526 Geological Society: Anniversary Address, 1843. 
tended laterally in the form of vast beds, must have had a great 
share in the production of such phenomena. Having myself taken 
no little interest in the formation of the Dudley and Midland Geo- 
logical Society *, I hail this report upon the physical condition of 
the subterranean masses of that tract as worthy of the approbation 
of men of science in all countries; for the history of Dudley is that 
of many regions of the earth, which have been penetrated by in- 
trusive matter. 
The progress made in our knowledge of the Seconpary Britisu_ Rocks, 
under the several heads of New Red Sandstone, Lias and Oolites, Wealden 
and Cretaceous System, is next stated, leading to the 
TERTIARY PERIOD. 
The session has not added much to our knowledge of British Ter- 
tiary deposits. Mr. Trimmer, well known to us by his researches in 
detrital phenomena, has lately expressed his opinion that the pecu- 
liar eroded surface of the chalk, in which pipes filled with sand or 
gravel are of frequent occurrence, was produced by the action of the 
sea during a period which preceded the deposit of the London clay. 
There can be no objection to this view being applied to all those 
corroded surfaces of the chalk, which are surmounted by the Eocene 
deposits of plastic clay and sand and London_clay, including, I would 
add from the recent observations of Count Keyserling and myself, the 
junction of the chalk and Lower Tertiary in Alum Bay. It would, 
however, be manifestly wrong to suppose, that such a corrosion of 
the surface of the chalk had not also been effected at other and sub- 
sequent periods; and as proofs of a still more recent corrosion, 
the observer has only to examine the shore and cliffs near Brighton, 
and see how similar cavities have been filled up by a breccia, in 
which the bones of elephants are imbedded. 
Some remarkable concretions in the Tertiary beds of the Isle of 
Man (where the newer marine Pliocene strata were first described 
by Professor E. Forbes, and shown by him to oceupy perhaps a larger 
area than in any one locality of the British Isles), have elicited from 
Mr. H. Strickland the suggestion, that they were caused by currents 
of water, or by the action of wind during ebb-tide. 
Among the terrestrial phenomena which have recently excited 
notice, is the discovery by Dr. Riley of a bone-cavern in the Moun- 
tain Limestone of Durdham Down near Bristol, the opening of which 
has been conducted by Mr. Stutchbury, who has described its con- 
tents. Distinguishing, as Dr. Buckland had formerly done, the cavities 
formed by fissures in the rock, into which bones had been washed 
with detritus of rocks and soil, or into which whole animals had 
fallen, from caverns inhabited by extinct species of canine animals, 
Mr. Stutchbury shows, that the facts observed in this case entirely 
favour the latter hypothesis, the bones (among which those of the 
hyzena vastly preponderate) being fractured into small bits without 
the admixture of any rolled or far-transported detritus. The most 
* See Address to the Dudley and Midland Counties Geological Society, 
841. 
