114 Mr Charlesworth on the Age 



folk coast, several miles from the spots in which they have been 

 carried down. 



" It may be said that these older shells, entering into the new 

 deposits, carry with them evidence of the stratum from which 

 they have been derived ; or that, at all events, their worn ap- 

 pearance would distinguish them from the more recent mollusca 

 with which they are associated. This is so far from being the 

 case, that considerably finer and more perfect specimens of the 

 Voluta Lamberti can be picked up on the sea shore, where they 

 have been dashed by the waves upon a shingly beach, than can 

 even be obtained from the beds of the crag formation itself. In 

 fact, this gradual process of degradation appears, in many in- 

 stances, to be of all others the most favourable for detaching or- 

 ganic remains from the matrix in which they are imbedded ; and 

 with respect to the evidence that might possibly be supposed to 

 arise from a difference in lithological character, it should be re- 

 membered, that even if such indications did exist by the time 

 these new deposits become accessible, every vestige of the crag 

 will have disappeared. There will, consequently, be nothing to 

 excite the slightest suspicion that the crag species are not con- 

 temporaneous with all the organic remains associated with them. 

 In adopting this line of argument, I am of course supposing 

 that the geologists of a future epoch have the same amount of 

 information respecting the history of the tertiary deposits of 

 those days that we have of our own, and not that a geological 

 record of events has been continued up to that period. 



" To a certain amount, then, this admixture of fossil with re- 

 cent shells, even in regular stratified deposits, cannot be denied ; 

 but it may be urged that it takes place only under peculiar cir- 

 cumstances, and to such a limited extent as would never inter- 

 fere with the accuracy of general inductions founded upon ex- 

 tended research and careful practical observation. 



" If, however, we enlarge our field of observation, we shall find 

 that a process has been going forward attended with similar re- 

 sults, over a tract the superficial extent of which far exceeds that 

 occupied by the whole of the crag formation. The bed of the 

 ocean, all along the coast of Norfolk, Suffolk, and Essex, and 

 probably as far as Kent on the one side, and Yorkshire on the 

 other, is strewed with multitudes of the bones of extinct mam- 

 malia. These remains have been taken up twenty miles from 



