A HISTORY OF SUSSEX 



the surface than would otherwise be expected, and we may there find a 

 counterpart of the Palaeozoic ridge under Dover and London. Experi- 

 ments at Dover however have not yet been so successful as to encourage 

 deep borings in Sussex, and near London rocks older than the Coal 

 Measures have been met with beneath the Cretaceous. The only deep 

 boring on the south side of the Wealden anticline is that sunk at the 

 Brighton Industrial School at Telscombe, where Lower Greensand was 

 touched at 1,280 feet from the surface, but was only penetrated to a 

 depth of about 5 feet. It is unfortunate that this boring was not 

 carried a few feet lower, for within 20 feet the Lower Greensand 

 would probably be pierced. What comes below is quite uncertain, and 

 the determination of this point would throw much light on Sussex 

 geology. 



Owing to the absence of Lower Greensand cliff sections in Sussex 

 few fossils have been found in this division compared with the prolific 

 fauna of Kent and Hampshire. Selmeston yields drifted pine-wood 

 perforated by boring molluscs. At Pulborough and Parham marine 

 mollusca have been obtained from the Sandgate Beds, and at Pulborough 

 the Hythe Beds also have yielded a good many species and the Folke- 

 stone Sands contain a few. These fossils are mainly bivalve shells, few of 

 the characteristic ammonites or other cephalopods and few gasteropods 

 having yet been found in Sussex. 



The porous strata of the Lower Greensand are succeeded by a mass 

 of stiff dark-blue clay known as Gault. This comes to the surface in 

 the belt of flat heavy land which separates the sandy ridges of the 

 Lower from the similar ridge formed by the Upper Greensand on the 

 south. In Sussex the Gault reaches the exceptional thickness of 300 

 feet, and is nearly everywhere fossiliferous, though owing to the absence 

 of cliff sections and the rarity of clear inland exposures fossils are not so 

 readily obtained as at Folkestone. At the base is found a band of scat- 

 tered phosphatic nodules, and this band seems to separate the true Gault 

 from the Lower Greensand below — though the upper part of this latter 

 (the only part preserved at Eastbourne) may be nothing but a gravelly 

 base to the Gault, equivalent to beds with Ainmonites mammillatus found 

 elsewhere. Low down in the true Gault at Eastbourne Ammonites laiitus, 

 a characteristic fossil of the Lower Gault, has been found ; but the 

 principal locality for Lower Gault fossils in Sussex is Ringmer, from 

 which place Mr. Jukes-Browne gives a long list of fossils, cephalopods 

 being particularly abundant.* At St. Anthony's Hill near Eastbourne 

 Mr. F. G. H. Price discovered another set of fossils, which prove the 

 Gault there seen to belong to the lower part of the Upper Gault. The 

 highest beds of all are sometimes well exposed on the foreshore opposite 

 Eastbourne, and they have been carefully examined below the Wish 

 Tower by Mr. Price and Rev. H. E. Maddock, who there collected 

 many fossils, including such characteristic Upper Gault forms as Am- 

 monites rostratus, A. varicosus, A. auritus and Anisoccras [Hamites) armatum. 



> 'The Cretaceous Rocks of Britain,' i. I 2 I, Memo'in Gcol. Siinry (1900). 

 8 



