4 THE RHTIC BEDS. 
so-called White Lias, consisting of from ten to twenty feet of 
thinly bedded white, grey, or cream-coloured limestone. I have 
occasionally found in the drift deposits near here fragments of a 
white hard limestone exactly resembling one of the hard beds 
of the White Lias; but as far as I know, this sub-division has 
never been found ¢z situ in Rheetic sections of the Midland 
district. 
‘Up to a recent date the only exposures which exhibit the 
junction of the Rheetics, on the one hand with the New Red, 
and on the other with the Lias, have been coast sections, such as 
that at Aust, in Gloucestershire, which Mr. O’Sullivan and I had 
an opportunity of examining last year. It was, therefore, with 
considerable pleasure that I learned from the last number but 
one of the Geological Magazine that a fine and complete section 
had been opened up at Wigston, near Leicester. I went over 
recently to examine this in the expectation of finding a succession 
of strata strictly comparable with those of our Needwood outliers. 
Although I did not find the parallel quite as close as I expected, 
considering the comparatively short distance between the two 
places, yet the general resemblances are very close; and it 
was highly satisfactory to have an opportunity of examining a 
perpendicular face of Rhetics from the junction with the New 
Red to their junction with the Lower Lias. Unlike a coast 
section, a clean cut, unweathered surface, like that at Wigston, | 
affords every opportunity for minute examination. The section 
itself has been carefully described by Messrs. Wilson and Quilter, 
but they have scarcely touched upon certain points which are 
of the highest possible interest to the physical geologist, viz., the 
changes of physical conditions during deposition, as evidenced 
by the altered nature of the sediment. 
At the bottom of the pit, which has been opened out as a 
brickyard, are seen the ordinary red gypsiferous marls that we 
all know so well. A few feet upwards the red marls give place 
to thin alternating bands of grey and red marls, which merge by 
very slow gradations into a mass of ‘‘Tea Green Marls,” about 
15 feet thick. These resemble in every respect, except thickness 
