136 



Upon the gravel rest two or three feet of vegetable soil, over which is 

 strewn another bed of similar gravel, an inch or two only in thickness, 

 and over all, under the existing herbage, the qnartzose and red 

 sandstone pebbles, of the (so-called) northern drift. Taking onr stand 

 at this point, and scanning the vale with the eye of a geologist, 

 we may readily trace the sequence of all the deposits, of which 

 the elements of the landscape around us consist.. We cannot doubt that 

 the lias upon which we stand, once stretched across what is now the 

 channel of the Severn, and rested upon the red sandstone, as correspond- 

 ing beds do at present on the opposite shore at Awre, near Poulton Court. 

 Looking directly up the river, we may see distinctly, with the aid of a 

 glass, the same beds stretching away in a corresponding direction at the 

 Hock Crib, and we know that a few miles beyond this lies Westbury 

 Cliff, where the lowest beds of the lias rest upon the new red marls, and 

 these, at Flaxley, unconformably against the Upper Silurian rock, thrown 

 up near Sir Martin Crawley's schools, enabling us to judge at what 

 period the great disturbance of the Protozoic formations in this neigh- 

 bourhood took place. 



All these, from the Mayhill sandstone to the upper beds of the 

 Carboniferous system, had been placidly de[)osited in their due order in 

 the depths of a vast sea. 



The section of the Forest Coal Field, in any direction, shown upon the 

 maps of the Ge,)logical Survey, indicates no relative disturVjance of its 

 component strata, pi'ior to that effected by the turning up of its edges, by 

 the protusion of older rocks which form the tracts, which separate it 

 from the neighbouring coal-fields of Bristol and Glamorgan, the central 

 portion remaining comparatively undisturbed. The relations of the 

 Secondary, to the Protozoic and eruptive rocks of the district, are 

 everywhere the same, and the line of unconformity between them, 

 mav be traced from the trap boss at Tortworth, behind us, on the 

 S.E., to the flanks of the Malvern range, before 'us, on the N.W. 

 Wherever first or last exerted, we know that the cosmic force by which 

 that great Sienitic mass was abruptly uplifted, produced the contortions 

 of the Silurian rocks around it, and the undulations of those before us, 

 and under our feet ; passing hence, still upheaving Silurian strata through 

 those of the Devonian age, and penetrating these again at Tortworth with 

 a mass of trap, it subsides from this point under the Bristol coal-field 

 to produce efiects analagous to those already described around and beyond 

 it. It is not our object to trace further the development of this force, 

 and its consequences, but to bring more prominently forward than they 

 have hitherto been bnmght in the Transactions of the Club, those 



