553

— Lomond, once a fiord, 448

— Staffin, oolites of, 199-200
Lodes, metalliferous, 592-596
Logan, Sir W., cited, 150

on American lakes, 454

London and Hampshire Eocene

basins, 236

Index.

631

LON

London clay, and fossils of, 238,

244-248, 255, 312
- Septaria, 245
Longmynd and Shelve and Upper

Llandovery rocks, 91

— and Wales, Cambrian rocks,
58-61

Lonsdale on Devonian rocks, 99
Lossiemouth, Keuper Sandstone

fossils, 155
Lower Greensand, range of, 212-

217

fossils of, 214-218

how deposited, 231

iron ore of, 217

— Lias, 167-169

— — passage into Marlstone, 169

— Oolitic Northamptonshire &c.,
estuarine conditions of, 193

series, group of fossils of,

179
theory of, 195-197

— Silurian, South Wales, 72

Scotland, 83-87

volcanos, 81 -82

Lowlands, physical character of,

292
Lowestoft, Boulder-clay and sand,

396

Lune river, 522
Lyell, Sir C., on changes of

climate, 376

on 'Insect limestone,' 164

on lakes, 454

— on plants of Hempstead beds,

254
Lyme Kegis, Lias limestone of, 167

MACCLESFIELD, shells in sand
and gravel, 413
Maestricht chalk, 234
Maggiore and Como, lakes of, once

fiords, 451
Magnesian Conglomerate, Keuper,

153
— Limestone, 139-142

escarpment, 331, 333

formed in salt lake, 149-151

Gypsum, &c., in, 150

MBR

Magnesian Limestone unconform-
able to Carboniferous strata,
142
Malldraeth marsh, Anglesey, 404,

410

Malm-rock, Upper Greensand, 223
Malvern Hills, view from, 315,316
Mammalia, migrations of, 456-459
Mammals of Purbeck beds, 204
Man, his advent, 481

— pre-glacial in Britain ? 546, 547
Manchester, Permian fossils, 142
Mantell, Dr., on Weald, 201, 206
Marbles, 615

Marine life and salts in sea, 560
Marjelen See, 424
Marlstone escarpments, 167

— or Middle Lias, 169-171
Maury, Captain, on ocean currents,

378
Mawddach estuary, a fiord ? 449

— glacier of, 405

McHenry, Kev. J., on Kent's Hole,

476, 477
Mellard, Keade, on salts in rivers,

559
Mello, Rev. J. M., on Bone caves,

Derbyshire, 467
Mitchell, on earthquakes, 278
Moore, Charles, cited, 163
Morton, Mr., on ice-grooves, 400
Murchison and Sedgwick, Cam-
brian and Silurian rocks, 56
on Devonian rocks, 99

— Sir R., Llandeilo flags and
limestones, 72

on Brora Oolites, 198

on Permian strata, 140

on Silurian rocks of

Durness, 86
Menai Straits, glaciation of, 403,

408-411
how formed, 410

— bridges, 612

Mendip Hills and Caves, 473-476
Menevian beds, fossils of, 62, 63
Meuse, human skeletons in alluvia,

548
Merionethshire, Cambrian rocks

and denudation, 321-323

632

Index.

MER

Merionethshire, glaciation of, 406

Mersey ice-grooves, 400

— water of, 554

Metamorphic rocks and theory of,

40-54
Microlestis antiquus, and Mendip

Hills, 163
Middle Oolites, 183-186

Hebrides, 199

Midland of England, character of,

315

Millepore bed, Yorkshire, 194
Millstone grit, 120
escarpments of, Derbyshire,

&c., 324, 325

waters of, 554

Miocene Alpine strata, deposition

and disturbance of, 508

— and Pliocene, 352-360

— epoch, 259-269

— epoch, mountains of, 263

— fauna fragmentary, 267

— fauna probable in British area,
264, 267-269, 274, 275

— flora and fauna, 353-357, 456

— flora and insects, Switzerland,
263

— floras, northern types of, 263,
264, 268

— lake of Khine valley and fauna,
268

— lakes, Switzerland, 263

— rocks, and volcanos, 354-
356

— strata, Bovey Tracey, 260
Mississippi, area of drainage,

560
Mo-el Tryfan shell-beds and

moraines, 414-416
Moraines, 364-369
Moraine profonde, 395
Moselle, and tablelands of, 499,

525, 526, 533, 535
Mountain chains, old glaciers of,

•375
Mountains of Europe, of pre- and

post-Wealden epoch, 210, 211
Mud and clay, how formed, 10
•Mull, Miocene flora of, 264
Muschelkalk, 152

OCH

NANT-FFRANCON glaciers,
407, 408, 423

Nant-Gwynant glacier, 422
Neocomian strata, 201, 212
Newberry, Dr., on American lakes,

454
Newcastle coal-field, 126

— on-Tyne, glacial, 387

New Bed Series, 152, 154, 308, 309,

330, 331

and Lias plains, 333

Marl, fossils of, 155, 156

and Lower Lias, transition

to, 160-165
Sandstone and Marl, 152-

158

New Zealand, glaciers of, 375
Niagara Falls and denudation, 31
Nith and Annan, Permian breccias,

142-143
Nordenskiold, Professor, on lakes

of Finland, 445
North America, glaciation of, 372

table-land of, 499

Northampton, Inferior Oolite and

Sands of, 192
Northamptonshire to Yorkshire,

Lower Oolites of, 191-200
Northern Counties, Old Red Sand-
stone of, 110
Northmore, Mr., and Kent's Hole,

476
North Staffordshire, Cheshire, and

Lancashire coal-fields, 125, 126
Permian strata, 142

— Wales, coal-fields, 124

glaciers of, 401-411, 419-428

volcanic rocks of, 75

— of England, glaciated, 382
Northumberland coal-field, 127
Norwich Crag, and fossils of, 270,

275, 276
Norway and Scotland, fiords of,

448
Nottingham, Derbyshire, and

Yorkshire coal-field, 126

0

,CEAN currents, 378

Ochil and Campsie Hills, 528

Index.

633

OCH

Ochil Hills, escarpment of, 296-

297

Oldhaven beds, 244
Old Bed Sandstone, 103-110

and Godwin- Austen, 61

Conglomerates of, 111

and Carboniferous, rocks,

Scotland, preservation of, 298,

299
and Devonian, 99, 302-

305

epoch, scenery of,113-118

fossils of, 113-117

freshwater deposit, 105-

109

passage into Carboni-
ferous series, 305

Scotland, 86

Scotland, denudations of,

295-297

South Wales, 117

volcanic rocks of, 111,

116, 291

waters of, 553

Olivi, geological ideas of, 277
Oolites, Brora, 198, 199
- and Lias, Upper Cretaceous

overlap on, 312

— North of Humber, denudation
of, 519

Oolitic Series, 173-200, 309

— and Liassic rocks, original ex-
tension of, 313-316

— escarpment, 331

— formations, overlaps of Creta-
ceous strata on, 183, 191

— limestones, waste of, 562

— plateaux, 511

— rocks, minor scarps of, 318

— series, of waters, 45

— table-land, and valleys in, 316
waste and denudation of,

311

Ores of metals, 592-596
Orkney Islands and denudation,

488

Orosius, on fossil shells, 277
Osborne Beds and fossils, 238, 252
Ouse, Bedfordshire, gravels, flint

hatchets, and mammals, 539

PER

Ouse, Sussex, alluvia of, 542

— Yorkshire, 517, 519, 532
Outliers, explanation of, 35

- Bristol coal-field, 35

— Forest of Dean, 35

Owen, Professor, on Oolitic epoch,

197
on marsupials of Purbeck,

205
Oxford Clay, 197

range of, 183-185

Battle, 206

Hebrides, 199

T)ACIFIC, Calcareous mud in,

JL 226

Palaeozoic epoch, 307

Palissy, Bernard, on fossil shells,
277-278

Parker, Mr., and Wookey Hole,
475

Passage of Silurian into Old Red
Sandstone, 104

Paviland cave, 470-472

Peach, Mr., Silurian fossils, Suther-
land, 61, 86

Peckforton Hills, 308

Pembrokeshire, denudation of,
487, 488

Penarth, Rhsetic beds, 159

Pengelly, Mr., on plants of Hemp-
stead beds, 254

— on Bone caves, 478, 479

— on Bovey beds, 259, 260
Pennine chain, waters of, 554
Pentamerus beds, 89
Pentuan, human skulls, 541
Permian series, 139-151

— and New Red epochs and Cen-
tral Asia, 157

— and New Red Sandstone,
waters of, 554

— Labyrinthodonts and lizards,
145

— fishes, 146

— physical geography, 145-151

— plants, 145

— pseudomorphs of salt, gypsum>
146

634

Index.

PER

Permian rocks, 306-308

— shells, 147

— sun-cracks and rain-pittings,
146

Phillips, Professor, on denudation

of Holderness, 484
Physical geography and geology,

relations of, 2

Cambrian epoch, &c., 67

Lower Silurian, 77-81, 86-

87

Carboniferous, 133-138

Lower Oolites, 195-197

old continental phase of,

157
Purbeck and Wealden epoch,

202, 208-21 1
Physiography before glacial epoch,

503

Pictish Gael, 582
Pipe-clays, Eocene, 609
Plains of marine denudation, 341-

343, 496-499
Plants and lignite, Inferior Oolite

Sands, 192

Playfair, on Button's generaliza-
tions, 280

lakes, 437

Pliny, 277

Pliocene strata, 270-276

Plot, Dr., geological ideas of, 277

Pont-y-gromlech, roche moutonnee

and blocs perches, 427
Portland beds, and fossils, 186,

190, 191, 202-206
Post-glacial rivers, 531
Pre-glacial valleys and coal, 531
Prestwich, Professor, on Thanet

sand, 239

Bristol coal-field, 597

Brixham cave, 479, 480

flint implements and

mammoth, 538
fossils of Crag, 271, 275,

357

Oldhaven beds, 244

shells between boulder-
clays, 413
• tertiary outliers, North

Downs, 345

Rrv

Prestwich, Professor, on Thames

at Kingston, 557, 558
Price, Williams Mr., on duration

of coal, 604
Primitive strata, so-called, 43-45

old theory of, 86

Pseudomorphs of salt crystals, and

sun-cracks, 160
Purbeck and Wealden series, 201-

211, 310

— beds, fossils of, 203-205

— Isle, disturbance of strata, 347

— limestone, 187, 202

— marble, 203

outliers of, Buckinghamshire,

&c., 209
Purfield beds, 223

"DACES of men in Britain, 579-
JLt 589

Kadiation of heat and shrinkage

of earth's crust, 45, 46, 49
Kainand rivers, Wealden, 341-344
Rainfalls, Britain, 492-494
Rathlin and glacier-ice, 399
Kay, on degradation of land, 10
Reculvers, denudation at, 485
Red chalk, 213

Reid, Mr., on denudation of
Cromer coast, 484

— Crag and fossils of, 270, 271

— rocks and lakes, 61

Rhaetic beds, and fossils of, 158-
165, 309

Brora, 198

Rhine, 499, 526, 543
Rhone, delta of, 426

— glacier, thickness of, 440
Ribble, 522

— Fells near, glacial striations,
399

— north of, shell-beds, 414
Riley, Dr., and Stutchbury, fossils

in Magnesian conglomerate 153
-155

Rivers and valleys, geological
dates of, 496-529

— and gravels, 530, 536-542

— areas of drainage, 584

Index.

635

KIT

Rivers, Celtic names of, 552

— channels and curves 534-536

- East and South of England,
salts in, 558

fauna and flint weapons of,

537-541

— France, initial flow of, 508

- of Wales, 522-526

— of World, salts in, 560

— valleys, and glacial epoch, 530-
533

— waters, qualities of, 552
Road metals, 612
Rocks, aqueous and igneous, 3

— analyses of, 48

— different ages of, 22, 30

— metamorphic, 40, 54
Rock-salt of Keuper lake, 155

and gypsum, 614, 615

Rockingham, Inferior Oolite, 192
Rogers, Professor, on salts in

springs, 556

Romford, boulder-clay, 394

Romney Marsh, 338

Roy,General,and Roman docks, 550

Running water, transport of sedi-
ment by, 6

Rutlandshire, Inferior Oolite of,
192

Riitimeyer,Prof essor, on old Alpine
glaciers, 440

SABLES DE BRACHEUX,
Paris basin, 240

Salt lakes of New Red epoch, 155,
156

Sanders, William, on Ichthyo-
saurus platyodon, 162

Sands, with Amm. Jurensis, York-
shire, their equivalents, 194

Sanford, Mr.,and WookeyHole, 475

Sarsen and Druid stones, 350

Scandinavia, its mountains, 210

— old glaciers of, 374

Scandinavians, 585

Scarborough Limestone, and
Inferior Oolite, 195

Schmerling, Dr., on Bone caves,
Meuse, 547

Scilla, geological ideas of, 277
Scotland, Old Red Sandstone, 86,
110, 284, 286-291

— age of mountains of, 404

— basins of Loch Doon, &c., 292

— Carboniferous rocks of, 284,
290-291

— coal-fields of, 127

— denudation of Highlands, 287,
288

— gneiss, &c., of, 283

— Highlands, mountain heights
of, 293-295

and glacial epoch, 382-384

— ice-stream from, 408

— later glaciers of, 428

— Laurentian, Cambrian and
Silurian rocks, 83-87, 283-286

— Lias and Oolite of, 284

— Lowlands of, 290

— origin of scenery of, 291,
301

— Permian rocks of, 284

— physical structure of, 283-301

— river waters of, 55

— section across Sutherland and
Caithness, 285

• the Grampian and Lam-

mermuir Hills, 287-290, 295-299

— soils of, 563, 564

— Southern Highlands, and
heights of, 292, 293

— strike of formations of, 527

— watershed and rivers of, 527-
529

Scuir of Eigg, 356
Searles, Wood, on Coralline Crag,
271

— glacial deposits, 391
Sea-cliffs, waste of, 8

— caverns, 549

— sand, how formed, 9

— solutions in, 562

— terraces, 548-551

— waves and denudation, 34
Seaton, glacial, 387
Seaham, 391

Secondary and Eocene strata, dip
of, &c., 323, 504-506

— strata, disturbance of, 346

636

Index.

