150 NOTES ORIGINAL AND SELECTED. 



Cauliflower Brickfield, the property of Mr. R. Page, where the pit exposed 

 a section of 12 to 14 feet brick-earth above sand. Mr. Holmes remarked that 

 the old river deposits of the Thames and its tributaries, on which they were 

 standing, covered a broad belt of flat country lying between the alluvial 

 flats bordering the Thames (which constituted the most recent river deposits) 

 and the higher ground of London Clay north of Wanstead, Romford, and 

 Upminster. The level of this tract varied from more than 100 feet above the 

 sea, towards its northern limits, to 15 or 16 feet close to the marshes of the 

 Thames between Barking and Rainham. Between London and Gravesend, 

 as between Windsor and London, the Thames had not only been cutting its 

 valley deeper and deeper, but had also been occupied in taking a more 

 southerly course than it once followed. This was shown by the much greater 

 breadth of river deposits to the north than to the south of the present 

 stream. It should also be remembered that the fall of the river would make 

 a deposit 60 or 70 feet above Ordnance Datum west of London, for example, 

 the equivalent of a bed at a considerably lower level east of that city. 

 Around the Ilford brick-pits the surface level is from 40 to 50 feet. But 

 Thames Valley Gravel had been seen at a height of about 100 feet above 

 O.D.,i on the new railway between Upminster and Romford, overlying the 

 Chalky Boulder-Clay, the latest deposit of the Glacial period in that part of 

 England. The Ilford deposits must therefore be still more decidedly " Post- 

 Glacial " in the only sense in which the term can be used, that is in the sense 

 of being more recent than the Chalky Boulder-Clay. 



These old river-deposits consist of sand and gravel occasionally capped, 

 as at Ilford, by a considerable thickness of loam or brick-earth. The gravel 

 and sand has, doubtless, been brought down in the channel of the stream, 

 while the brick-earth is inundation-mud, deposited above the sand and gravel 

 during floods. Mammals would be especially liable to be drowned during 

 floods, while at the same time their remains, when quietly buried in the com- 

 paratively impermeable mud, would have a much better chance of preserva- 

 tion than if brought down in the channel of the stream. 



Mr. Holmes concluded his remarks liy referring to the most important 

 and interesting of the mammalian remains which had bean found at Ilford by 

 the late Sir Antonio Brady and others.- In answer to a question as to the 

 origin of the curious steep-sided hollows, filled largely with other material, 

 often seen near the surface of the Brick-earth, Mr. Holmes replied that 

 they had probably originated iu natural cracks, the result of drying and 

 shrinking, which in many cases had been begun when the Brick-earth was 

 being deposited. These had been enlarged by the action of the weather, and 

 ultimately filled up with material at various periods and from a variety of 

 sources. 



Recrossing the railway, the party proceeded along the Romford road .in 

 a north-easterly direction. Passing the new Seven Kings Railway Station, 

 they entered, by permission of the G. E. R. Company, the large ballast-pit 

 on the northern side of the Romford road, about midway between Seven 



1 yiinr/. /o!(r«. Geo/. Sof. vol. xlviii (iSg2). p. 365, and vol.1 (1S94), p. 443. Es.skx N'.\t. 

 vol. iv, p. 143-149: and vol. vii, p. 1-14. 



2 S-:c Henry Walker, " .A Diy's Elephini Hunting in Esse.x," Tran%. Essex Field Club, 

 I., 27, and P»oc. £F.C., I , xii, and "A Visit to Illord," p. xxviii, Di. H. Woodward. "The 

 Ancient Fauna ot Essex," Trans. E.F.C., vol. iii, i ; Sir A. Brady, Catalogue of the Pleistocene 

 Vcrtcbrata from the neighbourhood of Ilford, Essex. London, 1874. 



