1868. | Geology. 519 
GxoLocy. (Section C.) 
The Geological Section was presided over by Mr. Godwin-Austen, 
who opened its proceedings with an elaborate address. He remarked 
that some of the later stages of the earth’s geological history were 
so abundantly illustrated in East Anglia, there had been so many 
labourers in the field, and there remained so many unsolved points, 
that he hoped the section would make local geology a prominent 
topic. The points alluded to belonged to the great Kainozoic period, 
and it was in East Anglia alone that the complete sequence of change, 
as it happened in this country, could be followed out. 
The Crag-sea waters were expelled from the North Sea area by 
the rise of the land on the south, the elevation decreasing from 
Belgium to Norwich. The geologist found but little to guide him 
as to the details of the chronology of that vast period when the 
North Sea area was terrestrial and part of the general European 
land-surface. A long list of animals, from the Norfolk Mastodon 
to the Mammoth, had left their remains there, and some of them 
ranged over Central and Southern Europe ; but how many of them 
co-existed remained undecided. 
The “ forest-bed” of Cromer gave a glimpse of the vegetation 
of the period—including the Norway spruce, Scotch fir, yew, and 
oak—but it was more than probable that it must be taken only as 
the facies of the flora of the last stage of terrestrial conditions prior 
to the next great physical change. 
Just as the Crag-beds came in as breaks in the lapse of Tertiary 
terrestrial conditions, so did the accumulations of the great northern 
submergence as a second intercalation ; but the physical change was 
ereater and of a different order. The Arctic basin extended itself as 
low as to lat. 50° N., by a slow submergence from north to south. 
Again the northern hemisphere emerged, apparently from south 
northward, till England as a whole had the same general arrange- 
ment of land and sea as in the Crag period. 
Over the whole of the European and American areas there was 
a region of broad expanses of water-worn detritus, often placed at 
considerable elevations above the present water-levels, the superficial 
extent of which had caused them to be identified with the members 
of the “ Glacial drift,” peculiar to another area, and from which they 
were quite distinct. ‘The conditions indicated were those of low 
winter temperature, terrestrial surfaces with alluvial and fluviatile 
accumulations, indicative of torrential and periodic rivers. They 
lay south of a line drawn across Europe, occasionally on one side or 
the other of the 51st parallel, and they were derived from the areas 
to which belonged the existing river-systems of the South and Mid- 
European continent. 
North of this line the detrital accumulations were neither local 