Sedgwick, Prof., and Murchison,
Cambrian and Silurian rocks, 57

Arenig beds, 69

on Devonian rocks, 99

on Magnesian limestone, 140

on William Smith, 281

Sediments, transported by gla-
ciers, 5
— » running water, 6

— how distributed, 10
Seine, 533, 535

Selsey Bill, waste of, 486
Serpentines, 615
Seven Springs, Thames, 515, 556
Severn, 503-510, 542, 554
Shap granite, boulders, 385
Shells, &c., how fossilized, 13, 16

— in glacial beds, 395, 412-418
Sheppey Isle, denudation of, 485
Shingle, how formed, 9
Shrewsbury, Permian strata, 142
Shrinkage of earth's crust, 45, 46,

49

Sidlaw Hills, 528
Silures, 580-582
Silurian rocks, England and

Wales, 302-305
Siston river, 511
Skene, Mr., on Celtic populations

and names, 580, 581, 583, 584, 586

King Arthur, 587

Skertchly, Mr., on boulder-clay,

394-396

antiquity of man, 481, 482

flint implements, 544

Skiddaw slates, 70

Skye, Miocene volcanic rocks and

flora of, 264

Slate quarries, Wales, 590-592
Smith, William, on Sands of

Inferior Oolite, 174

Fuller's earth, 176

Kelloway rock, 184

Succession of life in time, 281

Smythe, Admiral, and volcano of

Graham Island, 79
Snowdon, &c., volcanic rocks of, 76
Snowdon to East of England,

structure and physiography, 330,

331

STI

Snowdon, glaciers of, 407, 408

421-428
Soils, 563-578
— boulder-clay and silt, 576-578

— Charnwood Forest, 568

— Cretaceous series, 572-576

— Eocene beds, 576

— Lias and Oolites, 570-572

— Lickey Hills, 568

— loams, 573

— New Bed Series, 569, 570

— North of England, 564-566

— North of Scotland, 563

— Secondary rocks, 569-576

— Wales, 566-568

— Wealden, 573

Solar evaporation, concentration

of salts by, 146
Solent, 516

— Eocene strata of, 347
Somme, river, gravels of, 538
Sorby, Mr., on minerals and rocks,

53, 54

Sound of Jura, glacier, 398
South Staffordshire, Old Red

Sandstone of, 117

coal-measures of, 124

Permian strata, 142, 143

South Wales, Lower Silurian rocks

of, 72

glaciation of, 402

Old Bed Sandstone of, 117

Southern hemisphere, glacial

epoch there, 378

— Highlands glaciated, 382
Species, change of, and geological

time, 36

Speeton clay, 213
Spitzbergen, Miocene flora of, 264

volcanic rocks of, 354

Stanley, Bishop, on CefnCave, 496
St. Bride's Bay, denudation of , 487

— Cassian and Hallstatt beds, 159

— David's, volcanic rocks of, 77

— Lawrence, area of drainage, 560

— Paul's and Portland stone, 190,
611

Steno, on fossils, 278

Stiper Stones, 72

volcanic rocks near, 77

Index.

637

STO

Stonehenge, 350

Stonesfield slate and fossils, 176-

178

Stoppani, on Infra Lias, 158
Strabo, 277
Straits of Dover, 516
Strata, how consolidated, 12

— alteration of, 39

— how formed and arranged, 13-
17

Strath Dearn and Strath Spey, 527

Stratified formations, succession
of, 24-30

Succession of stratified forma-
tions, 24, 30

Suess, on St. Cassian and Hallstatt
beds, 159

Suilven, Canisp, and Coulmore,
289, 300

— view of lakes from, 447
Suncracks in Khsetic strata, 160
Sunderland, glacial, 388-390
Surturbrand, Iceland, 264
Sussex marble, 207
Sutherland, Cambrian rocks of, 61
— Silurian fossils of, 61

Swale, 519

Swallow-holes and under-ground

rivers, 473, 474
Swindon, Portland beds of, 191

— grey wethers, 349
Switzerland, Miocene fauna of,

265-267

fPABLE of British formations, 29

1 Tay, 528

Teddington, Thames water pass-
ing, 556

Tees, 520

Teifi, 522

Teith, 528

Temperature, internal of earth,
50, 51

Teutonic invasions, 587

Thames river basin, 238

— and escarpments, 513, 532

— Herne Bay, flint hatchets, 539

— river, terraces of, 536-538

— salts in solution in, 556-558

VAL

Thanet sand and fossils, 238-242,

312

The Gododin, 587
Thompson, Mr., on reptiles, 483
Thuringia, Permian, brecciated

conglomerates of, 143
Tiddeman, Mr. R. H., on ice-sheet,

399, 400
on Victoria cave, 464-466,

544

Till, 384-393
Towey, 522
Traeth Bach and Traeth Mawr,

glaciers of, 407

Tremadoc slates, fossils of, 65-66
Trent, 517
Trimmer, Mr., on shells in Drift,

North Wales, 417
Tweed, 528
Tyne, 520, 530
— alluvia of, 542
Tynemouth, glacial, 388

TTNCONFORMABLE stratifica-
tion, definition of, 35
Unconformity and geological
time, 36

— Cretaceous on Oolitic strata, 506

— Upper Llandovery on older
strata, 89-92

Upper Greensand, 212

changes in character of, 224

fossils of, 224, 225

range of, 220-224

— Lias, lithological character and
range of, 171

— Llandovery rocks, Builth, 92

— Oolites and fossils, 186-191

— Silurian fossils, 94-97
land plants of, 105

— — near Caer Caradoc and
Wenlock, 93

passage into Old Red Sand-
stone, 305
series, 88

YALE OF AYLESBURY, Port-
land beds of, 1£1

6*8

Index.

VAL

Vale of Clwyd and boulder-clay,
470, 526

— Eden, 324, 520-522

— •— Permian strata of, 142, 307
structure of country east of,

332-335

— Tisbury, Portland Limestone of,
191

Valleys, Forth and Clyde, 527,
528

— how formed, 327-330

— Loch Ness, 527

— of denudation, 32-33

— of Yorkshire, their origin, 334-
335

— river excavation of, 534-537

— Tyne and Solway, 527
Victoria cave, 464-467
Vitrified forts, 613

Vivian, Mr. E., and Kent's Hole,
477

— Mr. H. on South Wales coal-
field, 597

Volcanic ashes, how distinguished,
22

— dust of Cumbria, 81

— rocks of Old Eed Sandstone,
111

— rocks, Lower Silurian, 71, 75-77
Breidden Hills, 77

Builth, 72, 77

near Saint David's, 77

near Stiper Stones, 77

North Wales, 75

Volcano Graham Island, 79
Volcanos, Lower Silurian, 81, 82

— near the sea, 80

— roots of, 75-77

WALES,&c.,'OldEed Sandstone,
103, 104

— age of mountains of, 405

— and West of England, denuda-
tion of palaeozoic strata, 321

— churches and Gaelic Saints, 584

— partial Cretaceous submergence
of, 506

— Kivers of, 553

— valleys of, 522-529

WIL

Ward, J. C., on volcanic dust of
Cumbria, 81

rock-bound lakes, 446

Warwickshire coal-field, 124

— Permian strata and fossils, 142
Wash, rivers and plain of, 333,

517

— alluvia of, 542
Waste of sea-cliffs, 8

— — strata by denudation,
amounts of, 34

Waveney, river gravels, flint wea-
pons, &c., 539

Weald of Kent and Surrey, 202-
208

— clay, thickness of, 207

— denudation of, andtime,344-346
marine bands in, 208

— not an old bay, 338-340

— rivers of, 341-344
Wealden epoch, physical geogra-
phy of, 202, 206, 208-211

— anticlinal, 237

— boulder-clay, absent in, 53

— denudation of, 336-346

— epoch, vegetation and animals
of, 210

— fossils, 207

— grey wethers, 349, 350
land of, 209-211

— Upper Greensand of, 223, 224
Wear, 520, 530

Weaver, 522
Welland, 517

Wenlock, Upper Silurian rocks of,
93

— alluvia of, 542
Werner, 279

West coast- cliffs, denudation of,
488

Westminster Abbey and Bath
Stone, 611

Wharfe, 519

Whitaker, Mr., and flint imple-
ments, 541

White Lias, Lyme Regis, 159

fauna, analogous to Caspian

fauna, 160, 161

Willett, Mr., and Wookey Hole,
474

Index.

639

WIL

Williamson, Kev. L, and Wookey

Hole, 474

Winds of Lower Silurian epoch, 81
Witham, 517
Wood, Colonel, and Gower caves,

470
— Searles P., on boulder-clays,

393
Woodhouse, Mr., on Leicestershire,

Yorkshire, and other coal-fields,

597
Woodward, geological ideas of,

277
Woodward, H. B., on Bovey beds,

259, 260

- Chillesford Clay, 276
Wookey Hole, 474
Woolwich and Reading beds and

fossils, 238, 242-244, 248, 312
Wren, Sir Christopher,and Portland

stone, 611
Wright, Dr., on Avicula contorta

zone, 158, 159
Cephalopoda bed, 174

YOU

Wye and Usk, 500
- Derbyshire, 517, 518
Wynn, Mrs., and Cefn Cave,
469

T7ELLOW Sandstone, Carboni-

1 ferous, 119

Yellowstone lake, 438

Y-Graig-ddrwg, view from, 321

Yoredale rocks, 119

— and Millstone Grit, York-
shire, east slope of, 332-335

York and Tees, plain of, and
alluvia, 334, 542

Yorkshire, North Riding, Lias
and Oolites of, 193

— coast, denudation of, 487

— glacial deposits, 391

— Oolites and escarpment, 335

— rivers of, 519

Youle Hind, Professor, on ice-
action, Labrador, 396, 397
Young, Professor, 281

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By G. F. CHAMBERS, F.R.A.S., of the Inner Temple, Barrister-at-Law ; Author
of ' A Handbook for Eastbourne,' &c. With Map and Plan. Fcap. 8vo, cloth, 2s.

COOTE.— THREE MONTHS in the MEDITERRANEAN. By WALTER COOTE.
Crown 8vo, cloth, 5s.

COX.— TOURISTS' GUIDE to DERBYSHIRE. With full Information relative
to the principal Places and Objects of interest therein. By J. C. Cox, Author
of ' Notes on the Churches of Derbyshire.' With Map. Fcap. 8vo, cloth, 2s. i

CRACROFT.— THE TRUSTEES' GUIDE: A SYNOPSIS of the Ordinary
Powers of Trustees in regard to Investments, with Practical Directions and
Tables of Securities; a Digest of Reported Decisions on Trust Investments since
the year 1743. By BERNARD CRACROFT. Twelfth Edition. Fcap. 4to, cloth,
7s. 6d.

DAMON.— GUIDE to the GEOLOGY of WEYMOUTH and the ISLAND of
PORTLAND: Containing a Map of the District, Geological Sections, Coast
Views, Figures of the characteristic Fossils, and other Illustrations ; with nume-
rous Notes on the Botany and Zoology of the Coast and Neighbourhood. By
ROBERT DAMON. Fcap. 8vo, cloth, 5s.

A Supplement to the above, consisting of Nine Lithographic Plates of Fossils,
drawn by BONE. 2s. Qd.

DAVOS-PL.ATZ ; a New Alpine Resort for Siek and Sound in Summer and
Winter. By ONE WHO KNOWS IT WELL. With Map. Fcap. 8vo, cloth, 2s. 6d.

DE FONVIELLE.— ADVENTURES in the AIR: being memorable experi-
ences of Great Aeronauts. From the French of De Fonvielle. Edited and
Translated by J. S. KELTIE. Crown 8vo, illustrated, cloth, 6s.

DE HORSEY.— RULE of the ROAD at SEA. By Commodore A. F. R. DE
HORSEV, R.N., Author of ' On Manning the Navy,' ' Our Iron Navy,' &c. Fcap.
8vo, cloth, Is.

DE MORGAN.— ELEMENTS of ARITHMETIC. By AUGUSTUS DE MORGAN,
of Trinity College, Cambridge. Sixth Edition. Royal 12mo, cloth, 5s.

DENNIS.— STUDIES in ENGLISH LITERATURE. By JOHN DENNIS, Editor
of ' English Sonnets, a Selection from 1547,' &c. Crown 8vo, cloth, 7s. Qd.

CONTENTS : Pope— Defoe— Prior — Sreele — The War tons — John Wesley —
Southey— English Lyrical Poetry— English Rural Poetry— The English Sonnet.

DE RICCI.— FIJI : Our New Province in the South Seas. By J. H. DE Riccr,
F.R.G.S., H.M.'s Attorney-General for Fiji, and Author of 'How about Fiji?'
With Two Maps. Large post 8vo, cloth, 9s.

DREW.— The JUMMOO and KASHMIR TERRITORIES. A Geographical
Account. By FREDERIC DREW, F.R.G.S., F.GJS., Associate of the Royal School
of Mines ; Assistant-Master at Eton College, late of the Maharaja of Kashmir's
Service. Illustrated by Six Folding Coloured Maps, numerous Plates and
Folding Sections. Medium 8vo, cloth, 42s.

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DREW.— The NORTHERN BARRIER of INDIA; A Popular Account of the
Jummoo and Kashmir Territories. By FREDERIC DREW, F.R.G.S., F.G.S.,
Author of the 'Jummoo and Kashmir Territories: a Geographical Account.'
With Map and Illustrations. Large post 8vo, cloth, 12*.

DUN.— BRITISH BANKING STATISTICS: with Remarks on the Bullion
Reserve and Non-Legal-Tender Note Circulation of the United Kingdom. By
JOHN DUN, General Manager of Parr's Banking Company, Limited. Demy 8vo,
cloth, 5s.

EDWARDS.— The GERMANS in FRANCE. Notes on the Method and Con-
duct of the Invasion ; the Relations between Invaders and Invaded ; and the
Modern Usages of War. By H. SUTHERLAND EDWARDS. Post 8vo, cloth, 10s. 6d.

EVILL.— A WINTER JOURNEY to ROME and BACK. With Glances at
Strasburg, Milan, Florence, Naples. Pompeii, and Venice, and an Account of the
Siege and Fall of Strasburg. By WILLIAM EVILL, Jun. Third Edition, with
Map and Appendix. Crown 8vo, cloth, 4s. 6d.

FOSTER.— MANUAL of GEOGRAPHICAL PRONUNCIATION and ETY-
MOLOGY. By A. F. FOSTER, A.M., Author of 'A General Treatise on
Geography.' Ninth Edition. Fcap. 12mo, limp cloth, 2s.

GAWLER.— SIKHIM : With Hints on Mountain and Jungle Warfare. By
Colonel J. C. GAWLER, F.R.G.S., late Deputy Adjutant-General in India. With
Map and Illustrations. Demy 8vo, paper, 3s. ; cloth, 3s. 6d.

G-ILL.-rCHEMISTRY for SCHOOLS: an Introduction to the Practical Study of
Chemistry. By C. HAUGHTON GILL, late Assistant Examiner in Chemistry at
the University of London, late Teacher of Chemistry and Experimental Physics
in University College School. Third Edition. One Hundred Illustrations.
Crown 8vo, cloth, 4s. 6d.

