Brecon and Caermarthen Vans, the Sugar Loaf, and Black Mountains. We 

 look upon the site of the Eoman Ariconium and beyond the wooded knoUs in 

 the foregn^ound we behold a district famous for its strongholds of Wilton and 

 Goodrich Castles ; and the wild scenery of the Wye now famous for its bone 

 caverns, the haunts of the cave Hon and hyena in days when the mammoth 

 and hairy rhinoceros roamed over the Forest of Dean, and when a wild hunter 

 race of men chipped their flints and sometimes sheltered in the recesses of 

 Arthur's cave. Then facing us still on the west is the Forest of Dean, a oreafc 

 outlier of the coalfield of South Wales, which it resembles in geological struc- 

 ture so closely that no one can doubt the former continuity of the strata, rock 

 to rock. Here in the Eoyal Forest several of our kings loved to chase the 

 wild boar and the stag, and it was when hunting- there that the Conqueror 

 swore the deadly oath that he would exterminate the Northumbrians. In its 

 recesses the wretched Edward II. sheltered for a while before he was dragged 

 through Ledbury to his prisons at Kenilworth and Berkeley, which latter spot 

 we look upon right across the Severn sea, nearly south from where we stand 

 beyond the white waters of those ancient straits. Lastly, I must once more 

 direct your attention to the north-east and east, where the eye wanders over 

 tlie fertile vales of Worcester and Gloucester. The geological formation of 

 the vale is due to a great downthrow of the older formations east of the 

 Malvems in Post Carboniferous times, and this great fault extends aU the way 

 from the mouth of the Severn estuary by Cardiff to the mouth of the Dee and 

 the Irish Sea. Over the dovrathrow Palceozoic strata of the vale and fault we 

 know that the triassic and perhaps some of the upper Permian deposits 

 were laid down unconformably ; and the flat lands that you see stretching 

 away to the Cotswokls are mostly triassic beds, the older or hunter beds only 

 appearing through denudation at the surface as you approach towards the 

 JMalvern or May Hills. Here and there, where you see low hQls rising from 

 the plain the lower lias comes on, and in several outliers, as at Sarnhill, near 

 Tewkesbury, and the Berrow-hill, near the Malvern Chase end hill, cap the 

 iipper marls and Rhotic beds. The large hill of Bredon is a great mass, prin- 

 cipally of liassic deposits, upper, middle, and lower lias, capped at the summit 

 by beds of inferior oolite, showing us how the oolitic rocks were once continuous 

 from the Cotswold to Bredon'; and looking at the Has outhers between the 

 Cotswolds and the Malvern^ we can have little doubt extended to the Malvems 

 themselves. We must not suppose, however, when speaking of the down- 

 throw of the Palceozoaic rooks along the Malvern fault in Permian times, that 

 such faulting formed the great Vale of the Severn. This vale was once filled 

 with liassic and oolitic rocks to the height of the Cotswold ranges, and denuda- 

 tion excavated the hills of Bredon and Dumbleton, and Eobin Hood, where it 

 rises above Gloucester, and stripped off the oolites from the lias, and the 

 lias from the red maj-ls below. All these hills, and many others, are 

 monuments of the denudation left by nature as proofs and measures of 

 the amount of excavation that has gone on. And this denudation, 

 through the agency of sea waves, and waters, and currents, and ice 



