XXXV111. 



Mr. Shipp, Mr. Groves, and Mr. Austin collected specimens of the splendid showy palm 

 leaf, acacia pods, and dicotyledonous leaves, from which time and dust have gone far to 

 obliterate every mark of identification. Repeated and anxious search has produced only a 

 few leaves without any distinct venation or characteristic distinction. The Museum of 

 Practical Geology in Jermyn Street, the Museum at Oxford, the County and Corf e Museums 

 possess portions of the leaves of the palm and fragmentary pieces of other leaves. It is sad 

 to know that a flora, whose counterpart is only represented on the Continent in badly 

 preserved grits and sands, should have been worked out before some of its invaluable 

 remains had been rescued and passed under the eyes of Mr. Gardner, Count Saporta, or some 

 equally experienced botanical palaeontologists, especially as the contemporary plant beds 

 of Alum Bay on the other edge of the Hampshire basin have been swept away into 

 the sea. All the records are therefore irretrievably lost, and their correlation with the 

 floras of America and Australia will remain an unravelled mystery. The unfossiliferous 

 yellow and bright red sandstones which form the low cliff between the shore and the 

 village of Studland are allied to the pipeclays, and are of the same age as the variegated 

 sands of Alum Bay. There is a clay -bed containing leaves on the right hand side of the 

 lane near Redcliff, and a good transverse section of the cliff is exposed on the road to the 

 village a little to the east of Redcliff, showing the lines of strata. Its eastern termination 

 is covered with furze and brambles for about 300 yards, and then subsides beneath the 

 blown sands. A dreary waste of the sand-dunes intervene between this point and the 

 mouth of Poole Harbour, enlivened only by the beautiful small inland lake Little Sea, 

 into which the sea has occasionally access at extremely high tides. It is a favourite 

 resort of wild fowl, and on its margin grow several rare plants, one of which, Scirpus 

 parvulus, I replaced on the list of British plants about the year 1870. The same dreary 

 conditions continue for more than a mile on the north side of the harbour's mouth, a few 

 hundred yards only of sand-dunes intervening between the shore and the estuary of 

 Poole. The cliffs here rise about 150ft. above the shore, which average they retain to 

 Bournemouth. The flora differs entirely from that of Studland and Corfe, whose beds 

 are characterised by being of thicker and purer clay, intermixed with coarser and deeply 

 stained sands, while those of Bournemouth consist of black or sandy clays, intermixed 

 with beds of fine yellow sand. In the cliffs on the Poole side and close to the sand-dunes 

 is a band of dark clay containing leaves, some of which are willow-like, others resemble 

 stenocarpus and acacia. Mr. Gardner divides the cliffs between Poole and Bournemouth 

 into three divisions the most western characterised by the presence of salix and the 

 absence of palms ; the central group by an abundance of palms and ferns ; the eastern by 

 araucaria, eucalyptus, and net ferns. The physical conditions of the river may be 

 guessed at by the absence of boulders and pureness of the silt, showing that it flowed 

 over a flat area ; the absence of lignite in the beds must be attributed to lakes and 

 catchment basins to arrest the drifting timber, and lastly, to the absence of flint or 

 chalk, showing that no chalk ranges were cut through by it, for the chalk had not then 

 been upheaved, and the quartzose, granitic sands, and pipeclays must have been derived 

 from a palaeozoic area. The occasional occurrence of teredo-bored wood makes it probable 

 that the beds were laid down towards the lower part of the river, which must have been 

 more than a mile broad and the valley through which it flowed nine or ten miles broad. 

 The flora of the Middle Eocene is chiefly Australian and Central American in type. 



After the discussion Mr. Penney read the following notes and observations on 

 the denudation of the coast in the immediate neighbourhood. He said during 



For J. S. Gardner's account see Proceedings Geol. Assoc., vol. viii., No. 6. 