GREEN.— VESTIGES of the MOLTEN GLOBE, as Exhibited in the Figure
of the Earth, Volcanic Action, and Physiography. By WILLIAM LOWTHER
GREEN, Minister of Foreign Affairs to the King of the Sandwich Islands. Demy
8vo, cloth, 6s.

HALL.— The MINERALOGIST'S DIRECTORY ; or, A GUIDE to the PRIN-
CIPAL MINERAL LOCALITIES in the UNITED KINGDOM of GREAT
BRITAIN and IRELAND. By TOWNSHEND M. HALL, F.G.S. Post 8vo,
cloth, 6s.

HANDBOOK OF TRANSLATION from the LATIN, GREEK,
FRENCH, and GERMAN LANGUAGES. Post 8vo, 2s. 6<Z.

HAY.— ASHANTI and the GOLD COAST, and WHAT WE KNOW OF IT.
A Sketch. By Vice-Admiral Sir JOHN DALRTMPLE HAT, Bart., M.P., C.B.,
D.C L., F.R.S., &c. With Coloured Map. Second Edition. Crown 8vo, cloth,
2s. 6d.

HOLD SWORTH.— DEEP-SEA FISHING and FISHING BOATS. An Ac-

count of the Practical Working of the various Fisheries carried on around the
British Islands. With Illustrations and Descriptions of the Fishing Boats, Nets,
and other gear in use; and Notices of the Principal Fishing Stations in tne
United Kingdom. By EDMUND W. H. HOLDSWORTH, F.L.S., F.Z.S., &c., late
Secretary to the Royal Sea Fisheries Commission. Medium 8vo, cloth, 2 is.

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BOOKS.

HOLDSWORTH.— SEA FISHERIES. By E. W. H. HOLDSWORTH, F.L.S.,
F.Z.S., £c., Author of 'Deep Sea Fishing and Fishing Boats.' SALMON
FISHERIES. By ARCHIBALD YOUNG, Commissioner of the Scotch Salmon
Fisheries. Uniform in size and type with ' British Manufacturing Industries.'
With numerous Illustrations. Post Svo, cloth, 4s. 6d.

HOPE.— The HEROES of YOUNG AMERICA. By A SCOTT R. HOPE, Author
of • A Book about Boys ;' « A Book about Dominies,' &c. With Map and Illus-
trations. Crown Svo, cloth, 6s.

HO WLE Y.— GEOGRAPHY of NEWFOUNDLAND : for the Use of Schools.
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cloth, 2*.

HULL.— COAL FIELDS of GREAT BRITAIN; their History, Structure, and
.Resources ; with Notices of the Coal Fields of other parts of the World. By
EDWARD HULL, M. A., F.R.S., Director of the Geological Survey of Ireland, Pro-
fessor of Geology in the Royal College of Science, Dublin, £c. With Maps and
Illustrations. Third Edition, revised and enlarged, embodying the Reports of
the Royal Coal Commission. Demy Svo, cloth, 16s.

The PHYSICAL GEOLOGY and GEOGRAPHY of IRELAND. By EDWARD

HULL, M.A., F.R.S., Director of the Geological Survey of Ireland. Author of
• The Coal Fields of Great Britain.' With Maps and Illustrations. Post Svo,
cloth, 7s.

HUMPHRY.— ST. MARTIN-IN-THE-FIELDS IN THE OLDEN TIME.
By W. G. HUMPHRY, B.D., Vicar. Second Edition, Enlarged. Crown Svo,
cloth, Is. 6d. ; paper cover, Is.

HURLBURT.— BRITAIN and HER COLONIES. By J. B. HURLBURT, M.A.,
LL.D., Member of the Convocation of the University of Toronto. Demy Svo,
cloth, 10*.

HUTCHINSON.— The PARANA: With INCIDENTS of the PARA-
GUAYAN WAR and SOUTH AMERICAN RECOLLECTIONS, from 1861 to
1868. By THOMAS J. HUTCHINSON, F.R.G.S., F.R.S.L., F.E.S., fcc., H.B.M.
Consul for Callao (late for Kosario). With Map and Illustrations. Demy Svo,

INSTRUCTIVE PICTURE BOOKS.-No. I. NATURAL HISTORY

of ANIMALS.— A few Attractive Lessons from the Natural History of Animals.
By ADAM WHITE, Assistant, Zoological Department, British Museum. With
Fifty-four folio Coloured Plates. Tenth Edition, containing many new Illustra-
tions by Mrs. BLACKBURN and others, price 7s.-6d.

No. II. VEGETABLE WORLD.— Lessons from the Vegetable World. By

the Author of ' The Heir of Redclyffe,' « The Herb of the Field,' &c. Fifth
Edition, with many new Plates, price 7s. 6d.

No. III. GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION of ANIMALS.— Lessons on

the Geographical Distribution of Animals, or the Natural History of the Quad-
rupeds which characterise the Four Divisions of the Globe. In Sixty folio
Coloured Plates. Third Edition, price 7*. 6d.

No. IV. SKETCHES from NATURE, or PICTURES of ANIMAL and

VEGETABLE LIFE in ALL LANDS. Second Edition. In Forty-eight folio
Coloured Plates, price 7s. 6d.

No. V. PICTORIAL LESSONS on FORM, COMPARISON and NUMBER,

for Children under Seven Years of Age. With Explanations by NICHOLAS
BOHNT. Seventh Edition. Thirty-six oblong folio Coloured Illustrations,
price 7s. 6d.

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SELECTED LIST.

JENKINSON. — PRACTICAL GUIDE to CARLISLE, GILSLAND, the
ROMAN WALL, and NEIGHBOURHOOD. With Map and Frontispiece.
Fcap. 8vo, cloth, 5s.

SMALLER PRACTICAL GUIDE to CARLISLE and NEIGHBOURHOOD.

With Map. Fcap. 8vo, 2s.

PRACTICAL GUIDE to the ENGLISH LAKE DISTRICT. With Nine

Maps and Three Panoramic Views. Contents .—Introduction— How to Spend
a Flying Visit to the Lakes — a Fourteen Days' Pedestrian Tour — Charges for
Conveyances, Ponies, and Guides— Heights of Mountains, Lakes, Tarns, and
Passes — Local Names — Meteorology, Geology, and Botany. Fifth Edition.
Fcap. 8vo, cloth, 6s.
%* The SECTIONS separately: KESWICK — WINDERMERE and LANGDALE —

CONISTON, BUTTERMERE, and WASTWATER — GRASMERE and ULLSWATER.

With Maps, price Is. 6d. each.

EIGHTEEN-PENNY GUIDE to the ENGLISH LAKE DISTRICT : Con-
taining Charges for Conveyances, Ponies, and Guides ; Heights of Passes,
Mountains, Lakes, and Tarns, with Information and Instructions respecting
Walks, Drives, Boating, Ascents, Excursions, &c. Fcap. 8vo, with Map, Is. 6d.

PRACTICAL GUIDE to the ISLE OF MAN. Contents : How to Spend a

Flying Visit to the Isle of Man— Voyage round the Island— Hotel Tariffs-
Coaches, &c. — a Walk round the Island — Index, &c. Also, Chapters on Local
Names— Mineralogy— Civil History— Ecclesiastical History— Geology— Botany
— Zoology — Agriculture — Commerce — and Sea Trout-fishing. With Map.
Fcap. 8vo, cloth, 5s.

SMALLER PRACTICAL GUIDE to the ISLE OF MAN. Containing

Distances — Heights of Mountains — Charges for Porters and Conveyances — How
to spend a Flying Visit — Voyage round the Island, &c. With Map. Fcap.
8vo, 2s.

PRACTICAL GUIDE to the ISLE OF WIGHT. Containing full and

Original Information for Tourists respecting Walks, Drives, and Excursions ;
Railway Trains, Steamers, Coaches, Boats, Hotels, Public Buildings, Places of
Worship, &c. ; also, Chapters on the Local Names, the History, Geology,
Botany, Quadrupeds, Reptiles, Fresh-water Fishes, Birds, and Butterflies ; the
Fortifications ; Agriculture, Commerce, and Fisheries of the Island. With View
of Osborne House and Six Maps. Fcap. 8vo, cloth, 6s.

SMALLER PRACTICAL GUIDE to the ISLE OF WIGHT: Containing

Information for Tourists concerning Walks and Excursions, Railway Trains,
Steamers, Coaches, &c. With Two Maps. Fcap. 8vo, 2s.

PRACTICAL GUIDE to NORTH WALES. Contents: How to Spend a

Flying Visit to North Wales— A Seventeen Days' Tour— Hotel Tariffs; and
Cbarges for Conveyances, Ponies, and Guides — List of Mountains— List of Tarns
and Lakes— Local Names— History— Geology— Botany— Mines and Minerals-
Angling. With Two Maps. Fcap. 8vo, cloth, 6s. 6d.

%* The SECTIONS also separately: CHESTER— LLANDUDNO— BETTWS Y COED
and SNOWDON — DOLGELLET and BALA — ABERTSWYTH and LLANGOLLEN. With
Map, price Is. Qd. each.

SMALLER PRACTICAL GUIDE to NORTH WALES. Contents: How to

Spend a Flying Visit— A Seventeen Days' Tour— Hotel Tariffs, &c. With Map.
Fcap. 8vo, 2s. 6d.

Edward Stanford, 55, Charing Cross, London.

BOOKS.

JOHNSTON.— COMPENDIUM of GEOGRAPHY and TRAVEL in AFRICA,

for General Reading. Based on Hell wall's ' Die Erde und Ihre Volker.' Edited
and Extended by KEITH JOHNSTON, F.R.G.S. With Ethnological Appendix by
A. H. KEANE, B.A. Large post 8vo, cloth gilt, with Sixteen Maps and
Diagrams, and Sixty-eight Illustrations, 21s.

KINCAID.— CONIC SECTIONS— The METHOD of PROJECTIONS. By the
Rev. SIDNEY BOLTON KINCAID, M.A., Trinity College, Cambridge; Master of
the Modern Side of Ipswich School. Author of ' The Air Engine,' ' An Index
of British Geology,' &c. Crown 8vo, cloth, 2s. Gd.

KING.— VIRGIL'S ^NEID: Translated into English Verse by the Rev. J. M.
KING, Vicar of Cutcombe, late Scholar of Ball. Coll., Oxon. Second Edition.
Crown 8vo, cloth, Is. Gd.

LEES.— A FEW DAYS in BELGIUM and HOLLAND : An Idle Book for an
Idle Hour. By LADY LEES, Author of 'Dried Flowers,' 'Effie's Tales,' &c.
Contents: Bruges, Ghent, Antwerp, Bruxelles, Rotterdam, the Hague, Delft,
Leyden, Haarlem, Amsterdam, &c. Crown 8vo, cloth, 4s. Gd.

LEWIS.— The ENGLISH LANGUAGE: Its GRAMMAR and HISTORY;
together with a TREATISE on ENGLISH COMPOSITION, and SETS of
EXERCISES and EXAMINATION PAPERS for the ASSISTANCE of
TEACHERS and STUDENTS. By the Rev. HENRY LEWIS, B.A., Principal of
Culham Training College. Seventh Edition. Fcap. 8vo, cloth, 3*.

ENGLISH GRAMMAR for BEGINNERS, in a SERIES of EASY

LESSONS. By the Rev. HENRY LEWIS, B.A., Principal of Culham Training
College. Intended for the use of Junior Classes, and as an Introduction to the
Author's larger English Grammar. Third Edition. Fcap. 8vo, price 2d.

LEWIS (J.).— DIGEST of the ENGLISH CENSUS of 1871, compiled from the
Official Returns and Edited by JAMES LEWIS (of the Registrar-General's
Department, Somerset House). Sanctioned by the Registrar-General, and
dedicated by permission to the President, Vice-Presidents, and Council of the
Statistical Society of London. Royal 8vo, cloth, 5*.

LOBLEY.— MOUNT VESUVIUS: A DESCRIPTIVE, HISTORICAL, and
GEOLOGICAL ACCOUNT of the VOLCANO, with a NOTICE of the RECENT
ERUPTION. By J. LOGAN, F.G.S. With View, Map (printed in Colours),
and Section. Demy 8vo, cloth, 2s. Gd.

LONDON GUIDE. How to get from or to any Part of London, or its
Suburbs, Public Building, Place of Worship, Exhibition, Institution, Place of
Amusement, &c.; with Times, Fares, Prices of Admission, Speciality, &c.
Fourth Edition. With Map. Crown 8vo, cloth, 3s. 6d.

LONDON, BOUND ABOUT.— TOURISTS' GUIDE to the COUNTRY
within a circle of TWELVE MILES ROUND ABOUT LONDON. With
Historical, Archaeological, Architectural, and Picturesque Notes, suitable for the
Tourist, Antiquarian, and Artist. To which is added a Series of Specimens of
Walking Excursions, limited to six miles, and visits to Hatfield, Knole, St. Albans,
and Windsor, with a copious Index. By a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries.
Fourth Edition. Fcap. 8vo, cloth, with Map, 2s.

Edward Stanford, 55, Charing Cross, London.

10 SELECTED LIST.

LTTC AS.— HORIZONTAL WELLS. A New Application of Geological Principles
to effect the Solution of the Problem of Supplying London with Water. By J.
LUCAS, F.G.S., of the Geological Survey of England. With Maps. Crown 4to,
cloth back, 10s. Qd.

MAIN.— MILTON'S LYCIDAS. Edited, with Interpretation and Notes, by
FRANCIS MAIN, M.A., of the Inner Temple, Barrister-at-Law, one of the Clas-
sical Masters at the Bristol College. Post 8vo, printed wrapper, Is.

MILTON'S L' ALLEGRO. Edited with Interpretation, Notes, and Deriva-
tions : to which is appended, A Scheme of Analysis and Parsing, with Examples.
By FRANCIS MAIN, M.A., of the Inner Temple, Barrister-at-Law, one of the
Classical Masters of Bristol College. Intended for the use of pupils Preparing
for the Oxford Local Examinations in 1878, and for Schools. Post 8vo. Printed
wrapper, Is.

MANN.— DOMESTIC ECONOMY and HOUSEHOLD SCIENCE. Adapted for
Home Education, and for Schoolmistresses and Pupil Teachers. By ROBERT
JAMES MANN, M.D., Late Superintendent of Education at Natal. Post 8vo, cloth,
4s. 6d. ; or, cloth gilt, gilt edges, 5s.

MANLY.-PRINCIPLES of BOOK-KEEPING by DOUBLE ENTRY, in a
Series of Easy and Progressive Exercises. By HENRY MANLY, for more than
Thirty-three years Principal Writing Master and Teacher of Book-keeping in
the City of London School. Revised and Enlarged by HENRY WILLIAM MANLY,
Actuary to the Mutual Life Assurance Society, and Fellow of the Institute of
Actuaries. Fourth Edition. Demy 8vo, cloth, 4s. 6d.

