On the Anticlinal Line of the London and Hampshire Basins. 167 



or that bed of diluvium, to be accounted for by certain local 

 arrangements. With this key in his mind, let the observer tirst 

 consider the phsenomena of anticlinal and synclinal contortions, 

 the flexures and puckerings of strata struggUng upwards under 

 the restraint of lateral pressure, or rather lateral resistance and 

 incumbency, such foldings and contortions most apparent in the 

 great argillaceous formation of the Wealden*. Tlien the system 

 of cross- fracture, first pointed out by myself and afterwards ma- 

 thematically accounted for by Mr. Hopkins, as the result of one 

 great and simidtaneous act of upheaval. Thirdly, of the uni- 

 formity of watershed and drainage, first glanced at by Conybeare 

 and Phdhps, and afterwards enlarged on by myself, and insisted 

 on as an evidence of the unity and entirety of at least the fii'st 

 great upburst of the inferior beds. Fourthly, of the uniform and 

 irrefragable evidence of contemporaneous violent aqueous erosion 

 to be observed over some hundreds of square miles of country ; 

 the prominence of stony, and the recession of more friable and 

 otherwise more destructible surfaces ; and especially the down- 

 cast and laceration of the escarpments of the outcropping second- 

 aiy stony strata. And lastly, in the arrangement and the di- 

 spersion of drift along the axis of elevation, within the eroded 

 valleys on either side, and within the basins or great synclinal 

 depressions, of which the anticlinal forms the line of separation. 



Without this key, and this comprehensive view of the general 

 arrangement of the country from the chalk of the midland coun- 

 ties to the chalk of the Isle of Wight and the Boulonnais, the 

 strictly geological features of this area remain a mystery, and all 

 attempts at forming a just rationale of local phsenomena must 

 fail. 



It is with this habit of \dewing the south-east of England as 

 the scene of great disturbance, as I before said, in its totality, 

 that the phfenomena of drift can only be studied with eff"ect. It 

 has been frequently asserted that the Weald has no drift. I have 

 endeavoured, in my former communications to this Journal, to 

 bring evidence in contradiction of this assertion. Sir Roderick 

 Murchison, in his disquisition on "flint drift,^^ published in the 

 Journal of the Geological Society, soon after the promulgation of 

 my opinions, lays much stress on the bare state of the rocky 

 Hastings-sand districts ; and although he finds some marks of a 

 local accumulation of dctrital matters, and describes with great 

 accuracy the vicinal remarkable gravel-bed at Ilever, he seems 

 still to think the absence of flint-drift in the centre of the Weald 

 strong presuni]>tive evidence of an exceptional case. There is no 



• It is probably owiD}» to the impressible nature of these beds that they 

 are maile the nucleus of the denudation, and the axis of elevation, — the 

 point of least resistance, existing thereby. 



