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sedimentary rocks around them. But at what period did they rise up through 

 the surrounding sediment ? Some of the rocks in the Malvern Hills were amongst 

 the oldest to be found in England. But he would direct them first to the ex- 

 tremity of the ridge, and take the rocks as they occurred in succession. 



If they would carry their eye to the Obelisk in Eastnor Park, and then a 

 little to the left, they would discover a dome which was composed of the oldest 

 rock in the SUurian system. It was composed of sandstone, beautifully grained, 

 and full of the shells of trilobites — the agnostus and olenus — all chauracteristic 

 of the very oldest strata of the Silurian series. In Scandinavia or Russia — 

 wherever these rocks occurred, when carefully examined, the same lesson was 

 invariably read, though their mineral condition might be extremely different. 

 If they could examine them at St. Petersburg, where none of them could now pay 

 a friendly visit, but where he begged to say he had been most honourably and 

 kindly received, they would find these very rocks in a state of uncoiisohdated 

 mud. On the banks of the Neva they found limestones scarcely consolidated, 

 in the very process of settling down and becoming rock — not yet hardened and 

 indurated, yet they yielded precisely similar fossils to those found in the rocks to 

 which he was now directing their attention. This was the condition of these 

 strata all through the north and central portions of Russia. They never had 

 been operated upon as these at Malvern had, by heat and igneous action, yet the 

 fossil remains found in them prove them to be exact equivalents of one another. 



When he first came through this part of the country the true system of 

 classification had not been discovered, but now it is satisfactorily established 

 that the age of rocks is in no degree determinable by the mineral characteristics, 

 but only by the fossil remains found in them. Sir Chas. Lyell could tell them 

 of a vast extent of country in North America, which, on this principle, had been 

 proved equivalent to the Silurian and Devonian rocks of this neighbourhood, 

 and he had thought it well to refer them thus to other countries in order that 

 they might understand this point clearly. 



If, from the dome to which he had already referred them, they would carry 

 their eye into the valley of Eastnor Park, and descend into Stumps' Wood, they 

 would find the sandstone connected with the limestone called the Woolhope 

 limestone. The Woolhope limestones were the very bottom of the Upper Silurian 

 series. The Upper Silurian rocks formed the chief strata in all the ridges which 

 he saw before him on the Herefordshire side of the hills. The Woolhope were 

 succeeded by the Wenlock limestones, which were characterised by fossils, many 

 of which were preserved in the museum they would presently inspect, and they 

 were identical with the rocks of which Gothland and those isles of the Baltic, 

 which our fleet was now passing, were composed. 



The intervening valleys were occupied by shales, and in the ridges which they 

 saw over Ledbiury they came to the Ludlow limestone. Their eyes would 

 easily discover, from the very red colour of the fields, where the Red Sandstone 

 of the great Devonian formation first came in, and overlapped all those strata 

 which spread beneath them for so great an extent of country. The line of the 



