Ill 



From the circumstance that no large Boulders or Boulder 

 Clay * have been found on the high ground of the Cotteswold 

 HiUs, and that the former are only met with in the Valleys, 

 increasing in size and number as you proceed northward in the 

 Severn's course, it would appear to foUow from Professor 

 Eamsat, that the denudation of the Cotteswolds took place 

 prior to the Glacial Epoch : but such, I think, was not the 

 case, and I am inclined to refer the time to an early part of the 

 Glacial period.f 



The presence of fragments of Millstone Grit, Quartzose 

 Pebbles, and the apparent absence of Cretaceous Flints from 

 the height at which Gravel is first met with, down to about 100 

 feet, seem to indicate the transportation of the former, when 

 the Chalk was not in a position in this part of the country to 

 admit of being denuded, and brought to the higher plateaus of 

 the Cotteswolds. 



Afterwards the ground seems to have sunk farther beneath 

 the sea, and, as Mr. Page remarks, it was then, and during the 

 period of its subsidence, that the high boulders were carried 

 by floating ice far from their parent rocks, marking in a special 

 manner the second period of the Glacial epoch, and this period 

 in the district we have under our consideration, would, I think, 

 embrace the country from the coming in of the Cretaceous 

 Flints down to nearly the time of the High Level Gravel. 



In visiting the Shipston and Evenlode Valleys, I was much 

 impressed with the distinct evidence of the action of ice in all its 

 varied forms of berg, land, and sheet; of the vast mantle of frozen 

 snow and ice which, as it appeared to me, must once have lined 

 the tops and sides of the hills, carrying down with it, when the 

 summer thaws set in, the materials upon which it rested ; and 

 it was in consequence of my observations there, that I have 



* Unless the clay found in the partings of the Oolite quarries on the Cottes- 

 wold, more particularly at Woodchester, where the Quartz Pebbles occur, 

 belongs to the latter. 



t The extent of the denudation of the Cotteswolds was so great as to lead 

 so acute an observer as Dr. Buckland to attribute it to a vast diluvial wave 

 caused by the Noachian Deluge. 



