the London and Hampshire Basins. 35 



of accounting for the presence of stones so foreign to the country 

 as these obelisks of greenstone, he falls into the humour of the 

 archaeologists and believes them to have been transported from 

 Ireland*. The historians and ethnologists who have better 

 studied, in its broad extent, the prevalence of stone-pillar wor- 

 ship in the rude times of Abury and Stonehenge, will be better 

 able to weigh the evidence of the means of transport enjoyed by 

 the Britons of those days, than the zealous men who gave their 

 assistance to the Stukeleys, and Hoares and Cunningtons of the 

 past century. For a knowledge of the above-mentioned paper of 

 Mr. Conybeare I am also indebted to Professor Ramsay. 



I have little doubt that an attentive examination of what have 

 hitherto passed as greywethers on the Berkshire, Hampshire, and 

 Wiltshire Hills, and the many which are used for fences and 

 landmarks and other oeconomic pui'poses in the Vale of Pewsey 

 and other parts of the chalk country, would bring to light many 

 other testimonials of the former existence there of the " northern 

 drift." The same may be said, perhaps, of the Hampshire and 

 Dorset coasts, and of the Chesil Bank. The manner in which 

 the occurrence of this zone of drift bears on the general question 

 of dislocation and denudation will be seen presently. 



We are now in a position to understand the true geological 

 relations of the country we have had under review, and to con- 

 sider it as a sectional part of the great anticlinal to which it pro- 

 perly belongs. We see in it, in conjunction with other parts of 

 the same area, fragmentary records of three great geological 

 epochs posterior to the chalk. 



The first involves considerations of the deposit and area of the 

 tertiary formations. 



The second the " glacial period." Both these are anterior to 

 the rise of the great anticlinal. 



The third commences with this upburst of the older strata, and 

 is the diluvial epoch -.—in which I find the parentage of that he- 

 terogeneous and much-abused mass into which everyone throws 

 the materials which he cannot otherwise conveniently dispose 

 of — the post-pliocene, and the great undefined universality — 

 Drift. 



Tertiary Epoch and Area. 



When I began to speculate on these matters, one of my first 

 and earliest eff"orts was directed to disabuse the public mind of 

 the notion, adopted from the French geologists, of the formation 



* Mr. Couybeaic had not then heard of a "glacial period," and the 

 transport into this part of the world by icebergs. 



D2 



