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variety presented by the Cotteswold Hills in a journey by rail- 

 way into Gloucestershire, and the Bath beds being a southern 

 continuation of the Cotteswolds the same features present them- 

 selves everywhere around Bath. Similar, also, are the pretty 

 combes of tlie Gloucestershire Hills with those around Bath. 

 But it must be manifest, since there can be but little doubt that 

 the various beds were originally on the same horizon and contain 

 generally the same traces of organic life, that they were deposited 

 contemporaneously, and, from the thin laminse of some of the 

 clays, which at times no more than equal the thickness of a sheet 

 of paper, very slowly and perhaps periodically. 



Accepting, then, as a geological fact that there was a time 

 when the Bath basin and its valley prolongations did not exist, 

 how are we to account for their presence 1 when formed and by 

 what agencies 1 Answers to the first and the last are easy, viz., 

 by denudation. But much that is difficult lies behind this. 

 If we could, to use a humorous expression of Sedgwick's, " strip 

 oft' Dame Nature's petticoats," much might be revealed to us ; 

 but I suspect it would require a vigorous geological intellect to 

 explain the twisted, turned up and contorted palaeozoic beds 

 beneath our feet. Remembering the tapping of the source of 

 the Bath waters in 1838, I suspect we are better as we are. It 

 was not known till 1864 that a great line of dislocation passed 

 under Bath, when it was pointed out by me to Sir Charles LyeU, 

 who introduced it into his British Association address as bearing 

 upon the presence of the Bath waters. The fault is 200ft. in 

 thickness, and the depression on the south side or the elevation 

 of that on the north to that extent must have exercised an im- 

 portant bearing in facilitating the subsequent denudations, as 

 valleys with their rivers usually indicate weak lines of stratifica- 

 tion. Carboniferous beds are found two miles west of Bath at 

 Tvrerton, and again at Batheaston two miles to the east. There 

 appear to have been two periods of disturbance which have 

 affected the beds, one which was contemporary with the uplift 



