410 SUMMARY OF WORK. 



he had called the " Lower London Tertiaries," was 

 capable of a threefold arrangement into --1st, the 

 basement-bed of the London Clay ; 2nd, the Woolwich 

 and Reading series ; and 3rd, the Thanet Sands. 

 Tracing out the range and general physical features 

 of the middle group, he brought forward numerous 

 sections showing the local variations of the sediments 

 from Hampshire to the east of Kent. He gave ample 

 lists of the fossil contents of the strata, and discussed 

 them in their bearings on the geographical conditions 

 under which the deposits were accumulated. For the 

 first time, the succession of geological events recorded 

 in the oldest Eocene strata of England was clearly 

 stated. 



After reducing to order the older Tertiary series of 

 England, Prestwich conferred a still further service on 

 geology by bringing the English formations into line 

 with those of France and Belgium. In a series of 

 elaborate papers [32, 36, 109, 118] communicated to 

 the Geological Society, he established the correlation of 

 these deposits both lithologically and palseontologically, 

 and in so doing became the acknowledged leader in the 

 Tertiary geology of Western Europe. 



In the course of his researches among the Eocene 

 formations, Prestwich was necessarily led to take note 

 of the younger Tertiary deposits sparingly distributed 

 over the east and south-east of England. At intervals, 

 from the very beginning of his career, he had made 

 excursions into Suffolk and Norfolk. From 1845 to 

 1855 he devoted much time to the study of the younger 

 Tertiary deposits of these counties. But he was too 

 much engaged in his Eocene investigations to find time 

 to elaborate his Pliocene notes into methodical form. 

 It was not until the spring of the year 1868 that he 



