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leaves and fronds which were plentifully interspersed in its layers, spoke 
of overhanging banks covered with the plants which found at last a 
resting place in its quiet waters. A vast inland sea perchance it was, 
the uplifted bed of which now stretched in almost unbroken line from 
Derbyshire to Northumberland. That ancient sea-bed, now lifted high 
into tors, fells, peaks, and moors, formed the “ back-bone” of England ; 
the great central water-shed from which flowed the streams on each 
side of it, either into the Irish Sea or German Ocean. Looking into 
the substance of the millstone grit, its small smooth fragments of rolled 
_ quartz, its glittering spangles of mica, with the felspar between all, 
told of vast mountains of granite, which must have been broken up in 
order to form it. Were the Cheviots once 60,000 feet high, as Ramsay 
told us the Scotch mountains were? or had the Cumberland hills lost 
some five miles in perpendicular height, as the Mendips had? He 
would not pretend to say; but, gazing at these enormous masses of 
sandstone, which must have been brought as sediment by in-pouring 
rivers and deposited along the bottom of some great sea, the mind was 
oppressed with a sense either of the vast forces which must have been 
once at work, or of the long eternities through which smaller ones 
must have persisted. Here imagination might find ample scope for 
its powers, and a “use” also which should be, in the best sense of the 
word, “scientific.” 
. The PRESIDENT (Mr. Haselwood), in proposing a vote of thanks, 
said that personally he had felt deeply interested in the lecture, for in 
his youth he went over all the district on foot, seeing the wonderful 
rock, valleys, and everything, but he had not the scientific knowledge 
to appreciate it. 
Mr. WONFOR said that Derbyshire was the first ground on which 
he studied the subject of geology ; and on first looking at the place he 
was undef the impression that he was looking at castles, towers, and 
ruins. On arriving he went out at night, and on going indoors ex- 
pressed his intention of going to look at an old ruined abbey ; but in 
the morning he found that what he had supposed to be ruins was castel- 
lated rock. As regarded the formation of tufa, which was still going on, 
it was much more rapid than people generally thought ; and some of 
the arguments in favour of the great antiquity of certain cave de- 
posits, left out of consideration the fact that drainage and cultivation - 
had diverted the water bearing the stalactitic deposit ; hence in those 
places the comparative modern slowness of deposit. The mountain 
