Professor Buckland on Artesian Wells. 329 



for transmitting water differs in different beds of the great 

 chalk formation ; some beds are fragmentary and incoherent, 

 and through these the water passes rapidly ; other beds are so 

 continuous and solid, that little or no water can percolate them. 

 In the boring at Grrenelle, they found no useful water in the 

 chalk, nor until they had gone down a considerable depth in 

 the sandy and argillaceous beds of the green-sand formation 

 below it ; the lower chalk beds on Southampton Common may 

 be equally destitute of water, and a continuation of the present 

 borings many hundred feet more through the lowest chalk, into 

 the green-sand formation, may possibly produce a jet like those 

 from the same green-sand at Paris and at Tours ; but per- 

 chance it may fail to increase materially the quantity of water 

 that is already found, and which, if the facts that are said 

 to be now observed in pumping from the present supply be 

 correct, is sufficient to yield more than 40,000 gallons a-day. 

 In 1842 a well had been sunk at Brighton in chalk, which, 

 though but 97 feet deep, gave, by pumping with steam, 700 

 gallons of water per minute, and 347,000 gallons in 24 hours. 

 At 80 feet, they cut into a water-bearing bed of chalk, full of 

 fissures, from which the water gushed out abundantly. In this 

 fissured stratum they made four horizontal galleries or adits, 

 all of them intersecting so many small fissures or crevices, 

 loaded with water, that further progress was soon impeded. 

 The water in this fissured stratum was descending from the 

 chalk hills of the South-Downs into the sea, which it enters 

 by numerous springs along the shore near Brighton. In two 

 of Sir W. Heathcote's wells at Hursley, the lowest bed of 

 chalk was dry, and the water was obtained by making horizontal 

 adits in a weeping fissured bed, a few feet above the bottom of 

 each well. Had the downward digging on Southampton Com- 

 mon been stopped when the well arrived at the first bed of 

 chalk that gave signs of water, and had lateral galleries been 

 driven into that bed, these might have possibly have yielded 



bo exempt from any of those great transverse fractures called faults or 

 slips, which whenever they occur below the level of the vent of subter- 

 raneous sheets of water, may form channels of communication between 

 the water in upper and lower porous beds that have an impermeable 

 stratum between them. 



