THE GEOLOGY OF THE DISTRICT. 



By tue Kev. W. S. SYMONDS, F.G.S., President of the Blalvcru Club. 



He need Bcarcely remind the geologists present that the range of the 

 Malvern Hills before them represented the oldest rock history of the world on 

 which we live, so far as is known. They were formerly considered to be purely 

 volcanic, but the researches of Sir Roderick Murchison, of Mr. Strickland, and 

 of Dr. Holl, had proved that they consisted in gi-eat part of sedimentary rocks, 

 interspersed with very frequent trap or volcanic dykes. When the railway cutting 

 ■was made through the hills there was often considerable difficulty in making oiit 

 the exact character of the rocks, which were embedded lavas, and which wore 

 real sedimentai-y rocks. These ancient Gneiss rocks were the oldest sedinicntary 

 rocks known, more ancient than the Cambrian system of Sedgwick, and they are 

 now fully recognised as the eqmvalents to the Laurentian Gneiss rocks of 

 Amercia, 



The time at which these ancient beds must have been deposited is so 

 immensely remote as ta be beyond calculation. What the distant star was to 

 the astronomer in regard to space, such were these old rocks to the geologist 

 with reference to time. They offered no traces of land or of life. There were no 

 pebbles or conglomerates to tell of currents or land, nor had even a shell been 

 found in them. In America, however, one of these deep ocean deposits had been 

 found to contain foramiuiferous shells, which are allied to some which are now 

 found in the Pacific ocean. These are the earliest records of life to be found. 

 These old Laurentian gneiss rooks were succeeded by the Cambrians, and here 

 animal remains became more abundant, — zoophites and worm tubes, and an 

 occasional trilobite. Above the Cambrian came the Lower Silurian rocks, plentiful 

 in the records of the lower animals, which lived in those ancient seas ; many species 

 of beautifully preserved Trilobites, allied to the lobsters of oui- own age, and still 

 more closely to the King crab existing in the present seas. 



One point of the Blalvem Hills was peculiarly interesting. It was impossible 

 for any geologist to stand in that valley just over the ridge of the hill, the Valley 

 of the White-leaved Oak, without feeling convinced that he is standing near the 

 Bite of -an ancient volcano. And the more he studies the rocks around him the 

 more sure he will become of the fact ; for he finds beds of pumico and scoriae, 

 interbedded with sedimentai-y rocks of shak, and recognises the proofs that it was 

 an island volcano with a deep surrounding sea — a volcano that showed the inter- 

 mittaut action of the volcanos of the present day— that vomited forth its streams 