MARTIN.— THEORIES of HORIZONTAL CURRENTS in the OCEAN and
ATMOSPHERE, and of Eastation of Planetary arid other Celestial Bodies, being
new Theories of Natural Forces not before discovered, and accounting for many
Natural Phenomena, hitherto unsolved problems. By JOHN MARTIN. Seventeen
Illustrations. Crown 8vo, 3s.

ME ADEN. -A FIRST ALGEBRA for Use in Junior Classes. By the Rev.
R. ALBAN MEADEN, M.A., late Scholar of Emmanuel College, Cambridge;
Senior Mathematical Master of the Bradford Grammar School. Fourth Edition,
revised and enlarged. Fcap. 8vo, cloth, Is. &d.

MEDHTTRST.— The FOREIGNER in FAR CATHAY. By W. H. MEDHURST,
H.B.M. Consul, Shanghai. With Coloured Map. Crown 8vo, cloth, 6s.

MILLER.— NOTES on the MORNING and EVENING PRAYER and the
LITANY, with a Chapter on the Christian Year. By FREDK. MILLER, Malvern
Link National School. Second Edition. Fcap. 8vo, cloth, Is.

ELEMENTARY GEOGRAPHY for ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS. An Intro-
duction to Physical and Political Geography. By FREDK. MILLER, Master of
the Malvern Link National School. Fcap. 8vo, limp cloth, 8d.

MILLETT.— An AUSTRALIAN PARSONAGE ; or, the SETTLER and the
SAVAGE in WESTERN AUSTRALIA. By Mrs. EDWARD MILLETT. With
Frontispiece. Second Edition. Large post 8vo, cloth, 12s.

MIMPRISS.— CHRIST an EXAMPLE for the YOUNG, as EXHIBITED in
the GOSPEL NARRATIVE of the FOUR EVANGELISTS. Harmonized and
Chronologically Arranged. By ROBERT MIMPRISS. Illustrated by Fifty-five
Engravings, and a Map. Fifth Edition. Cloth, 6s.

Edward Stanford, 55, Charing Cross, London.

BOOKS. 11

MTJLHALL.— From EUROPE to PARAGUAY and MATTO GROSSO. By
Mrs. M. G. MULHALL. With Illustrations. Demy 8vo, cloth, 5*.

MTJLHALL.— The ENGLISH in SOUTH AMERICA. By MICHAEL G.
MDLHALL. Demy 8vo, cloth, with Twenty-two Illustrations, 16s.

NEW ZEALAND HANDBOOK : Containing a New and Accurate
Coloured Map, and giving a full description of the Provinces; with Tables of
Statistics, Prices, and Wages; Land Regulations; Instructions for the Voyage,
Outfit, and Arrival in the Colony; also Observations on New Zealand Pursuits
and Investments. Twelfth Edition. Fcap. 8vo, Is.

NOBLE. — DESCRIPTIVE HANDBOOK of the CAPE COLONY : its CON-
DITION and RESOURCES. By JOHN NOBLE, Clerk of the House of Assembly,
Cape of Good Hope. With Map and Illustrations. Crown 8vo, cloth, 10s. 6d.

PALMER.— The ORDNANCE SURVEY of the KINGDOM : Its Objects, Mode
of Execution, History, and Present Condition. By Captain H. S. PALMER, R.E.
Five Coloured Index Maps. Demy 8vo, cloth, 2s. 6cJ.

PHILPOT.— GUIDE BOOK to the CANADIAN DOMINION: Containing full
information for the Emigrant, the Tourist, the Sportsman, and the small
Capitalist. By HARVEY J. PHILPOT, M.D. (Canada), M.R.C.S.L., &c. With a
Preface by THOMAS HUGHES, Esq., M.P., and a COLOURED MAP. Super-royal
I6mo, 4s.

POOR RELIEF IN DIFFERENT PARTS OF EUROPE:

being a Selection of Essays, translated irom the German Work, ' Das Armen-
wesen und die Armengesetzgebung in Europaischen Staaten herausgegeben,'
Von. A. Emminghaus. Revised by E. B. EASTWICK, C.B., M.P. Crown 8vo,
cloth, 7s.

POPE.— A CLASS BOOK of RUDIMENTARY CHEMISTRY. By the Rev.
GEO. POPE, M.A., Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, and one of the
Masters of the College, Hurstpierpoint. 18mo, stiff cover, 9d.

PTJRDY.— RETURN to PARLIAMENT of OWNERS of LAND, 1873. SUM-
MART DIGEST— ENGLAND AND WALES. By FREDERICK PURDT, F.S.S., Principal
of the Statistical Department, Local Government Board. Large 8vo, paper
cover, 2s.

RAMSAY.— PHYSICAL GEOLOGY and GEOGRAPHY of GREAT BRITAIN.
By A. C. RAMSAY, LL.D., F.R.S., &c., Director-General of the Geological
Surveys of the United Kingdom. Fifth Edition, considerably enlarged, and
Illustrated with NUMEROUS SECTIONS, FOSSILS, LANDSCAPES, and a GEOLOGI-
CAL MAP of GREAT BRITAIN, printed in Colours. Post 8vo, cloth.

RICE.— NOTES on the GEOGRAPHY of EUROPE, PHYSICAL and POLITI-
CAL. Intended to serve as a Text-Book tor the use of Elementary Classes.
By WILLIAM RICE, F.R.G.S. Crown 8vo, limp cloth, 9d.

ROBSON.— CONSTRUCTIVE LATIN EXERCISES, for Teaching the Elements
of the Language on a System of Analysis and Synthesis, with Latin Reading
Lessons and ;copious Vocabularies. By JOHN ROBSON, B.A. Loud. Eighth
Edition. 12mo, cloth, 4s. 6d.

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12 SELECTED LIST.

ROBSON.— FIRST GREEK BOOK. Containing Exercises and Reading Lessons
on the Inflexions of Substantives and Adjectives, and of the Active Verb in the
Indicative Mood. With copious Vocabularies. Being the First Part of the Con-
structive Greek Exercises. By JOHN ROBSON, B.A. Lond. Third Edition.
12mo, cloth, 3s. Gd.

ROWAN.— The EMIGRANT and SPORTSMAN in CANADA. Some Experi-
ences of an Old-Country Settler. With Sketches of Canadian Life, Sporting
Adventures, and Observations on the Forests and Fauna. By J. J. ROWAN.
With Map. Large post 8vo, cloth, 10s. 6d.

RUSSELL.— BIARRITZ and the BASQUE COUNTRIES. By Count HENRY
RUSSELL, Member of the Geographical and Geological Societies of France, of the
Alpine Club, and Societe Ramond, Author of 'Pau and the Pyrenees,' &c.
Crown 8vo, with a Map, 6s.

SCHOOL-BOYS' LETTERS for COPYING and DICTATION :

being a Series of Lithographed Letters on Subjects interesting to School-Boys,
with Remarks on the Essentials of Good Writing, &c. Third Edition. Large
post 8vo, cloth, 2s. 6d.

SCHOOL PUNISHMENT REGISTER.— THE LONDON SCHOOL
REGISTER of PUNISHMENTS. Designed to meet the Requirements of
School Boards, &c. Fcap. folio, stiff boards, cloth back, 2s. 6d.

SCHOOL REGISTERS.— THE DURHAM SCHOOL REGISTERS. By
the Rev. CANON CKOMWELL, M. A., Principal of St. Mark's College, Chelsea.

s. d.

1. Admission Register for 1000 Names 3 0

2. Class Register for Large Schools (50 Names) 0 8

3. Class Register for Small Schools (34 Names) 0 6

4. General Register or Summary, for Three Years 3 0

LONDON SCHOOL REGISTER of ADMISSION, PROGRESS, and WITH-
DRAWAL. Adapted to the Requirements of the Committee of Council on
Education. By WILLIAM RICE, F.R.G.S., Author of the 'London Class
Register,' the ' Class and Home Lesson Book of English History,' the ' Scholar's
Wordbook and Spelling Guide,' the ' Orthographical Copy Books,' &c. Fcap.
folio, stiff boards, leather back, 4s.

LONDON CLASS-REGISTER and SUMMARY of ATTENDANCES and

PAYMENTS. Ruled and Printed for 52 Weeks. Adapted to the require-
ments of the " Special Minute of the Committee of Council on Education." By
WILLIAM RICE, F.R.G.S., Author of the Class and Home-Lesson Book of Eng-
lish History,' &c. A New and Improved Edition. Fcap. folio, Is.

V ARTY'S CLASS REGISTER of INDIVIDUAL PROGRESS. To contain

the Admission Numbers aud Names of the Children, their Attendance and
Absence, and Relative Position in the Class. Fcap. folio, Is.

HALBRAKE REGISTER of ATTENDANCE and STUDIES. Designed for

Private and Middle-Class Schools. Second Edition. Demy 8vo, coloured
wrapper, 8d.

SCOTT.— The FAMILY GUIDE to BRUSSELS: Comprising Hints upon Hiring
Houses, Furniture, Servants, Cost of Living, Education, and the General Infor-
mation necessary for a Family purposing to reside in that city. By J. R.
SCOTT, of Brussels. Crown 8vo, cloth, gilt, 4s.

Edward Stanford, 55, Charing Cross, London.

BOOKS. 13

SEYD.— THE BANKS OF ISSUE QUESTION. Memorial Addressed to the
Governor and Court of Directors of the Bank of England, and submitted to the
Select Committee of the House of Commons of 1875. By ERNEST SEYD, F.S.S.,
Author of ' Bullion and Foreign Exchanges/ ' The London Banking and Clearing
House System,' &c. Royal 8vo, 3s.

SHARP.— RUDIMENTS of GEOLOGY. By SAMUEL SHARP, F.S.A., F.G.S.
Part I. Introductory and Physical— Part II. Stratigraphical and Palaeontological.
Second Edition, revised and enlarged. Crown 8vo, cloth, 4s.

SIMMS.— THE FIRST SIX BOOKS of the ILIAD of HOMER, Translated
into Fourteen-Syllable Verse, with Preface and Notes, and a Map of Greece in
the Homeric Age. Designed as a Reading Book for Colleges and Schools. By
the Rev. EDWARD SIMMS, M.A., Oxon., Vicar of Escot, Devon. Demy 8vo,
cloth, 7s. 6d.

SIMPLE LESSONS.— Chiefly intended for Elementary Schools and for
Home Use. By the most Eminent Writers. Contents :— Our Bodily Life— How
and Why we Breathe— Food— Drink— Cookery— Plain Needlework-Clothing—
Air and Ventilation — The Sicknesses that Spread — Weather— Astronomy —
Birds — Flowers — Money. 18mo, cloth, 2s. fid. The Simple Lessons are also
published separately, 3d. each, or 16s. per 100 assorted. The set of 14, in card
case, 3s.

SMITH.— The PEASANTS' HOME, 1760-1875. By EDWARD SMITH, F.S.S.
Being the Howard Prize Essay, 1875. Crown 8vo, cloth, 3s. 6d.

STANFORD'S COMPENDIUM OF GEOGRAPHY AND
TRAVEL for GENERAL READING. Based on Hellwald's " Die Erde
und lure Volker." Translated by A. H. KEANE, B.A. A Series of Volumes
descriptive of the Great Divisions of the Globe. Large post 8vo.
Europe.— Edited and extended by A. C. RAMSAY, LL.D., F.R.S., Director-
General of the Geological Surveys of the United Kingdom; Author of
' Physical Geology and Geography of Great Britain.'
Asia.— Edited and extended by Col. YULE, F.R.G.S., Author of ' Travels of

Marco Polo.'

Africa.— Edited and extended by KEITH JOHNSTON, F.R.GJS. With Sixteen

Maps, Ethnological Appendix, and Sixty-eight Illustrations. Cloth, gilt, 21s.

North. America.— Edited and extended by Professor F. V. HAYDEN, of

the United States Geological Survey.

Central and South America.— Edited and extended by H. W. BATES,
Assistant-Secretary of the Royal Geographical Society; Author of 'The
Naturalist on the Amazon.' With Thirteen Maps, Ethnological Appendix,
and Seventy-three Illustrations. Cloth gilt, 21s.

Australasia.— Edited and extended by A. R. WALLACE, F.R.G.S., Author
of 'The Malay Archipelago.'

SULLIVAN.— THE PRINCES OF INDIA. An Historical Narrative of the
principal events from the Invasion of Mahmoud of Ghizni to that of Nadir
Shah. By Sir EDWARD SULLIVAN, Bart., Author of ' Letters on India,' ' Trip to
the Trenches,' ' Rambles in North and South America,' &c. Second Edition.
Crown 8vo, cloth, with Map, 8s. 6d.

SYMONS.— BRITISH RAINFALL, 1876. The Distribution of Rain over the
British isles during the Year 1876, as observed at about 1700 Stations in Great
Britain and Ireland. With Maps and Illustrations. Compiled by G. J. SYMONS,
F.M.S., F.R.B.S., Member of the Scottish Meteorological Society, &c. Demy 8vo,
cloth, 5s. [Published Annually.

Edward Stanford, 55, Charing Cross, London.

14 SELECTED LIST.

TAYLOR.— BOYS of OTHER COUNTRIES. By BAYARD TAYLOR. Thf Uttte
Post-Boy— The Pasha's Son— Jon of Iceland— The Two Herd Boys— The Young
Serf. With Illustrations. Crown 8vo, cloth, 4s. Qd.

TOOG-OOD.— SIMPLE SKETCHES from CHURCH HISTORY, for YOUNG
PERSONS. By Mrs. TOOGOOD. New Edition. 18mo, Is. 6d.

TREGKELLAS. — TOURISTS' GUIDE to CORNWALL and the SCILLY
ISLES. Containing full Information concerning all the principal Places and
Objects of Interest in the County. By WALTER H. TREGELLAS, Chief Draughts-
man, War Office. With Map. Fcap. 8vo, cloth, 2s.

VERB AD.— From VINEYARD to DECANTER. A Book about Sherry. By
DON PEDRO VERDAD. With a Map of the Jerez District. Sixth Thousand,
revised and enlarged. Fcap. 8vo, cloth, Is.

VICTORIA, The BRITISH "EL DORADO." Showing the advan-
tages of that Colony as a field for Emigration. By a COLONIST of Twenty
Years' Standing, and late Member of a Colonial Legislature. With Two
Coloured Views and a Map. Super-royal 16mo, cloth, 5s. 6d.

WALLACE.— MINERAL DEPOSITS. The Laws which Regulate the Depo-
sition of Lead Ore in Mineral Lodes. Illustrated by an Examination of the
Geological Structure of the Mining Districts of Alston Moor. By W. WALLACE.
With Map and numerous Coloured Plates. Large demy 8vo, cloth, 25s.

