IK) 



To assign the Geological age to the bed at Holly Hazle is by 

 no means an easy task, but I would submit for the consideration 

 of the members of the Club the following facts and the hypo- 

 thesis I base thereon. 



I have stated that at the bottom of the peat is a bed of fine 

 clay, and that this rests on an eroded surface of hard Eed Marl. 

 Now, at the base of the drift gravel and close to it at the section 

 already given, the same eroded surface of hard Eed Marl is met 

 with. 



As the gravels resting on the eroded surface, and which ex- 

 tend up to and around Gloucester, where I have lately seen 

 many admirable examples of the power which must have been 

 required to plane off the hard beds of the Lower Lias, are the 

 low level beds of Mr. Peestwich, there is a basis for guidance, 

 but then the question arises, What is the fine tenacious clay 

 which forms the base of the peat bed ? and What was its origin ? 



Now I believe this clay, with its Northern Drift and boulders, 

 only represents a small portion of what once covered, and perhaps 

 filled up, some of our low valleys, and, as I hope shortly to show, 

 extended over the Cotteswolds ; and the reason why we have so 

 few traces of Boulder Clay left in the Severn district is that the 

 configuration of the Bristol Channel has always been, (as is the 

 case at present,) such as to give a larger tidal action than 

 the Thames and other of our estuarine rivers, and it is this 

 increased tidal action that has removed so much of the clay. 



thickness on the land above the beach, this must have been the case. The 

 trees, in fact, could not have grown in the angiilar detritus vrithout some 

 soil being with it. 



In the Journal of the Ethnological Society for 1870, page 142, Mr. Boyd 

 Dawkins mentions that in the autumn of 1869, he and the Rev. H. H. 

 WiinvoOD, on digging through a layer of undisturbed vegetable matter, 

 found ihnt and chert chippings and one very well formed flake, which, 

 apparently, had never been used. They were embedded in the upper 

 ferruginous portion of the angular detritus, and evidently had been di-Qjjped 

 upon the surface soil of the period and not transported by water. They 

 also found flint chippings in the same position in the submerged forest at 

 Minehead. 



Mr. GoDwrN-AuSTEN believes the angular detritus to be referable to the 

 glacial period. 



