34 



but great masses of greenstone and Llandovery conglomerate rest upon 

 its summit, as my friend Captain Guise can testify. 



The celebrated Arthur's stone on Merbridge HiU, near "Winforton, on 

 the "Wye, is a transported block which could only have been carried 

 by an ice floe. I could give many instances and examples, but enough 

 has been said to call attention to the fact that these transported boulders 

 are to be found throughout Herefordshire and "Wales, and that they must 

 have been dropped where they now rest when the summits of hills as 

 high as Merbridge and Bradnor were beneath the ice-traversed sea. The 

 more I enter into the history of the boulder phenomena, the more I feel 

 assured that the part of England we now inhabit was principally beneath 

 the sea at an early period of the Glacial epoch, and it was during this 

 epoch that I believe the scooping out of the valleys was effected by the 

 agency of ice and water, dirring a protracted epoch, and which denuded, 

 or rather degraded, the enormous thickness of strata which have been 

 scooped out between the Malvems and the Cotteswolds. 



High Levkl Dbtfts (Marine). These drifts occupy heights ranging 

 from 70 to 250 feet above the Severn. The land was gradually rising, 

 and the elevated surfaces of the sea bottom, over which in the Rock Drift 

 epoch waves covered with ice floes rolled, appeared as dry land. For 

 age after age the land arose, and the former bed of a sea became the haunts 

 of the mammoth, the long-haired rhinoceros, and the tail-less hare. Boreal 

 shells lived in the seas. England must have then been joined to the 

 continent of Europe, and probably Ireland was continuous with the Isle 

 of Man. In our own district I cannot doubt that the high level drifts 

 were deposited during the period of the Malvern straits of Mxjbchison, 

 when the Malvems and Cotteswolds were elevated above the sea level, 

 but when hills 300 and 400 feet in height were submerged in the waves . 

 I suspect that we shall be obliged to divide the high level drifts into two 

 distinct and separate deposits, as representing different sea bed surfaces, 

 and appertaining to different epochs of elevation of that sea bed. 



I am not quite satisfied with the correlation of drift deposits on the 

 summits of Corsewood Hill, Wainlode Hill, Gadbury Camp, and other 

 hills of considerable elevation, with drifts which occupy lower surfaces, as 

 at Tunnel Hill, and EyaU Hill, near T7pton-on-Sevem ; Twining gravel 

 pits, at Shuthonger common, near Tewkesbury ; and Elmore, near 

 Gloucester. We have yet much to investigate before we can hope to 

 obtain a clear insight into the history of our "Worcestershire and 

 Gloucestershire drifts, and the reason which induced me to bring the subject 

 before the memberg of the Cotteswold Field Club was in the hope that I 

 might receive the valuable cooperation of the members of this society* 

 "With regard to the fossils of the high level drifts, we have of late obtained 



