420 Professor Ramsay ^ on the Permian Epoch. [April 24, 



They are of all sizes up to 2^ and 3 feet in diameter. The majo- 

 rity are small, like the stones of the Pleistocene drift. Their 

 forms are always angular and subangular, their sides usually 

 smoothed, and sometimes polished, and scratched in a manner 

 identical with some of the stones of the modern moraines of the 

 Alps, or of the glacial drijt of the Pleistocene period that spreads 

 over the north of Europe and America. The manner in which the 

 blocks lie rudely bedded in the marly matrix also precisely cor- 

 responds to many of the ice-drifted deposits of the Pleistocene 

 epoch. In England, judging from their outcrops, they now occupy 

 an area of at least 500 square miles, chiefly concealed by overlying 

 deposits. If lithological character be any guide, they have mostly 

 been derived from the conglomerates of green, grey, and purple 

 Cambrian grits of the Longmynd and from the Silurian quartz 

 rocks, slates, felstones, felspathic ashes, greenstones, and Penta- 

 merus beds between the Stiper stones and Chirbury. Neither the 

 Malvern nor the Abberley Hills, nor the South Staifordshire country, 

 nor any of the other districts where the breccias occur contain rocks 

 at the surface similar to those from whence the breccias have derived 

 their materials. It has been asserted that they may have been 

 formed from the waste of rocks concealed beneath the neighbouring 

 New red sandstone. This is, however, an improbable assumption, 

 and in tlie outlier of Church Hill, which is altogether surrounded 

 by coal measures, the rocks are of the same far transported charac- 

 ter as in other localities. If other patches were formed from rocks 

 concealed by the New red sandstone, this outlier, according to the 

 same reasoning, might be expected to be formed from the waste of 

 the surrounding coal measures, which is not the case. If then the 

 blocks of stone that form the breccias were derived from the Cam- 

 brian and Silurian rocks of the Longmynd, it is of importance to 

 know how far they travelled. From the Longmynd region Church 

 Hill is from 25 to 30 miles distant ; Howler's Pleath, at the south 

 end of the Malvern Hills, from 40 to 50 miles distant ; and the 

 places where they occur near the South Staifordshire coalfield, from 

 35 to 45 miles distant ; and it was shown that so many angular and 

 subangular fragments, some of them 3 feet in diameter, and form- 

 ing deposits in places 400 feet in thickness, could only have been 

 transported by floating ice. At Northfield especially, many angular 

 slabs of the Pentamerns beds of the Longmynd district were 

 found, some of them 2 feet across, containing fossils of the later age 

 of that deposit, and in the same Pentamerus rock, are enclosed frag- 

 ments of the Cambrian green slates that were deposited in it when 

 it formed a Silurian beach, as ' explained at the beginning of the 

 lecture. In no other part of England have the Pentamerus beds 

 this character ; and the evidence is, therefore, in favour of tlie sup- 

 position that they were transported from the Longmynd. As no 

 other agent that we know, except ice, transports so many large 

 angular blocks to a distance, it was shown that the same transport- 



