118 



The position wliicli I seek to establidli is that there was a time 

 when the whole of the land in this part of the Severn valley, as 

 seen in the hard bed of the Old Eed Marl at Holly Hazle, and 

 also in the hard Lias beds at Grloucester and beyond Tewkesbury 

 was eroded, and this, 1 believe, was either caused by the force 

 which deposited the Boulder Clay, or by some kind of ice action 

 just prior to its deposit. That there are remains of that same 

 clay with its embedded small boulders and Northern Drift now 

 at the base of the Peat Bed. That the beginning of the Peat Bed 

 occurred when the climate began to ameliorate is evident, as it is 

 well known the Oak will not flourish in cold climates. In Norway 

 the extreme limit of growth is said to be 63° latitude. That a 

 vast forest growth must have been going on for ages to accu- 

 mulate such a mass of peat, that it occurred when the elevation 

 of the land was far higher than at present, and what is now the 

 estuary of the Severn was a dense forest, with probably only a 

 narrow rivulet running through it, admitting of the passing over 

 of some of the extinct quadrupeds that inhabited the fissures and 

 caves found in Glamorganshire and Monmouthshire, and that 

 part of the German Ocean may have been at that time forest land 

 also, connecting Great Britain with the Continent.* The fine 

 horns I have referred to of Bos Primigenius — an animal that lived 

 in the forest beds of Cromer — came out of the same peat bed 

 between Sharpness a.nd Purton. 



That afterwards a subsidence of the land set in which covered 

 the whole of the forest, and most likely we only see part of the 

 silt that is left, and which in its turn was scattered over in 

 places with a slight covering of drift. 



The more I consider the recent changes of the Earth's surface 

 the more impressed I am how much we have still to learn, and 

 how impoi-tant is the investigation of them to enable Geologists 

 more clearly to apprehend the long interval of time which must 

 have been necessary to form the great sedimentary dejjosits with 

 which our globe is encrusted. 



* See Appendix : Mr. Geikie, "The Great Ice Age." 



