104 SCIENCE PROGRESS. 



The Rev. A. Irving (17) doubts the existence of coal 

 beneath that neighbourhood : he considers that the Ar- 

 dennes-Mendip axis runs south of Dover, and that the old 

 rocks beneath London form part of a ridge with a southerly 

 slope, so that the centre of this ridge lay, not beneath 

 London, but some distance to the northward, the older 

 rocks of Ware, etc., forming part of it, and not of a 

 north and south ridge running at right angles to it, and 

 therefore coal is not likely to be found in Essex. He 

 alludes to the carboniferous rocks occurring at Harwich, 

 but considers that they may dip towards the south-east, so 

 that the coal-basin may be under the sea, and not anywhere 

 under the eastern counties north of London. 



Messrs. Whitaker and Jukes-Browne (18) think there 

 is nothino- distinctive about the Palaeozoic rocks reached in 

 the Culford boring near Bury St. Edmunds, but remark 

 that all are agreed that they are older than the coal 

 measures. They believe that the Wenlock beds of the 

 Ware boring are quite as likely to belong to Wenlock lime- 

 stone as to the Wenlock shale series, and prefer to speak 

 of them, therefore, merely as the Wenlock beds. In a sec- 

 tion of the paper containing their general conclusions, they 

 mention two points giving " slight support to the view that 

 the old rock at Culford may be pre-carboniferous, and per- 

 haps pre-Silurian in age. . . . On the other hand, however, 

 the fact that at Harwich, which is nearer to Culford than 

 any other of these deep borings, it is carboniferous slate that 

 has been found, and that this is, in some respects, not unlike 

 the harder parts of the Culford rock, naturally leads the 

 sanguine to hope, if not to expect, that the latter too may 

 be of carboniferous age. Should this view be right, the like- 

 lihood of still higher carboniferous and coal-bearing rocks 

 occurring underground somewhere in the eastern counties is, 

 of course, greatly increased." The authors also state that 

 we can hardly expect that the northern rise of the older 

 rocks continues underground beyond the neighbourhood of 

 Culford. In the discussion upon this paper Prof. Boyd 

 Dawkins called attention to the fact that the non-discovery 

 of coal-bearing rocks in the area under consideration did not 