WEBBER.— The KAIETEUR FALLS, BRITISH GUIANA. The ESSE-
QUIBO and POTARO RIVERS. With an Account of a Visit to the Kaieteur
Falls. By Lieut.-Colonel WEBBER, 2nd West India Regiment. With Map and
Frontispiece, and Descriptive Notes on the Geology of Guiana. Crown 8vo,
cloth, 4s. 6d.

WILKINS.— The GEOLOGY and ANTIQUITIES of the ISLE of WIGHT.
By Dr. E. P. WILKINS, F.G.S., &c. With Relief Map of the Island, coloured
geologically. Super-royal 8vo, cloth, 7s. 6ti.

WILLIAMS.— Through NORWAY with a KNAPSACK. A New and Im-
proved Edition. With Notes on Recent Changes, suggested by a Recent revisit.
By W. MATTIEU WILLIAMS, F.R.A.S., F.C.S., &c., Author of 'The Fuel of
the Sun,' &c. With Map. Crown 8vo, cloth, 6s.

Through NORWAY with LADIES. By W. MATTIEU WILLIAMS, F.R.A.S.,

F.C.S., Author of ' Through Norway with a Knapsack.' With Map and illus-
trations. Crown 8vo, cloth, 12s.

WORTH.— TOURISTS' GUIDE to SOUTH DEVON: Rail, Road, River, Coast,
and Moor. By R. N. WORTH, F.G.S. With Map, and Plan of Exeter Cathe-
dral. Fcap. 8vo, cloth, 2s.

Edward Stanford, 55, Charing Cross, London.

MAPS. 15

f i&rars «r Wall

EUROPE. — Scale, 50 miles to an inch; size, 65 inches by 58. Coloured and
mounted on linen, in morocco case, 31. 13s. 6d.; on roller, Tarnished, 31. ; spring
roller, 6Z.

ENGLAND and WALES.— Scale, 5 miles to an inch ; size, 72 inches by 84.
Coloured, 21. 12s. Qd. ; mounted on linen, in morocco case, 31. 13s. 6cL; on roller,
varnished, 41. 4s. ; spring roller, 61. 6s.

LONDON and its SUBURBS.— On the scale of six inches to a mile :
constructed on the basis of the Ordnance block plan. Price, in sheets, plain,
21s. ; coloured, in a portfolio, 31s. Qd. ; mounted on linen, in morocco case, or on
roller, varnished, 21. 15s. ; on spring roller, 51. 5s. Single sheets, plain, Is. ;
coloured, Is. 6d. A Key Map may be had on application, or per post for one
stamp.

SCOTLAND. — Scale, five miles to an inch; size, 52 inches by 76. Coloured,
42s. ; mounted on linen, in morocco case, 31. 3s. ; on roller, varnished, 31. 13s. 6d.;
spring roller, 51. 5s.

IRELAND.— Scale, 5 miles to an inch ; size, 43 inches by 58. Coloured, four
sheets, 25s.; mounted, in case, 35s.; on roller, varnished, 2J. 2s.; on spring
roller, «. 4s.

ASIA. — Scale, 110 miles to an inch; size, 65 inches by 58. Coloured and
mounted on linen, in morocco case, 31. 13s. 6d. ; on roller, varnished, 31. ; spring
roller, Ql

AFRICA.— vScale, 94 miles to an inch; size, 58 inches by 65. Coloured and
mounted on linen, in morocco case, 31. 13s. 6d. ; on roller, varnished, 31. ; spring
roller, 61.

NORTH AMERICA.— Scale, 83 miles to an inch; size, 58 inches by 65.
Coloured and mounted on linen, in morocco case, 3/. 13«. 6d.; on roller,
varnished, 31. ; spring roller, 61.

CANADA.— LARGE MAP of CANADA, including New Brunswick, Nova
Scotia, Newfoundland, and a large portion of the United States. By JOHN
ARROWSMITH. Scale, 16 miles to an inch; size, 96 inches by 54. Eight
Coloured Sheets, 21. 12s. 6d. ; mounted, in case, 31. 13s. 6d. ; on roller, varnished,
4Z. 4s. ; spring roller, 81.

UNITED STATES and CENTRAL AMERICA, with Canada,
New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, and the West Indies. Scale, 54i
miles to an inch ; size, 72 inches by 56. Coloured and mounted on linen, in
morocco case, 31. 13s. 6dl ; on roller, varnished, 3l. ; spring roller, 6Z.

SOUTH AMERICA.— Scale, 83 miles to an inch; size, 58 inches by 65.
Coloured and mounted on linen, morocco case, 31. 13s. 6d: on roller, varnished,
32. ; spring roller, 61.

AUSTRALASIA.— Scale, 64 miles to an inch; size, 65 inches by 58.
Coloured and mounted on linen, morocco case, 31. 13s. 6d. ; on roller, varnished,
31', spring roller, 61.

Edward Stanford, 55, Charing Cross, London.

16 SELECTED LIST.

EUROPE.— STANFORD'S PORTABLE MAP of EUROPE; showing the
latest Political Boundaries, the Railways, the Submarine Telegraphs. &c. Scale,
150 miles to an inch; size, 36 inches by 33. Fully coloured and mounted on
linen, in case, 10s. ; on roller, varnished, 14s.

CENTRAL EUROPE.— DAVIES'S MAP of CENTRAL EUROPE;

containing all the Railways, with their Stations. The principal roads, the
rivers, and chief mountain ranges are clearly delineated. Scale, 24 miles to
an inch ; size, 47 inches by 38. Sheets, plain, 10s. ; coloured, 12s. ; mounted on
linen, in case, 16s.

AUSTRIAN EMPIRE. By J. ARROWSMITH. Scale, 28 miles to an inch;
size, 26 inches by 22. bheet, coloured, 3s. ; mounted in case, 5s.

DENMARK and ICELAND. By J. ARROWSMITH. Scale, 13 miles to
an inch; size, 22 inches by 26. Sheet, coloured, 3s. ; mounted in case, 5s.

FRANCE, in DEPARTMENTS. With a Supplementary Map, divided
into Provinces, and a Map of the Island of Corsica. By J. ARROWSMITH. Scale,
31 miles to an inch ; size, 22 inches by 26. Sheet, coloured, 3s. ; mounted in
case, 5s.

GERMANY. By J. ARROWSMITH. Scale, 25 miles to an inch ; in two sheets,
size of each, 22 inches by 26. Price of each, coloured sheet, 3s. ; mounted, in
case, 5s.

ITALY, including Sicily and the Maltese Islands. By J. ARROWSMITH. Scale,
20 miles to an inch ; in two sheets, size of each, 22 inches by 26. Price of each,
coloured, 3s. ; mounted in case, 5s.

NETHERLANDS and BELGIUM, including Luxembourg and the
Country to the East as far as the Rhine. By J. ARROWSMITH. Scale, 13 miles
to an inch ; size, 22 inches by 26. Sheet, coloured, 3s. ; mounted in case, 5s.

RUSSIA and POLAND, including Finland. By J. ARROWSMITH. Scale,
90 miles to an inch ; size, 22 inches by 26. Sheet, coloured, 3s. ; mounted in
case, 5s.

SPAIN and PORTUGAL. By J. ARROWSMITH. Scale, 30 miles to an
inch; size, 26 inches by 22. Sheet, coloured, 3s. ; mounted in case, 5s.

SWEDEN and NORWAY. By J. ARROWSMITH. Scale, 35 miles to an
inch ; size, 22 inches by 26. Sheet, coloured, 3s. ; mounted in case, 5s.

SWITZERLAND. By J. ARROWSMITH. Scale, 10£ miles to an inch ; size,
26 inches by 22. Sheet, coloured, 3s. ; mounted in case, 5s.

TURKEY in EUROPE, including the Archipelago, Greece, the Ionian
Islands, and the South part of Dalmatia. By J. ARROWSMITH. Scale, 40 miles
to an inch; size, 22 inches by 26. Sheet, coloured, 3s. ; mounted in case, 5s.

Edward Stanford, 55, Charing Cross, London.

MAPS. 17

BRITISH IS3L.ES.

BRITISH ISLES.— NEW WALL MAP. Constructed on the basis of the
Ordnance Survey, and distinguishing in a clear manner the Cities, County and
Assize Towns, Municipal Boroughs, Parliamentary Representation Towns which
are Counties of themselves, Episcopal Sees, Principal Villages, &c. The
Railways are carefully laid down and coloured, and the Map from its size is
•well suited for Public Offices, Institutions, Reading-Rooms, Railway Stations,
good School-Rooms, &c. Scale, 8 miles to an inch; size, 81 inches by 90.
Price, coloured, mounted on mahogany roller, and varnished, 31.

BRITISH ISLES.— DA VIES'S NEW RAILWAY MAP of the BRITISH
ISLES, and part of France. Scale, 22 miles to an inch ; size, 31 inches by 38.
Price, coloured in sheet, 6s. ; mounted on linen, in case, 9s. ; or on roller,
varnished, 15s.

ENGLAND and WALES.— LARGE SCALE RAILWAY and STATION
MAP of ENGLAND and WALES. In 24 sheets (sold separately). Con-
structed on the basis of the trigonometrical survey. By J. ARROWSMITH. Scale,
3 miles to an inch; size of each sheet, 20 inches by 28. Price, plain, Is.;
mounted in case, 2s. 6d. ; coloured, Is. 6d. ; mounted in case, 3s. Size of the
complete map, 114 inches by 128. Price, plain, in case or portfolio, ll. 5s.;
coloured, in case or portfolio, ll. 8s ; mounted on cloth to fold, in case, coloured,
41. 4s. ; on canvas, roller, and varnished, 41. 14s. 6d. : on spring roller, 9Z. 9s.

ENGLAND and WALES.— STANFORD'S PORTABLE MAP of ENG-
LAND and WALES. With the Railways very clearly delineated ; the Cities
and Towns distinguished according to their Population, &c. Scale, 15 miles to
an inch ; size, 28 inches by 32. Coloured and mounted on linen, in case, 5s. ;
or on roller, varnished, 8s.

ENGLAND and WALES.— WALL MAP. Scale, 8 miles to an inch;
size, 50 inches by 58. Price, mounted on mahogany roller, varnished, 21s.

WALES.— NORTH and SOUTH WALES. Re-issue of Walker's Maps,
thoroughly revised and corrected to the present date. Scale, 3 miles to an inch.
Each in sheet, 32 inches by 27, coloured, 3s. ; mounted to fold in case for the
pocket, 6s.

SCOTLAND.— NEW WALL MAP, showing the Divisions of the Counties,
the Towns, Villages, Railways, &c. Scale, 8 miles to an inch ; size, 34 inches
by 42. Price, coloured, mounted on mahogany roller, and varnished, 12s. 6d.

SCOTLAND, in COUNTIES. With the Roads, Rivers, &c. By J.
ABROWSMITH. Scale, 12 miles to an inch; size, 22 inches by 26. Sheet,
coloured, 3s. ; mounted in case, 5s.

IRELAND, in COUNTIES and BARONIES, on the basis of the
Ordnance Survey and the Census. Scale, 8 miles to an inch ; size, 31 inches
by 38. On two sheets, coloured, 8s. ; mounted on linen, in case, 10s. 6d. ; on
roller, varnished, 15s.

IRELAND.— NEW WALL MAP, showing the divisions of the Counties, all
the Towns, Principal Villages, Railways, &c. Scale, 8 miles to an inch; size,
34 inches by 42. Price, coloured, mounted on roller, varnished, 12s. &d.

IRELAND, in COUNTIES. With the Roads, Rivers, &c. By J.
ARBOWSMITH. Scale. 12 miles to an inch; size, 22 inches by 26. Sheet,
coloured, 3s. ; mounted in case, 5s.

Edward Stanford, 55, Charing Cross, London.

18 SELECTED LIST.

LO3STIDO1ST.

MODERN LONDON and its SUBURBS, extending from Hatnpstead
to the Crystal Palace, and from Hammersmith Bridge to Greenwich ; showing
all the Railways and Stations, the Roads, Footpaths, &c. Scale, 6 inches to the
mile ; size, 5 feet by 6. On six large sheets, 25s. ; mounted on linen, in case, or
on roller, varnished, 42s.

COLLINS' STANDARD MAP of LONDON. Admirably adapted
for visitors to the City. Scale, 4 inches to a mile; size, 34£ inches by 27.
Price, plain, in case, Is. ; coloured, Is. 6d. ; mounted on linen, ditto, 3s. 6d. ;
on roller, varnished, Is. 6d.

BRITISH METROPOLIS.-DAVIES'S NEW MAP of the BRITISH
METROPOLIS. Scale, 3 inches to a mile ; size, 36 inches by 25£. Price,
plain sheet, 3s. Qd. ; coloured, 5s. ; mounted on linen, in case, 7s. 6cZ. ; on roller,
varnished, 10s. &d. With continuation southward beyond the Crystal Palace,
plain sheet, 5s.; coloured, Ts. fid. ; mounted on linen, in case, 11s.; on roller,
varnished, 15s.

RAILWAY MAP of LONDON and ENVIRONS.— STANFORD'S
SPECIAL MAP of the RAILWAYS, RAILWAY STATIONS, TRAM-
WAYS, POSTAL DISTRICTS, and SUB-DISTRICTS, in LONDON and its
ENVIRONS. Scale, 1 inch to a mile ; size> 24 inches by 26. Price, coloured
and folded, Is. ; mounted on linen, in case, 3s.

RAILWAY MAP of LONDON.— The 'DISTRICT' RAJLWAY MAP
of LONDON, showing all the Stations on the ' Inner,' ' Middle,' and ' Outer '
Circles of the Metropolitan Underground Railways, with the principal Streets,
Parks, Public Buildings, Places of Amusement, &c. Size, 37 inches by 24.
Coloured, and folded in cover, Gd.

PARISH MAP of LONDON.— STANFORD'S MAP of LONDON and its
ENVIRONS, showing the boundary of the Jurisdiction of the Metropolitan
Board of Works, the Parishes, Districts, Railways, &c. Scale, 2 inches to a
mile ; size, 40 inches by 27. Price, in sheet, 6s. ; mounted on linen, in case, 9s. ;
on roller, varnished, 12s.

LONDON and its ENVIRONS.— DA VIES'S MAP of LONDON and its
ENVIRONS. Scale, 2 inches to a mile ; size, 36 inches by 28. The main roads
out of London, the Minor Roads and Footpaths in the Environs, the Railways
completed and in progress, are carefully defined, Price, sheet, 4s.; coloured,
5s. 6d ; mounted on linen, in case, 8s. ; or on roller, varnished, ] 4s.

