Iviii. PRESIDENT^ ADDRESS. 



supposed to be the junction-bed with the Kimmeridge Clay. 

 For some time it was a puzzle to the early geologists how to account 

 for the absence of the Upper Portland and the Purbeck beds in 

 the Vale of Blackmore ; Dr. Buckland explained it, under the 

 supposition that the missing beds had fallen down in the 

 abyss below. It is now known that the cretaceous sea invaded 

 the upturned missing beds. The extension of the Lower 

 Greensand has this year been traced westward to Okeford 

 Fitzpaine by Miss Barbara Forbes and Miss Lowndes, where a 

 fine section is exposed in a brickyard west of the village, 

 comprising a fossiliferous bed of Gault, separated by a brown 

 sandy rock from the Greensand, beneath which is a bed containing 

 silicious pebbles. We owe a debt of gratitude to Mr. Clement Reid 

 also, who is now examining the quaternary beds of the county, for 

 a paper on "The Charred Pinewood from the Dorset Peat-mosses," 

 and for another on the "Tufaceous Deposit at Blashenwell," in 

 which he agrees with the opinion expressed in my anniversary 

 address last year that there are evidences of a Neolithic settlement 

 upon it, and further that there was a subsequent settlement during 

 the Roman period. He has found proofs of glacial action at Paghnm 

 Harbour and Selsea, where there is a deposit of boulder-clay con- 

 taining fossils derived from a superincumbent bed of Bracklesham 

 clay containing marine mollusca of the Pleistocene age, with large 

 chalk-flints and some crystalline rocks, granites, greenstones, and 

 sedimentary representing the Upper Greensand and Upper Tertiaries. 

 The granites were probably derived from Brittany and transported 

 by floating shore-ice. There is no other instance of the kind in the 

 south ; but there is evidence of intensely cold conditions in Dorset- 

 shire, indicating a temperature considerably lower than that of 

 the present day, and to which our dry-coombes may owe their 

 origin ; snow-sheets and glaciers did not extend farther south 

 than the Thames valley. Mr. Starkie Gardner's paper on " The 

 Leaf -beds of Bournemouth," which was read before the members 

 last yearj gives a retrospect of the changes to which Great Britain 

 has submitted since the commencement of the Tertiary period, when 



