204 PETRIFACTIONS AND THEIR TEACHINGS. CHAP. III. 



In the good old times, when a well-appointed four-horse 

 coach conveyed the traveller from Brighton to London in six 

 or seven hours, the first resting stage for the passengers after 

 leaving the Queen of Watering-places on a summer's morning, 

 was the neat little town of Cuckfield in Sussex; whose single 

 street straggles up the southern slope of a steep acclivity, 

 formed by the anticlinal ridge of Wealden grit, which 

 emerges from beneath the clays and sands of the adjacent 

 valley of Cuckfield Park, near the seat of my friend, Warden 

 Sergison, Esq. 



On the summit of this ridge is " Whiteman's Green," and 

 there, some thirty years since, was an extensive quarry, that 

 had been occasionally worked for a quarter of a century, and 

 was then in unwonted activity ; the calciferous grit, a hard 

 calcareous sandstone formed by an infiltration of crystalline 

 carbonate of lime into beds of sand, which had always 

 been in request for various economical purposes, having sud- 

 denly acquired increased value from the great demand for 

 road materials, occasioned by the competition between the 

 various boards of trustees, in consequence of the rapidly 

 augmenting number of coaches and passengers, which the 

 rising prosperity of Brighton had called forth. 



From that quarry, long since filled up, and the area 

 covered by pasturage and gardens, I collected the first and 

 most interesting of the fossil remains of the Iguanodon, 

 Hylseosaurus, Pelorosaurus, and other stupendons creatures 

 whose existence was previously unknown and unsuspected. 



The sketch, (Lign. 45,) represents the section exposed on one 

 side of the quarry in 1 820. The spire of Cuckfield Church 

 is seen in the middle ground ; the hills in the extreme 

 distance are part of the range of South Downs to the west of 

 Ditchling Beacon, an eminence of the chalk that rises to the 

 height of 856 feet. 



1. The lowermost bed, forming the floor of the quarry, is 

 a stiff blue clay, in which bones and freshwater shells are 

 occasionally met with. 



2. The succeeding strata are composed of the fine calci- 

 ferous grit or Tilgate-stone, which was extensively used as 

 a road material, and occasionally for walls and buildings \ 

 but, owing to its extreme hardness, the difficulty of reducing 

 it to blocks of convenient size, together with the adaptability 