ENVIRONS of LONDON.— A MAP of the ENVIRONS of LONDON,
including twenty-five miles from the Metropolis. Scale, f of an inch to a mile ;
size, 36 inches by 35. This Map includes the whole of the County of Middlesex,
with parts of the Counties of Surrey, Kent, Essex, Herts, Bucks, and Berks.
Price, on one large sheet, coloured, 8s. ; mounted, in case, 10s. ; on roller, var-
nished, 14s.

ENVIRONS of LONDON.— DA VIES'S MAP of the ENVIRONS of
LONDON. Scale, 1 inch to a mile ; size, 43 inches by 32. Price, sheet, plain, 4s. ;
coloured 5s. 6d. ; mounted on linen, in case, 8s. ; or on roller, varnished, 14s.

ENVIRONS of LONDON.-STANFORD'S NEW MAP of the COUNTRY
TWELVE MILES round LONDON. Scale, 1 inch to a mile ; size, 25 inches
by 25. Price, plain, folded in case, 2s. Gd. ; coloured, ditto, 3s. 6d. ; mounted on
linen, ditto, 5s. 6d.

Edward Stanford, 55, Charing Cross, London.

MAPS. 19

GENERAL MAP OF ASIA.— By J. ARROWSMITH. Scale, 300 miles to
an inch ; size, 26 inches by 22. Sheet, coloured, 3s. ; mounted, in case, 5s.

NORTHERN ASIA, including Siberia, Kamtschatka, Japan, Mantchooria,
Mongolia, Tchoongaria, Tibet, and the Himalaya Mountains. By J. ARROW-
SMITH. Scale, 170 miles to an inch ; size, 26 inches by 26. Sheet, coloured, 4s.;
mounted, in case, 7s.

CENTRAL ASIA.— STANFORD'S MAP of CENTRAL ASIA, including
Teheran, Khiva, Bokhara, Kokan, Yarkand, Kabul, Herat, &c. Scale, 110 miles
to an inch ; size, 22 inches by 17. Coloured sheet, 2s. 6d. ; mounted, in case, 5s.

ASIA MINOR, &C. (TURKEY in ASIA). With portions of Persia, the
Caspian Sea, and the Caucasian Mountains. By J. ARROWSMITH. Scale, 55
miles to an inch ; size, 26 inches by 22. Sheet, coloured, 3s. ; mounted, in
case, 5s.

INDIA.— STANFORD'S NEW PORTABLE MAP of INDIA. Exhibiting the
Present Divisions of the Country according to the most Recent Surveys. Scale,
86 miles to an inch; size, 29 inches by 33. Coloured, 6s. ; mounted on linen, in
case, 8s. ; on roller, varnished, 1 Is.

INDIA.— MAP of INDIA. By J. ARROWSMITH. Scale, 90 miles to an inch ;
size, 22 inches by 26. Sheet, coloured, 3s. ; mounted in case, 5s.

CEYLON.— MAP of CEYLON. Constructed from a Base of Triangulations and
corresponding Astronomical Observations. By Major-General JOHN FRASER,
late Deputy-Quartermaster-General. Reconstructed by JOHN ARROWSMITH.
Scale, 4 miles to an inch ; size, 52 inches by 78. Eight sheets, coloured, 21. 5s. ;
mounted, in case, 3Z. 13s. 6cJ.; on roller, varnished, 41. 4s.; spring roller,
61. 16s. 6d.

CEYLON.— COFFEE ESTATES of CEYLON. Map showing the Position of the
Coffee Estates in the Central Province of Ceylon. By J. ARROWSMITH. Size,
15 inches by 20. Sheet, coloured, 3s. ; mounted, in case, 5s.

BTJRMAH, &c. — A Map showing the various Routes proposed for connecting
China witn India and Europe through Burmah, and developing the Trade of
Eastern Bengal, Burmah, and China. Prepared under the direction of JOHN
OGILVT HAY, F.R.G.S. Scale, 33 miles to an inch; size, 27 inches by 32.
Coloured, 3s. ; mounted, in case, 5s.

BTJRMAH and ADJACENT COUNTRIES. — Compiled from
various MSS., and other Documents. By J. ARROWSMITH. Scale, 24 miles to
an inch ; size, 26 inches by 22. Sheet, coloured, 3s. ; mounted, in case, 5«.

CHINA.— MAP of CHINA. By J. ARROWSMITH. Scale, 90 miles to an inch ;
size, 26 inches by 22. Sheet, coloured, 3s. ; mounted, in case, 5s.

CHINA and JAPAN.— STANFORD'S MAP of the EMPIRES of CHINA
and JAPAN, with the Adjacent Parts of British India, Asiatic Russia, Burmah,
&c. Scale, 110 miles to an inch ; size, 38 inches by 24. One sheet, full coloured,
8*. ; mounted on linen, in case, 10s. 6d. ; on roller, varnished, 14s.

Edward Stanford, 55, Charing Cross, London.

C~2

20 SELECTED LIST.

GENERAL MAP of AFRICA.— By J. ARROWSMITH. Scale, 260 miles
to an inch ; size, 22 inches by 26. Sheet, coloured, 3s. ; mounted, in case, 5s.

EGYPT.— MAP of EGYPT. Compiled from the most authentic materials, and
founded on the best Astronomical Observations. By Colonel W. M. LEAKE,
R.A., LL.D., F.R.S. Scale, 10 miles to an inch ; size, 34 inches by 52. Two
sheets, coloured, 21s. ; mounted, in case, 28s. ; on roller, varnished, 36s.

EGYPT.— MAP of EGYPT: including the Peninsula of Mount Sinai. By
J. ARROWSMITH. New Edition. Scale, 26 miles to an inch; size, 22 inches by
26. Sheet, coloured, 3s. ; mounted, in case, 5s.

AFRICA (NORTH- WEST).— MAP of NORTH-WEST AFRICA, in-
cluding the Coast of Guinea, and the Isle of Fernando Po, on the South, and the
Western parts of Egypt and Darfnr, on the East. By J. ARROWSMITH. Scale,
130 miles to an inch ; size, 26 inches by 22. Sheet, coloured, 3s. ; mounted, in
case, 5s.

AFRICA (SOUTH).— MAP of SOUTH AFRICA to 16 deg. South Latitude.
By HENRY HALL, Draughtsman to the Royal Engineers, Cape Town. Scale, 50
miles to an inch ; size, 34 inches by 28. Two sheets, coloured, 10s. 6d. ;
mounted on linen, in case, 13s. 6eZ.; on roller, varnished, 15s.

AFRICA (SOUTH -E ASTERN). — MAP of SOUTH-EASTERN
AFRICA. Compiled by HENRY HALL. Scale, 25 miles to an inch; size, 26
inches by 22. Sheet, 4s. ; mounted on linen, in case, 6s.

AFRICA (WEST COAST).— MAP of the WEST COAST of AFRICA.
Comprising Guinea and the British Possessions at Sierra Leone, on the Gambia,
and the Gold Coast. &c. By J. ARROWSMITH. Scale, 50 miles to an inch. Two
coloured sheets ; size of each, 22 inches by 26, 6s. Mounted, in case, 10s.

CAPE of GOOD HOPE and SOUTH AFRICA —MAP of SOUTH
AFRICA, Cape Colony, Natal, &c. By HENRY HALL. Scale, 50 miles to an
Inch; size, 29 inches by 17. Sheet, price 4s. 6d. ; mounted, in case, 6s. 6d.

CAPE COLONY (EASTERN FRONTIER).— MAP of the EASTERN
FRONTIER of the CAPE COLONY. Compiled by HENRY HALL. Scale,
8 miles to an inch ; size, 40 inches by 38. Sheets, 18s. 6d. ; mounted on linen,
in case, 25s. ; on roller, varnished, 31s. 6d.

NATAL.— A MAP of the COLONY of NATAL. By ALEXANDER MAIR, Land
Surveyor, Natal. Compiled from the Diagrams and General Plans in the
Surveyor-General's Office, and from Oata furnished by P. C. SUTHERLAND, Esq.,
M.D., F.R.S., Surveyor-General. Scale, 4 miles to an inch ; size, 54 inches by 80.
Coloured, Four Sheets, 21. 5s. ; mounted, in case, or on rollers, varnished, 3i.

NATAL.— MAP of the COLONY of NATAL. Compiled in the Surveyor-
General's Office. Size, 11* inches by 14£. Sheet, coloured, Is. ; mounted, in
case, 2s. 6d.

NUBIA and ABYSSINIA, including Darfur, Kordofan, and part of Arabia.
By J. ARROWSMITH. Scale 65 miles to an inch ; size, 26 inches by 22. Sheet,
coloured, 3s.; mounted, in case, 5s.

Stanford, 55, Charing Cross, London.

MAPS. 21

BRITISH COLUMBIA.-NEW MAP of BRITISH COLUMBIA, to the
56th Parallel North Latitude, showing the New Gold Fields of Omineca, the
most recent discoveries at Cariboo and other places, and the proposed routes for
the Inter-Oceanic Railway. Scale, 25 miles to an inch ; size, 39 inches by 27.
Price, hi sheet, coloured, 7s. 6d. ; or mounted on linen, in case, 10s. 6d.

CANADA.— MAP of UPPER and LOWER CANADA, New Brunswick, Nova
Scotia, Prince Edward's Island, Cape Breton Island, Newfoundland, and a large
portion of the United States. By J. ABROWSMITH. Scale, 35 miles to an inch ;
size, 40 inches by 26. Two sheets, coloured, 6s. ; mounted, in case, 10s. ; on
roller, varnished, 15s.

UNITED STATES and CANADA.— STANFORD'S NEW RAILWAY
and COUNTY MAP of the UNITED STATES arid TERRITORIES, together
with Canada, New Brunswick, £c. Scale 54£ miles to an inch ; size, 57 inches
by 36. Two sheets, coloured, 21s. ; case, 25s. ; on rollers, varnished, 30s.

UNITED STATES.— STANFORD'S HANDY MAP of the UNITED

STATES. Scale, 90 miles to an inch ; size, 40 inches by 25. Coloured sheet,
7s. 6d. ; mounted, in case, 10s. Gd. ; on roller, varnished, 15s.

UNITED STATES.— STANFORD'S SMALLER RAILWAY MAP of the
UNITED STATES. Scale, 120 miles to an inch; size, 29 inches by 17 J. Two
sheets, coloured, 4s. Gd. ; mounted on linen, in case, 6s. Gd.

CENTRAL AMERICA.— BAILEY'S MAP of CENTRAL AMERICA,

including the States of Guatemala, Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa
Rica. Scale, 8 miles to an inch ; size, 40 inches by 27. Sheet, 7s. Gd.; mounted
on linen, in case, 10s. Gd. ; on roller, varnished, 14s.

MEXICO.— A GENERAL MAP of the REPUBLIC of MEXICO. By the
Brigadier-General PEDKO GARCIA CONDE. Engraved from the Original Survey
made by order of the Mexican Government. Size, 50 inches by 37. Sheets,
price, 10s. Gd. ; mounted on linen, in case, 18s.

BERMUDAS.— MAP of the BERMUDAS. Published by direction of His
Excellency Major-General J. H. LEFROY, C.B., R.A., Governor and Commander-
in-Chief of the Bermudas. Scale, 2| miles to an inch; size, 62 inches by 63.
Mounted, in case, or on roller, varnished, 21s.

WEST INDIA ISLANDS and GUATEMALA.— Showing the
Colonies in possession of the various European Powers. By J. ARROWSMITH.
Scale, 90 miles to an inch ; size, 26 inches by 22. Sheet, coloured, 3s. ; mounted,
in case, 5s.

JAMAICA.— A NEW MAP of the ISLAND OF JAMAICA. Prepared by
THOMAS HARRISON, Government Surveyor, Kingston, Jamaica, under the direc-
tion of Major-General J. R. MANN, R.E., Director of Roads and Surveyor-General.
Scale, 2i miles to an inch ; size, 64 inches by 27. Mounted, in case, or on roller,
- varnished, 21s.

BARBADOES.— Topographical Map, based upon Mayo's Original Survey in
1721, and corrected to the year 1846. By Sir ROBERT H. SCHOMBURGH, K.R.E.
Scale, 2 miles to an inch ; size, 40 inches by 50. Two sheets, coloured, 21s. ;
mounted, in case, 28s. ; on roller, varnished, 37s.

Edward Stanford, 55, Charing Cross, London.

22 SELECTED LIST.

AUSTRALIA. — From Surveys made by order of the British Government, com-
bined with those of D'Entre, Casteaux, Baudin, Freycinet, &c. By J. ARROW-
SMITH. Scale, 80 miles to an inch. On two sheets ; size of each, 22 inches by
26. Sheets, coloured, 6s. ; mounted, in case, 10s.

AUSTRALIA. — Constructed from Official and other original Documents,
adjusted to the Maritime Survey of Flinders, King, Wickham, Stokes, Black-
wood, Stanley, &c. Sy J. ARROWSMITH. Scale, 27 miles to an inch. In
Nine Sheets. [Preparing.

WESTERN AUSTRALIA.— With Plans of Perth, Fremantle, and Guild-
ford. From the Surveys of John Septimus Roe, Esq., Surveyor-General, and from
other Official Documents in the Colonial Office and Admiralty. By J. ARROW-
SMITH. Scale, 16 miles to an inch ; size, 40 inches by 22. Two sheets, coloured,
6s. ; in case, 10s.

SOUTH AUSTRALIA.-rShowing the Division into Counties of the settled
portions of the Province. With Situation of Mines of Copper and Lead. From
the Surveys of Capt. Frome, R.E., Surveyor-General of the Colony. By J.
ARROWSMITH. Scale, 14 miles to an inch ; size, 22 inches by 26. Sheet,
coloured, 3s. ; in case, 5*.

QUEENSLAND.— STANFORD'S NEW MAP of the PROVINCE of

QUEENSLAND (North-Eastern Australia) : Compiled from the most reli-
able Authorities. Scale, 64 miles to an inch ; size, 18 inches by 23. In sheets,
coloured, 2s. 6d. ; mounted on linen, in case, 4s. 6d.

VICTORIA.— A NEW MAP of the PROVINCE of VICTORIA (Australia) :
Showing all the Roads, Rivers, Towns, Counties, Gold Diggings, Sheep and
Cattle Stations, &c. Scale, 20 miles to an inch ; size, 31 inches by 21. In
sheet, 2s. 6d. ; or mounted on linen, in case, 4s. 6d.

NEW ZEALAND.— STANFORD'S MAP of NEW ZEALAND: Compiled
from the most recent Documents. Scale, 64 miles to an inch ; size, 17 inches by
19. Full-coloured, in sheet, 2s. ; mounted on linen, incase, 3s. 6d.

NEW ZEALAND.— From Official Documents. By J. ARROWSMITH. Scale,
38 miles to an inch ; size, 22 inches by 26. Sheet, coloured, 3s. ; mounted, in
case, 5s.

