46 A PROBLEM FOR CHESHIRE GEOLOGISTS. 
It is with respect to the Jurassic strata, however, that we 
possess the most striking evidence concerning their former 
wide distribution, and the extensive removal of their beds by 
denudation. And it is in regard to the beds of this age that it 
is especially desirable that the attention of geologists residing 
in Cheshire and the adjoining counties should be aroused. 
The greater part of the Lias, and much of the Oolitic strata 
appears to have been deposited in moderately deep water. 
Hence it is quite impossible to suppose that the patches of 
Lias and other clays to which we are about to refer could have 
been deposited in their present isolated condition. 
If we follow the outcrop of the Jurassic strata from the 
South-west to the North-east of England, we shall find beyond 
its limits many scattered patches of strata or outliers, which 
were evidently once connected with the strata forming escarp- 
ments in their immediate vicinity, but are now isolated by 
denudation. Beyond these outliers, which were manifestly once 
a part of the main mass of the strata in their neighbourhood, 
we find a number of others, some of them situated at very 
great distances from the main line of outcrop. 
That Jurassic strata were originally deposited over the 
Mendip area was shown by the late Mr. Cuas. Moors, who 
found Rhaetic and Liassic fossils occupying deep fissures in 
the Carboniferous Limestone of the district. 
In Somersetshire and South Wales, there are patches of 
Liassic strata lying far to the West of the general line of 
outcrop of those beds; and similar outlying fragments are 
found about Copt Heath in Warwickshire, and Needwood 
Forest in Staffordshire. Similar outliers, but still farther 
removed from the parent mass, are found in North Shropshire 
and Cheshire and in the neighbourhoood of Carlisle. Still 
farther away, about Portrush and Rathlin Island in the North 
of Ireland, in Morvern, Mull, Ardnamurchan, Raasay, Skye 
and the Shiant Isles in the Western Highlands of Scotland, and 
again in Ross, Sutherland, and Caithness, in the extreme 
North-east of Scotland, similar patches of Jurassic strata are 
found. 
Tf we turn our attention to the Cretaceous strata similar facts 
force themselves upon our attention. Strata of the age of the 
Upper Greensand and Chalk, which are found overlapping all 
the older rocks in Dorset and Devon, reappear in Antrim and 
the adjoining counties of the North of Ireland, and again in 
Mull and Morvern. In the intermediate area, and even as far 
Northwards as Aberdeen, the occurrence in the drift of Chalk 
Flints often containing fossils points to the former wide exten- 
sion of the Chalk strata. Now the globigerina-ooze of the 
Chalk was certainly not a shallow-water deposit, and if Chalk 
be proved to have been deposited at all these different points in 
the British Islands, it must have also covered, at one time, the 
