( 85 ) 



114. — Notes from the Ardennes. 



By Dr. H. Franklin Parsons. 



(Kead October 17th, 1893.) 



The following notes on a few observations made during a brief 

 tour in the south of Belgium in the end of August and beginning 

 of September, 1893, are submitted in the hope that they may not 

 be without interest to members of the Croydon Microscopical and 

 Natural History Club. 



The route taken was to Namur, thence by steamer up the 

 river Meuse to Dinant, thence by road to Rochefort and Han- 

 sur-Lesse; by train to La Eoche, and home again. The tract of 

 country traversed is a plateau gradually rising to the south-east 

 to a height of 1000 — 2000 ft., and deeply carved into valleys by 

 the rivers which traverse it. It was formerly a vast forest, the 

 Forest of Ardennes, which in Caesar's time reached from the 

 Ehine to the Rhone. At the present time, however, the woods 

 are chiefly confined to the steep slopes of the valleys ; the 

 plateaux being under cultivation and devoid of timber, except 

 long formal avenues of trees, like those in a box of toys, planted 

 by the roadsides. The alluvial ground at the bottom of the 

 valleys forms meadow land, in some places laid out as water 

 meadows. 



The Meuse from Namur to Dinant is a river about the size of 

 the Thames at Hampton Court, flowing in a narrow valley with 

 steep carboniferous limestone cliffs at the sides, like the Avon 

 below Bristol. The carboniferous limestone is in thick beds, 

 apparently with a general dip at a high angle to the north, but in 

 some places nearly vertical, and in others much contorted. Here 

 and there a hard bed of rock among softer strata has been left 

 by denudation standing out as a wall in the side of the valley ; a 

 detached portion of such a wall near Dinant forms a solitary 

 pinnacle of rock about 100 ft. high, called La Roche de Bayard. 

 The cliffs are of the form familiar in the carboniferous limestone 

 districts of this country, such as the Mendip HiUs, the Welsh 

 borders, and the Derbyshire and Yorkshire dales. Some of the 

 crags are crowned with ruined fortresses, reminding one of those 

 on the Rhine. A bed of boulder clay was observed in a road 

 cutting on the higher ground near Dinant. The geological for- 

 mation at Rochefort and Han-sur-Lesse is carboniferous lime- 

 stone similar to that at Dinant ; but between Dinant and Roche- 

 fort there is a tract composed of shales and sandstones resembling 

 those of the coal-measures. Fossils were not plentiful in the 

 carboniferous limestone, but corals were observed in a few 

 places, and the large brachiopod shell, Productus, characteristic 