NELSON and MARLBOROUGH.-A NEW MAP of the PRO-
VINCES of NELSON and MARLBOROUGH, in New Zealand, with Cook's
Strait, and the Southern Part of the Province of Wellington. Scale, 8 miles to
an inch. Size, 40 inches by 27. In sheet, coloured, 7s. 6d. ; mounted on linen,
incase, 10s. Qd.

TASMANIA (Van Diemen's Land).— From MS. Surveys in the
Colonial Office, and in the Van Diemen's Land Company's Office. By J. ARROW-
SMITH. Scale, 10i miles to an inch ; size, 22 inches by 26. Sheet, coloured, 3s. ;
mounted in, case, 5s.

Edward Stanford, 55, Charing Cross, London.

MAPS.

23

BRITISH ISLES.— GEOLOGICAL MAP of the BRITISH ISLES. By
Professor A. C. RAMSAY, LL.D., F.R.S., Director-General of the Geological
Surveys of the United Kingdom. Scale, 11£ miles to an inch; size, 50 Inches
by 58. Mounted on rollers, varnished, 42s.

BRITISH ISLES.— STANFORD'S GEOLOGICAL MAP of the BRITISH
ISLES. Compiled under the Superintendence of E. BEST, H.M. Geological
Survey. Scale, 25 miles to an inch ; size, 23 inches by 29.

ENGLAND and WALES. By ANDREW C. RAMSAY, LL.D., F.R.S., and
G.S., Director-General of the Geological Surveys of Great Britain and Ireland,
and Professor of Geology at the Royal School of Mines. This Map shows all
the Railways, Roads, &c., and when mounted in case, folds into a convenient
pocket size, making an excellent Travelling Map. Scale, 12 miles to an inch ;
size, 36 inches by 42. Fourth Edition, with Corrections and Additions. Price, in
sheet, ll. 5s. ; mounted on linen, iu case, ll. 10s. ; or on roller, varnished, ll. 12s.

ENGLAND and WALES. Showing the Inland Navigation, Railways,
Roads, Minerals, &c. By J. ARROWSMITH. Scale, 18 miles to an inch ; size,
22 inches by 26. One sheet, 12s. ; mounted hi case, 15s.

SOUTH-EAST ENGLAND.— GEOLOGICAL MODEL of the SOUTH-
EAST of ENGLAND and Part of France ; including the Weald and the Bas
Boulonnais. By WILLIAM TOPLEY, F.G.S., Geological Survey of England and
Wales, and J. B. JORDAN, Mining Record Office. Scale, 4 miles to an inch
horizontal, and 2,400 feet to an inch vertical. Coloured and varnished in black
frame, to hang up, 51. ; or packed hi case for safe transit, 51. 5s.

LONDON and its ENVIRONS. Scale, 1 inch to a mile; size, 24 inches
by 26. Compiled from various authorities by J. B. JORDAN, Esq., of the
Mining Record Office. Price, folded hi cover, 5s. ; mounted on linen, in case,
7s. 6d. ; or on roller, varnished, 9s.

IRELAND. By JOSEPH BEETE JUKES, M.A., late Director of H.M. Geological
Survey of Ireland. Scale, 8 miles to 1 inch ; size, 31 inches by 38. On two
sheets, 25*. ; mounted on linen, hi case, 30s. ; or on roller, varnished, 32s.

SOUTH AFRICA.-GEOLOGICAL SKETCH MAP of SOUTH AFRICA.
Compiled by E. J. DUNN from personal observations, combined with those of
Messrs. A. G. and T. BAIN, WYLIE, ATHERSTONK, PINCHIN, SUTHERLAND, and
BUTTON. Scale, 35 miles to an inch ; size, 34 inches by 28. One sheet, 10s. ;
mounted in case, 13s. 6d. ; on roller, varnished, 16s.

CANADA and the ADJACENT REGIONS, Including Parts of the
other BRITISH PKOVINCES and of the UNITED STATES. By Sir W. E.
LOGAN, F.R.S., &c.. Director of the Geological Survey of Canada. Scale, 25 miles
to an inch ; size, 102 inches by 45. On eight sheets, 3i. 10s. ; mounted on linen,
on roller, varnished, or in two parts to fold in morocco case, 51. 5s.

NEWFOUNDLAND.— GEOLOGICAL MAP of NEWFOUNDLAND. By
ALEXANDER MURRAY, F.G.S., assisted by JAMES P. HOWLEY, and Drawn by
ROBERT BARLOW. Scale, 25 miles to an inch ; size, 26 inches by 26. One
Sheet, 10s. ; mounted in case, 12s. 6d.

Edward Stanford, 55, Charing Cross, London.

24 SELECTED LIST.

STANFORD'S NEW SERIES OF SCHOOL MAPS.

Prepared under the direction of the SOCIETY FOR PROMOTING CHRISTIAN KNOWLEDGE
and of the NATIONAL SOCIETY, are patronized by Her Majesty's Government
for the Army and Navy Schools, the Commissioners of National Education for
Ireland, the School Boards of London, and of all the principal Provincial
towns. The Series comprises the following Maps: —

THE EASTERN HEMISPHERE— THE WESTERN HEMI-
SPHERE.— Two distinct Maps. Size, each 50 inches by 58. Price of each,
mounted on roller, varnished, 13s. ; the two mounted together, '26s.
EUROPE. — Scale, 65 miles to an inch; size, 50 inches by 58. Price, mounted on

roller, varnished, 13s.
BRITISH ISLES.— Scale, 8 miles to an inch; size, 75 inches by 90. Mounted

on roller, varnished, price 42s.
BRITISH ISLES.— Scale, 11£ miles to an inch ; size, 50 inches by 58. Price,

mounted on roller, varnished, 13s.
ENGLAND and WALES-Scale, 8 miles to an inch ; size, 50 inches by 58.

Price, mounted on roller, varnished, 13s.
SCOTLAND and IRELAND.— Separate Maps. Scale, 8 miles to an inch ;

size, 34 inches by 42. Price of each, mounted on roller, varnished, 9s.
ASIA. — Scale, 140 miles to an inch; size, 50 inches by 58. Price, mounted on

roller, varnished, 13s.
HOLY LAND.— Scale, 4£ miles to an inch; size, 50 inches by 58. Price,

mounted on roller, varnished, 13s.
OLD TESTAMENT.— MAP of the HOLY LAND to ILLUSTRATE the

OLD TESTAMENT. Scale, 8 miles to an inch; size, 34 inches by 42. Price,

mounted on roller, varnished, 9s.
NEW TESTAMENT.— MAP of the HOLY LAND to ILLUSTRATE the

NEW TESTAMENT. Scale, 1 miles to an inch ; size, 34 inches by 42. Price,

mounted on roller, varnished, 9s.
ACTS and EPISTLES.— MAP of the PLACES mentioned in the ACTS and

the EPISTLES. Scale, 57 miles to an inch; size, 34 inches by 42. Price,

mounted on roller, varnished, 9s.
JOURNEYINGS of the CHILDREN of ISRAEL.— MAP of the

PENINSULA of SINAI, the NEGEB, and LOWER EGYPT. Scale, 10 miles

to an inch ; size, 42 inches by 34. Price, mounted on roller, varnished, 9s.
INDIA.— Scale, 40 miles to an Inch; size, 50 inches by 58. Price, mounted on

roller, varnished, 13s.
AFRICA.— Scale, 118 miles to an inch ; size, 50 inches by 58. Price, mounted

on roller, varnished, 13s.
NORTH AMERICA.— Scale, 97 miles to an inch ; size, 50 inches by 58.

Price, mounted on roller, varnished, 13s.
SOUTH AMERICA.— Scale, 97 miles to an inch; size, 50 inches by 58.

Price, mounted on roller, varnished, 13s.
AUSTRALASIA.— Scale, 86 miles to an inch ; size, 58 inches by 50. Price,

mounted on roller, varnished, 13s.
AUSTRALIA.— Scale, 86 miles to an inch; size, 42 inches by 34. Price,

mounted on roller, varnished, 9s.
NEW ZEALAND.— Scale, 25 miles to an inch ; size, 42 inches by 34. Price

mounted on roller, varnished, 9s.

Edward Stanford, 55, Charing Cross, London.

MAPS. 25

STANFORD'S SMALLER SERIES OF SCHOOL MAPS.

Published under the direction of the Committee of General Literature and Educa-
tion appointed by the SOCIETY FOR PROMOTING CHRISTIAN KNOWLEDGE, and
of the NATIONAL SOCIETY.

These New Maps are accurately Coloured in Political Divisions ; they retain all the
characteristic boldness of the larger Series, and are specially suitable for Small
Classes.

WORLD IN HEMISPHERES. — EASTERN HEMISPHERE —
WESTERN HEMISPHERE. Two separate Maps. Size of each map, 27
inches by 32. Price, coloured and mounted on roller, varnished, 6s. each;
coloured sheet, 2s. Gd.

*„* The two Hemispheres can be had mounted as one map ; size, 54 inches by 32.
Price, coloured, on roller, varnished, 12s.

EUROPE.— Size, 32 inches by 27. Coloured and mounted on roller, varnished,

6s. ; coloured sheet, 2s. Gd.
ASIA. — Size, 32 inches by 27. Coloured and mounted on roller, varnished, 6s. ;

coloured sheet, 2s. Gd.
INDIA.— Size, 27 inches by 32. Coloured and mounted on roller, varnished,

6s. ; coloured sheet, 2s. Gd.
HOLY LAND.— To ILLUSTRATE the OLD and NEW TESTAMENTS.

Size, 27 inches by 32. Coloured and mounted on roller, varnished, 6s. ;

coloured sheet, 2s. Gd.
OLD TESTAMENT.— MAP of the HOLY LAND to ILLUSTRATE the

OLD TESTAMENT. Size, 17 inches by 22. Coloured and mounted on roller,

varnished, 4s. ;* on millboard, varnished, 3s. Gd. ; coloured sheet, Is. Gd.
NEW TESTAMENT.— MAP of the HOLY LAND to ILLUSTRATE the

NEW TESTAMENT. Size, 17 inches by 22. Coloured and mounted on

roller, varnished, 4s. ;* on millboard, varnished, 3s. Gd. ; coloured sheet, Is. Gd.
* The Maps of the Old Testament and New Testament can be had, mounted
together, price 8s.

ACTS and EPISTLES.-MAP of PLACES MENTIONED in the ACTS
and EPISTLES: showing St. Paul's Missionary Journeys, Journey to Rome,
&c. Size, 22 inches by 17. Coloured and mounted on roller, varnished, 4s. ;
on millboard, varnished, 3s. Gd. ; coloured sheet, Is. Gd.

JOURNEYINOS of the CHILDREN of ISRAEL.-MAP of the
PENINSULA of SINAI, the NEGEB, and LOWER EGYPT, to illustrate
the History of the Patriarchs and the Exodus; with a Supplementary Map of
the Migration of Terah and Abraham. Size, 17 inches by 22. Coloured and
mounted on roller, varnished, 4s.; on millboard, 3s. Gd. ; coloured sheet,
Is. Gd.

NORTH AMERICA.— Size, 27 inches by 32. Coloured and mounted on
roller, varnished, 6s. ; coloured sheet, 2s. Gd.

SOUTH AMERICA.— Size, 27 inches by 32. Coloured and mounted on
Droller, varnished, 6s.; coloured sheet, 2s. Gd.

AUSTRALIA.— Size, 22 inches by 17. Coloured and mounted on roller,
varnished, 4s. ; on millboard, varnished, 3s. Gd. ; coloured sheet, Is. Gd.

NEW ZEALAND.— Size, 17 inches by 22. Coloured, and mounted on roller,
varnished, 4s. ; on millboard, varnished, 3s. Gd. ; coloured sheet, Is. Gd.

Edward Stanford, 55, Charing Cross, London.

26 SELECTED LIST.

STANFORD'S NEW GEOGRAPHICAL SERIES OF
WALL MAPS.

For use in Schools and Colleges. Edited by Professor RAMSAY, LL.D., F.R.S., &c.,
Director-General of the Geological Surveys of the United Kingdom.

This series aims at exhibiting in the first place, and prominently, the forms of
relief and of contour of the land masses of the globe, and next of the sea bed. At
once a general idea is gained by the youngest student, on an inspection of the Map,
of the relative position of the high, dry, and cold table-lands and mountainous
regions, and the warm, moist, and fertile plains in each great division of the globe.
For instance, in our own country it is seen at once why the eastern part is devoted
to agricultural purposes, and the western part to mining and manufacturing; or by
reference to the Map of Europe we can readily see how a rise in the level of the sea
of a few hundreds of feet would suffice to inundate the whole northern part of
Europe ; and on the other hand, how the general upheaval of the land of a few hun-
dreds of feet would alter the whole contour of Europe, connecting the British Isles
with the Continent, and annihilating the North Sea and the Baltic.

The following Maps, forming part of the Physical Series of Wall Maps for use in
Schools and Colleges, are ready for sale, and will be found, both in utility and artistic
finish, not inferior to any Maps hitherto offered to the public.

They are uniform in scale and size with the Political Series already in use, and
which have acquired so great a popularity ; and will be found as accurate and, it is
hoped and believed, as useful in teaching Physical Geography as the companion series
are and have been in Political Geography.

BRITISH ISLES. Mounted on linen, on rollers, varnished. Scale, 11* miles
to an inch ; size, 50 inches by 58. Price 30s.

ENGLAND and WALES. Mounted on linen, on rollers, varnished. Scale,
8 miles to an inch ; size, 50 inches by 58. Price 30s.

SCOTLAND. Mounted on linen, on rollers, varnished. Scale, 8 miles to an
inch; size, 34 inches by 42. Price 18s.

IRELAND. Mounted on linen, on rollers, varnished. Scale, 8 miles to an inch ;
size, 34 inches by 42. Price 18s.

EUROPE. Mounted on linen, on rollers, varnished. Scale, 65 miles to an inch ;
size, 58 inches by 50. Price 30s.

Mounted on linen, on rollers, varnished. Scale, 140 miles to an inch ;
size 58 inches by 50.

AFRICA. Mounted on linen, on rollers, varnished. Scale, 116 miles to an inch ;
size, 50 inches by 58. Price 30s.

NORTH AMERICA, Mounted on linen, on rollers, varnished. Scale, 97
miles to an inch j size, 50 inches by 58. Price 30s.

SOUTH AMERICA. Mounted on linen, on rollers, varnished. Scale, 97
miles to an inch ; size, 50 inches by 58. Price 30s.

Edward Stanford, 55, Charing Cross, London.

MAPS.

27

V ARTY'S EDUCATIONAL SERIES of CHEAP WALL

MAPS, for class teaching, constructed by AKKOWSMITH, WALKEB, &c. New
and revised editions, coloured, mounted, and varnished.

