COAL MEASURES BENEATH ESSEX. 1 39 



the geological series and away from the horizon of the coal measures. 

 It is true that an earlier boring at Harwich had proved the existence 

 of Loiver Carboniferous strata under that locality, and until the dip 

 of those strata shall have been proved by another boring not far 

 from Harwich, any coal measures in that region may be, as likely as 

 not, found beneath the bed of the C.erman Ocean. There is no 

 evidenee whatever of the extension of any portion of the Carboniferous 

 ' strata to the west under North Essex. On the contrary, a boring at 

 Culford (north of Bury St. Edmunds) executed only so recently as 

 1 89 1, tell us plainly enough that the Palreozoic floor, which, as we 

 have seen, rises with a steady gradient northwards from London, 

 exists at a still higher level under the country about Bury. These 

 facts, taken along with the entire absence in all the East Anglian 

 borings of Jurassic and Triassic Strata (the former of which occupy 

 a large portion of the Midlands, while the Trias has been proved 

 beneath them in many borings in Northants, South Notts, and 

 Leicestershire), point to the conclusion that we are here on a line of 

 country marked by an axis of elevation during all Triassic and 

 Jurassic times, representing possibly a faint continuation of the inner 

 Scandinavian axis of elevation along the line of the Dogger Bank. 

 There is nothing to show that such an axis does not date back even 

 to the Carboniferous period, a view to which the occurrence of 

 crystalline rocks in the boring at Bletchley lends strong support. 

 Such an axis would bear a relation to the two more pronounced axes 

 of the west of Britain and of the Ardennes, similar to that which the 

 axis of elevation of the Appenines bears to the greater and older 

 axes of elevation of the Alps and of Corsica and Sardinia. 



We must not omit reference to the Lower Rhine coalfield, in the 

 region of Elberfeld and Dortmund, because this has been spoken of 

 sometimes as a separate and distinct basin from that of Aix and 

 Liege, as if thrown off by an axis of elevation which points to a 

 similar axis continued through East Anglia to the north of Harwich. 

 Such a view would lend support to the conjecture to which Mr. 

 Harrison has given expression in his map {op. cit.), and the sectional 

 drawing, which represents the Carboniferous strata (including the 

 coal measures) as let down into a synclinal flexure between Ware 

 and Bury, upon which his argument for coal beneath North Essex 

 \entirely rests. A careful examination of so trustworthy a document 

 as Von Dechen's geological map of Germany leads one to the con- 

 clusion that there is no such axis, as has been premised by some, 



