312 ME. E. W. BINNEY ON SOME SUPPOSED 



found to have been wholly or partially removed by the effects 

 of running water, it would not have been very remarkable; 

 but when these stones are found in the midst of the most 

 tranquil deposits of the whole series, with no trace of a 

 portion of rolled mineral matter of the size of a pea for 

 thousands of feet in vertical height, their occurrence, in 

 the places where they were found, is difficult to account for. 



Sir Charles Lyell, at page 217 of the last edition of his 

 Elements of Geology, in speaking of the pebbles in the 

 chalk, states as follows : — " The general absence of sand and 

 pebbles in the white chalk, has been already mentioned ; 

 but the occurrence here and there, in the east of England, 

 of a few isolated pebbles of quartz and green schist, some 

 of them two or three inches in diameter, has justly excited 

 much wonder. If these had been carried to the spots where 

 we now find them, by waves or currents from the lands 

 once bordering the cretaceous sea, how happened it that no 

 sand or mud was transported thither at the same time ? 

 We cannot conceive such rounded stones to have been 

 drifted like erratic blocks by ice, for that would imply a 

 cold climate in the cretaceous period, — a supposition incon- 

 sistent with the luxuriant growth of large-chambered 

 univalves, numerous corals and many fish, and other fossils 

 of tropical forms. 



" Now, in Reeling's Island, one of those detached masses 

 of coral which rise up in the wide Pacific, Captain Ross 

 found a single fragment of greenstone, where every other 

 particle of matter was calcareous; and Mr. Darwin con- 

 cludes, that it must have come there entangled in the roots 

 of a large tree. He reminds us that Chamisso, the dis- 

 tinguished naturalist who accompanied Kozebue, affirms 

 that the inhabitants of the Radack archipelago, a group of 

 lagoon islands in the midst of the Pacific, obtained stones 

 for sharpening their instruments, by searching the roots of 

 trees which are cast up on the beach. 