The World in Hemispheres. Size, 51 inches by 26. Price 12*.
The World (Mercator). Size, 50 inches by 32. Price 10s.
The British Isles. Size, 51 inches by 41. Price 10*.
Also the following, each 6*., size, 34 inches by 26 :—
Europe. Australia.

Asia.
Africa.

America.
New Zealand.

England.
Scotland.
Ireland.
Roman. Empire.

Journeyings of
the Children of
Israel.

S. Paul's Voyages
and Travels.

Price, in plain sheet, 2s. ;
Price, in plain

VABTY'S LARGE OUTLINE MAPS.

coloured, 3s. ; mounted on rollers, 7s.

The World (globular), 2 feet 3 inches by 4 feet 3 inches.

sheet, Is. ; coloured, Is. 6d.
The World (Mercator), 21 inches by 15 in.
And the following, plain sheet, Is. 3d. ; coloured, 1*. 6d. ; mounted on rollers, 4*. ;

size, 2 feet 10 inches by 2 feet 2 inches.

Europe.

Asia.

Africa.

America.
England.
Scotland.

Ireland.

Palestine (O. Test.).

Palestine (N. Test.).

STANFORD'S OUTLINE MAPS. Size, 17 inches by 14, printed on
drawing paper. A Series of Geographical Exercises, to be filled in from the
Useful Knowledge Society's Maps and Atlases. Price 6d. each.

World in Hemi-
spheres, West.

World in Hemi-
spheres, East.

Europe.

British Isles.

England.

Scotland.

Ireland.

France.

Netherlands.

Switzerland.

Germany, General.
Italy, General.
Spain and Portu-

gal.

Russia.
Denmark.

Norway.

Turkish Empire.

Asia.

Asia Minor.

Greece.

India.

China.

Palestine.

Africa.

Egypt.

America, North.

Canada, and the

United States.
America, South.
West India Islands
Australia.
New Zealand.

STANFORD'S PROJECTION SERIES. Uniform in size, price, &c.,
with Stanford's Outlines.

The OXFORD SERIES of OUTLINE MAPS. Size, 16 inches by 14.
Price 3d. each.

Edward Stanford, 55, Charing Cross, London.

28 SELECTED LIST.

These Diagrams, compiled by the eminent Scientific Men whose names are
appended, are drawn with the strictest regard to Nature, and engraved in the best
style of art. The Series consists of Eleven Subjects, each arranged so that it may be
mounted in one sheet, or be divided into four sections and folded in the form of a
book, thus rendering them available either for Class Exercises or Individual Study.

Price of each, mounted on roller and varnished, 6s. ; or folded in book form, 4s.

I. CHARACTERISTIC BRITISH FOSSILS. By J. W. LOWRT,

F.R.G.S. Exhibits nearly 600 of the more prominent forms of Organic remains
found in British Strata.

II. CHARACTERISTIC BRITISH TERTIARY FOSSILS.

By J. W. LOWRY, F.R.G.S. This Diagram is similarly arranged to No. 1, and
illustrates upwards of 800 specimens of the Tertiary Formation.

III. FOSSIL CRUSTACEA. By J. W. SALTER, A.L.S., F.G.S., and H.
WOODWARD, F.G.S., F.Z.S. Consisting of about 500 Illustrations of the Orders
and Sub-Orders, and showing their Eange in Geological time.

IV. The VEGKETABLE KING-DOM. By A. HENFREY. Arranged
according to the Natural System, each Order being illustrated by numerous
examples of representative species.

V. The ORDERS and FAMILIES of MOLLUSCA. By Dr.

WOODWARD. Represented in six classes : Cephalapoda, illustrated by 20
examples; Gasteropoda, 4 Orders, illustrated by 180 examples; Pteropoda,
illustrated by 18 examples; Conchifera, illustrated by 158 examples; Brachio-
poda, illustrated by 11 examples; and Tunicata, illustrated by 20 examples.

VI. MYRIAPOD A, —ARACHNID A, — CRUSTACEA, — AN-
NELIDA,—and ENTOZOA. By ADAM WHITE and Dr. BAIRD. The
numerous Tribes represented under these Orders are illustrated by upwards of
180 examples, including Centipedes, Spiders, Crabs, Sandhoppers, Seamice,
Serpulas, Leeches, &c.

VII. INSECTS. By ADAM WHITE. Contains nearly 250 drawings of the
different Orders: Coleoptera; Euplexoptera ; Orthoptera ; Thysanoptera —
Thripidae, &c. ; Neuroptera; Trichoptera; Hymenoptera ; Strepsiptera —
Hylechthrus rubis; Lepidoptera; Homoptera — Heteroptera ; Diptera; and
Aphaniptera.

VIII. FISHES. By P. H. GOSSE. Showing over 130 of the most conspicuous
types, arranged in their Orders and Families.

IX. REPTILIA and AMPHIBIA. By Drs. BELL and BAIRD. Contains
105 figures of the principal typical forms.

X. BIRDS. By GEORGE GRAY. Contains drawings of 236 of the leading illus-

trative specimens.

XI. MAMMALIA. By Dr. BAIRD. Exhibits 145 of the chief illustrations
selected from the several Orders.

Edward Stanford, 55, Charing Cross, London.

BEADING BOOKS. 29

Smes of
f0r

Edited by the Kev. J. P. FAUNTHORPE, M.A., Principal of Whitelands Training
College. With original Illustrations. Post 8vo.

Standard 1.— Illustrated Short Stories, &c. 56 pp. 4d.
2.— Illustrated Easy Lessons. 164 pp. is. 3d.
3. — Instructive Lessons. Illustrated. 206 pp. is. &d.
4.— Original Stories and Selected Poems. 264pp. is. 9tf.
5.— Domestic Economy and Household Science.
6.— Literary Header.

f0r ffatw Its*.

Chiefly intended for Elementary Schools.

Our Bodily Life* Mrs. FENWICK MILLER, Member of the

London School Board.

How and Why We Breathe* Mrs. FENWICK MILLER.

Food* G. PHILLIPS BEVAN, F.G.S., Editor of

' British Manufacturing Industries.'

Drink Dr. MANN, F.R.A.S., F.R.G.S., late Super-
intendent of Education in Natal.

Cookery* J. C. BUCKMASTER, B.A., of the Science

and Art Department, South Kensington.

Needlework Mrs. BENJAMIN CLARKE.

Clothing1 J. J. POPE, Staff Surgeon, retired.

Air and Ventilation* . . . . Mrs. FENWICK MILLER.

Sicknesses that Spread . . Mrs. FENWICK MILLER.

Weather Dr. MANN, F.R.A.S., F.R.G.S.

Astronomy .. .. RICHARD A. PROCTOR, B.A., Author of

' Light Science for Leisure Hours,' &c.

Birds Kev. F. 0. MORRIS, M. A., Author of • His-
tory of British Birds.'

Flowers Rev. G. HENSLOW, M.A., F.L.S.

Money Rev. T. E. CRALLAN, M.A., Chaplain to

Sussex County Asylum.

* Specific Subject of New Code, Article 21.

This series is written in a siinple and interesting manner, and will be found
admirably adapted either for use in class or as rewards for attendance and good
conduct.

Price 16«. per 100. Single copies 3d. each.

Edward Stanford, 55, Charing Cross, London.

30 SELECTED LIST.

Jrfamg's Jfmpt0irttr

EDITED BY ROBERT JAMES MANN, M.D., F.R.A.S., F.R.G.S., late Super-
intendent of Education in Natal. Price 9d. each.

Algebra.
Astronomy.
Botany.

British Constitution.
Chemistry.
Classical Biography.
English Grammar.
English History.
French Grammar.
French History.
General Geography.
General Knowledge.
Grecian Antiquities.

Grecian History.
Irish History.
Italian Grammar.
Jewish Antiquities.
Music.
Mythology.
Natural Philosophy.
Roman Antiquities.
Roman History.
Sacred History.
Scottish History.
Universal History.

INSTRUCTIVE ATLAS of MODERN GE O GRAPH Y.— Con-
taining Sixteen Coloured Maps, each 17 inches by 14.

ELEMENTARY PHYSICAL ATLAS, intended chiefly for Map-
Drawing, and the Study of the Great Physical Features and Relief Contours of
the Continent, with an Introduction to serve as a Guide for both purposes. By
the Rev. J. P. FAUNTHORPE, M.A., F.R.G.S., Principal of Whitelands Training
College. Eighth Edition. Sixteen Maps, printed in Colour, with descriptive
Letterpress. Price 4s.

OUTLINE ATLAS.— Containing Sixteen Maps, intended chiefly for use with
the ' Elementary Physical Atlas.' Coloured Wrapper, Is.

PROJECTION ATLAS.— Containing Sixteen Plates of Projections, intended
chiefly for use with the ' Physical Atlas.' Coloured Wrapper, Is.

BLANK SHEETS for MAPS.— Sixteen Leaves of Blank Paper for Map-
Drawing, intended chiefly for use with the ' Elementary Physical Atlas '
Coloured Wrapper, 6d. "

PHYSICAL ATLAS.— A Series of Twelve Maps for Map-Drawing and
Examination. By CHARLES BIRD, B.A., F.R.A.S., Science Master in the Brad-
ford Grammar School. Royal 4to, stiff boards, cloth back, 4s. 6d.

Edward Stanford, 55, Charing Cross, London.

PRINTS. 31

atttr Animal

PRECEPTIVE ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE BIBLE. A Series
of Fifty-two Prints to aid Scriptural Instruction, selected in part by the Author
of ' Lessons on Objects.' The whole from Original Designs by S. BENDIXEN,
Artist, expressly for this Work. They have been recently re-engraved, and are
carefully coloured. Size, 17£ inches by 13.

Price of the Work.
The Set of 52 Prints, in Paper Wrapper .............. 52s.

---- in One Volume, handsomely half-bound . . . . 60s.

-- in Varty's Oak Frame, with glass, lock and key 60s.
Single Prints, Is. each ; mounted on millboard, Is. 4d. each.

VARTY'S SELECT SERIES of DOMESTIC and WILD

ANIMALS, Drawn from Nature and from the Works of Eminent Artists. In
36 carefully-coloured Plates, exhibiting 130 Figures. Size, 12 inches by 9.
The selection of Animals has been limited to those which are most known and
best adapted to elicit inquiry from the young, and afford scope for instruction and
application.

Bound In Frame

in Cloth. and Glass.
Set of 36 Prints, Coloured ...... 18s. .. 24s. .. 24s.

--- Plain ........ 12s. .. 17s. .. 18s.

Single Prints, coloured, 6d. ; mounted on millboard, lOd.

The ANIMAL KINGDOM at ONE VIEW, clearly exhibiting, on
four beautifully-coloured Plates containing 1 84 Illustrations, the relative sizes of
Animals to Man, and their comparative sizes with each other, as arranged in
Divisions, Orders, &c., according to the method of Baron Cuvier.
Exhibited on four Imperial Sheets, each 30 inches by 22 :—

Complete Set,

Animals and Landscape, full coloured . .

Animals only coloured

Single Plates, full coloured

Cloth,

Rollers, and
Varnished.

38s.
35s.
10s.

On

Sheets.

18s.

15S.
5S.

VARTY'S GRAPHIC ILLUSTRATIONS of ANIMALS,

showing their Utility to Man, in their Services during Life and Uses after
Death. Beautifully coloured. Size, 15 inches by 12. Price, the set, 31s. 6d. ;
in frame, with glass, lock and key, 39s. 6d. ; or half-bound in leather, and
lettered, 1 vol. folio, 42s.

The 21 separate Prints may also be had, price Is. 6ci. each.
Or Mounted on Millboard, Is. lOd.

For complete lists of EDWARD STANFORD'S PUBLICATIONS, see his GENERAL
CATALOGUE of MAPS and ATLASES, LIST of BOOKS, EDUCATIONAL CATALOGUE, &c.,
gratis on application, or by post for one penny stamp.

Edward Stanford, 55, Charing Cross, London.

CATALOGUES

ISSUED BY

EDWAED STANFOBD,

55, OHABDTG OEOSS, S.W.

1. ATLASES and MAPS.— General Catalogue of Atlases and Maps

published or sold by EDWARD STANFORD. New Edition.

2. BOOKS. — Selected List of Books published by EDWAKD STANFORD.

Naval and Military Books, Ordnance Survey Publications, Memoirs of the
Geological Survey of the United Kingdom, and Meteorological Office
Publications, published on account of Her Majesty's Stationery Office.

4. LONDON and its ENVIRONS.— Selected List of Maps of

London and its Environs, published by EDWARD STANFORD.

5. ORDNANCE MAPS.— Catalogue of the Ordnance Maps, published

under the superintendence of Major-General J. CAMERON, R.E., C.B.,
F.R.S., &c., Director-General of the Ordnance Survey. Price Qd. ; per
post Id.

6. GEOLOGICAL SURVEY of GREAT BRITAIN and

IRELAND.— Catalogue of the Geological Maps, Sections, and Memoirs of
the Geological Survey of Great Britain and Ireland, under the Superin-
tendence of ANDREW C. RAMSAY, LL.D., F.R.S., Director-General of the
Geological Surveys of the United Kingdom.

8. ADMIRALTY CHARTS.— Catalogue of Charts, Plans, Views, and

Sailing Directions, &c., published by order of the Lords Commissioners of
the Admiralty. 224 pp. royal 8vo. Price 7s. ; per post Is. 4d.

9. INDIA.— Catalogue of Maps of the British Possessions in India and

other parts of Asia, with continuation to the year 1876. Published by
order of Her Majesty's Secretary of State for India, in Council. Post free
for Two Penny Stamps.

10. EDUCATIONAL.— Select List of Educational Works, published by

EDWARD STANFORD, including those formerly published by VARTY and
Cox.

11. EDUCATIONAL WORKS and STATIONERY.— STAN-

FORD'S Catalogue of School Stationery, Educational Works, Atlases, Maps,
and Globes, with Specimens of Copy and Exercise Books, &c.

12. SCHOOL PRIZE BOOKS.— List of Works specially adapted for

School Prizes, Awards, and Presentations.
14. BOOKS and MAPS for TOURISTS.— STANFORD'S Tourist's

Catalogue, containing a List, irrespective of Publisher, of all the best

Guide Books and Maps suitable for the British and Continental Traveller ;

with Index Maps to the Government Surveys of England, France, and

Switzerland.

%* With the exception of those with price affixed, any of the above Cata-
logues can be had gratis on Application ; or, per post, for Penny Stamp.

Edward Stanford, 55, Charing Cross, London.

Agent, by Appointment, for the sale of the Ordnance and Geological
Survey Maps, the Admiralty Charts, Her Majesty's Stationery
Office and India Office Publications, fyc.

RETURN EARTH SCIENCES LIBRARY

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U.C.BERKELEY LIBRARIES

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