10 
seen resting against the “Old Red Sandstone.” Here a halt 
was made, and, at the request of the President, the Rev. W. 8. 
Symonps, spoke at some length on the interesting Geology 
of the district around May Hill, Flaxley, the Forest of Dean, 
and the wide-spread vale of the Severn. ‘“ Years had passed 
away since he first visited that neighbourhood in company 
with Mr. Srricknanp, one of the earliest and most dis- 
tinguished members of the Cotteswold Club, who conducted 
the old Silurian chief, Sir Roprrick Murcuison, to the © 
excavations on the Gloucester and Hereford railway and the 
faulted rocks of ‘Upper Silurian’ on which they were then 
looking.” Mr. Symonps reviewed the history of the palzozoic 
rocks, and glanced at the fossils they contained. Alluding to 
the Carboniferous period and its wonderful land vegetation, 
Mr. Symonps explained how, after that period had passed away— 
in Permian times—those great upheavals took place, the result 
of volcanic energy, to which we owe it that the coal-fields of 
South Wales, of Dean Forest, and of Bristol are brought within 
the reach of our mining industries. 
The address closed with a description of the Severn Straits 
and the days of the Mammoth and prehistoric man. Mr, 
Symonps referred his hearers for fuller information on the 
subject to Murcutson’s “ Siluria,” SrrickLanp’s paper on the 
“Upheaval of the Malverns,” Puriurrs’s ‘Memoir on the 
Malverns,” and Dr. Hout’s paper in the Quarterly Journal of the 
Geological Society for 1856. 
The next poimt made was the Camp at Welshbury. The 
carriages being left in the road below, a rather arduous climb 
brought the party to the top of the hill, and to the site of the 
Camp, where they were rewarded by a glorious outlook east 
and north over the Severn, with May Hill and its well-known 
clump of trees in the centre of the prospect. This place was 
not marked as a Camp in the Ordnance Map, and attention was 
first drawn to it by Mr. G. F. Prayne, whose valuable paper on 
“the Ancient Camps of Gloucestershire,” will be found in the 
last volume of the Transactions of the Cotteswold Club. In 
company with Mr. Joun Bettows he explored this locality about 
