THE CORRELATION OF THE QUATERNARY DEPOSITS 

 OF THE BRITISH ISLES WITH THOSE OF THE CON- 

 TINENT OF EUROPE. 



By Chaeles E. P. Brooks, M. Sc, F. G. S., F. R. Met. Soc. 



INTRODUCTION. 



In any attempt to reconstruct the geographical and meteorological 

 conditions of various stages of a former period, it is necessary first 

 to classify the various deposits which are referable to the period into 

 definite stages. This preliminary is often difficult ; in the case of the 

 Quaternary deposits of the British Isles it is especially difficult be- 

 cause of their great complexity. It is hard to find fixed characters 

 to act as a means of correlating the various local f acies one with an- 

 other, and to distinguish slight oscillations of the ice-edge from 

 longer periods of interglacial rank. It is necessary to find some dis- 

 trict outside these islands where the succession is simple and the 

 amount of field work done sufficiently great to make the conclusions 

 arrived at fairly certain. Such a district exists in the north Ger- 

 man plain which was visited only by ice from Scandinavia, un- 

 mixed with local ice, which lay in the region of deposition of that 

 ice, and which possesses a literature of truly stupendous proportions. 

 In fact, it was only when I began to collect a bibliography of the 

 subject that I realized the magnitude of the task I had undertaken. 



This study of north Germany gave me a series of very definite 

 glacial and interglacial horizons, which could be traced by ordi- 

 nary stratigraphical and paleontological methods through Holland, 

 and correlated with fair certainty with the glacial deposits of east- 

 ern England. But in Holland the Rhine gravels entered into the 

 series, and could be traced through the Vosges and Plateau Central 

 into the river valleys of western France. The Rhine gravels had 

 been traced upstream and connected with the Alpine glacial se- 

 quence made out by Penck and Bruckner, which Penck had extended 

 to the Pyrenees, where it was connected with the gravels of the 

 Garonne. The sequence in the Seine and Somme is exactly similar 

 to that in the Thames, and the two could be correlated directly. In 

 short, a network of cross correlations could be made between the 

 various districts, reducing the chances of error to a minimum. 



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