xvin. 



Ettinghausen and Gardner (Paleontograph, Soc. Pub.) state that the 

 plants found fossil in this formation are represented by the fruit seeds 

 and leaves of Sequoia, Picris, Callitris, Salisburia, Musa, Nipa, Sabal, 

 Chamasrops, Quercus, Liquidambar, Petrophiloides, Laurus, Nyssa, 

 Diospyros, Symploco*, Magnolia, Victoria, Hightea, Sapindus, Cupania, 

 Eugenia, Eucalyptus and Amygdalus, but most of these have been ob- 

 tained from other parts of the deposit, and probably but few have been 

 actually found in Suffolk. All the organic remains in this deposit give 

 evidence of a warm and even tropical climate during the time that it 

 was being deposited. 



In many places a most interesting deposit is found immediately 

 above the London clay, between it and the Coralline and Eed Crags, 

 known as the Boxstone deposit, a name originally given by the quarry- 

 men to certain stones, which, when broken, revealed a cavity, and in 

 about 5 per cent, a fossil. This deposit varies in places, and contains 

 foreign boulders of quartz, Archaean and Palasozoic rocks, brownish water 

 worn sandstone (the boxstones) phosphatic nodules, rolled bones, and 

 flints. At Foxhall, and in the various coprolite pits in the neighbour- 

 hood, can be seen good examples of this formation ; but in a few places 

 the brown boxstones are found as slabs, not worn down and broken up 

 into pieces, still enclosing fossils and hollow spaces. Many of the 

 stones of this bed are encrusted with fossil barnacles (cirripedes), proof 

 of their previous existence upon a sea bottom. Near Antwerp is found 

 a deposit, the Diestien beds, which is older than the English crags and 

 yet more recent than the London clay, with fossils similar to those 

 contained in the boxstones, and on these grounds it is assumed that 

 the deposit once continuous with the Diestien series, is the remnant, 

 which has escaped the destructive agencies of water, and probably ice 

 action; the presence of foreign erratics pointing to a glacial epoch. The 

 frequency with which the minerals and fossils of the London clay 

 occur in the boxstone deposit, often included with phosphatic deposit, 

 points to the enormous amount of denudation of the older beds, which 

 took place before the newer strata were laid down. Mixed with the 

 erratic blocks are the bones of various extinct Mammals, the remains 

 being in some places so abundant as to merit the term " bone bed," 

 specimens of the teeth of many land animals as the pig, rhinoceros, 

 mastodon, tapir, deer, horse, bear, and bones of whales, which probably 

 nourished during the miocene epoch, together with shark's teeth, and 



