8 PROCEEDINGS COTTESWOLD CLUB 1904 
final form was due, not to marine action, but to subaerial 
forces, working by frost and running water. I now pro- 
pose, by way of contrast, to picture to you the district in 
which we live as it was in those remote ages when no 
animal had yet trodden the solid land or fish swum in the 
waters; when, it may be, not even the humblest mollusc had 
come into being. Instead of the gentle Naiades of the air 
and stream, I shall invoke Pluto and his fiery myrmidons, 
and show you that, in Precambrian times, on the site of 
Malvern, and far away for hundreds of miles to the north 
and west, the subterranean energies of the globe were 
piling up volcanoes, and scattering showers of ashes over 
land and water. I take as my foent @apput the Uriconian 
rocks of Malvern. 
Several rocky spurs project from the eastern base of the 
Herefordshire Beacon into the Severn Valley at Little 
Malvern, occupying an area of about one mile from north 
to south, and half-a-mile from east to west. They are 
built up of alternating bands of volcanic matter, the 
dominant type being acidic lavas, andesites and _tuffs, 
a compact flinty variety of ash being very characteristic. 
The strike of the bedding is north and south, that is, 
parallel to the geographical strike of the Malvern range, 
and the dip at high angles to the east, with occasional 
reversal to the west. Associated with these strata are 
bands of dolerite; but whether they were flows of basic 
lava or later intrusions is not yet ascertained. The bulk 
of the above rocks are undoubtedly volcanic. They do 
not essentially differ from the products of recent volcanoes ; 
but as they do not contain coarsely fragmental material, 
they were probably accumulated at a distance from any 
crater of eruption. They are a small relic of an extensive 
formation known as the Uriconian System. We may 
safely say that, in the Uriconian epoch, volcanoes were 
scattered over this area. Far below us at the present 
