TROF. T. RtnPERT JONES — ON COAL. 97 



movements of disturbance Avliich they have undergone had tended 

 to preserve the great Franco-Belgian coal-band, and had rendered 

 it available ; and he proceeded to state that the course of tliat Ijand 

 of Coal-measures may be traeeai)le westward, and probably coin- 

 cided with, and may some day be reached along the line of, the 

 Valley of thi^ Thames. 



Professor Prestwich in 1871 extended this inquiry;* and, having 

 carefully compared the coal-beds of Somerset and Belgium, de- 

 scribed the characters and relations of the strata in detail, and 

 showed that the coal might be met with at a workable distance 

 from the surface along a narrow, but interrupted, curved area from 

 Westphalia, through Belgium and France, to England ; then along 

 the north-eastern part of Kent (Isle of Thanet, etc.), and through 

 Herts, Bucks, Oxfordshire, and Grloucestershire, to the Bristol coal- 

 field, and on to South Wales. The coincident axis of disturbance 

 is south of the River Thames, in his opinion throwing off the coal- 

 beds on its northern Hank. (Plate I., illustrating, by a map and 

 section, the views of Mr. Godwin-Austen and Prof. Prestwich, has 

 been prepared by the Editor from published data.) 



In the second edition (1887) of his 'Geology of England and 

 Wales,' Mr. Horace B. Woodward has given, at pages 200-203, a 

 useful resume of what is known on this subject. (Mr. Woodward's 

 illustrative section is reproduced by his permission on Plate II.) A 

 full account of the history of the question of the underground 

 range of the older rocks in the South-east of England, especially as to 

 the possible occurrence of the Coal-measures, is published in the 

 ' Memoirs of the Geological Survey : The Geology of London and of 

 Part of the Thames Valley,' vol. i, 1889, pp. 13-28, by Mr. W. 

 Whitaker, F.Il.S., who, having given close attention to this sub- 

 ject, has suggested the following localities as likely sites at which 

 to search for coal in the South-east of England : St. Margaret's, 

 Charthara, Chatham, and Shoreham (all in Kent) ; Bushey (Herts), 

 Loughton (Essex), and Coombs, near Stowmarket (Suifolk).f 



An interesting fact relative to this matter is that in February, 

 1890, the engineer of a boring at the foot of Shakespeare's Cliff, 

 Dover, announced that at 1,204 feet below the surface there a thin 

 seam of coal was met with, and, at several yards lower down, coal 

 eight feet thick was pierced, associated wdth clays, grits, and 

 blackish shales. (iS'ewspapers of the time.) Dr. Blanford, in his 

 Anniversary Address to the Geological Society on February 21, 

 1890, stated that Professor Boyd Dawkins, in a letter received the 

 day before, had informed him that a coal-seam had really " been 

 reached at a depth of 1,180 feet, and that this seam is proved to be 

 of Carboniferous age by the plant-fossils in the associated clays. . . 

 The discovery is solely the result of scientific induction, and arrived 

 at by following the line of research first indicated, I believe, by 



* ' Report Roval Commission on Coal-Supply,' 1871 ; * Anniv. Ad(lre.ss Geol. 

 Soc.,' 1872; 'Popular Science Review,' July, 1872; and ' Proc. Inst. Civil 

 Engineers,' vol. xxxvii, 1874, p. 110, etc., plates \'iii and ix. 



t 'Geol. Mag.,' November, 1890, pp. 514-516. 



