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Severn was excavated down to the old lacustrine silt. The alluvium of 

 the present river is between twenty and thirty feet thick. Below this was 

 a stiiF tenacious red clay, and below this, again, a black lacustrine silt, 

 containing freshwater shells, some ancient pottery, and a fossilized horn of 

 a red deer. The pottery was thirty feet, and the red deer's horn was 

 thirty-seven feet and a half from the surface. Both were found in 

 the lacustrine silt. 



I have to thank Mr, Alfeed "Williams, the engineer of the Tewkesbury 

 Docks, for these particulars. I would also observe that abundance of 

 freshwater shells are found in the old lake beds only. They occur 

 in thick masses imbedded in black mud with drift wood and fossil 

 nuts. Mr. Steickland has sunk through the Severn alluvium near 

 the "Eaw Bridge ; but neither here, nor at Tewkesbury, nor at the 

 Brick-pits at Upton-on-Severn, could I ever obtain any well-preserved 

 specimens of freshwater shells ; yet, if we once strike the lacustrine mud, 

 which is overlaid by the alluvium, freshwater shells occur in thousands. 

 Mr. Strickland possesses a mass of these shells, obtained from the very 

 base of his brick-pits, imbedded with the teeth of a larg3 horse. In 

 "Worcester Museum we have the remains of existing animals, but no 

 remains of the extinct mammalia from these lake silts. The human skeleton 

 found at Defford on laying the foundation of the railway bridge, and 

 recorded by Mr. Hugh Strickland ; the ancient pottery near the base of 

 the Tewkesbury Docks ; and the skeleton in the peat moss near Mickleton 

 Tunnel, all probably belong to the lake period. 



Allijvial Deposits. The first point we remark is the great difference 

 which at present obtains in the deposition of sUt and alluvium by such 

 rivers as the Severn and Avon, compared with the swift flowing streams 

 like the "Wye and Usk, which have a fall of as much as two-and-a-half 

 feet in a mile along their general course. In some localities the "Wye has 

 shifted its course, filled up its former channel, and cut out a new bed, 

 within the memory of man. Mr. Charles Eichaedson, C.E., in his 

 contribution to the Edinburgh New Phil. Journal, entitled " Chronological 

 Kemarks on the River Wye," mentions an instance of the shifting of the 

 course of the "Wye, as proved by an old map, which gives the position of 

 the celebrated Boss Oak, now known as the Burnt Oak, and the river as it 

 flowed a century and a half ago. A broad surface of meadow land now 

 sweeps where the "Wye then flowed, and the river now runs some seventy 

 or eighty yards from the former bank on which that old oak stood. 

 Indeed, many of the old inhabitants of Ross lately assured me that the 

 channel of the river Wye, near the town, has been very much changed 

 since their own remembrance. This, however, is not the case with the 

 smoothly flowing Severn and sluggish Avon, to anything like the same 



