GEOLOGY 



I 



beginnings of the history of our county are to be found 

 written on the stony tablets of the rocks, in records by the side 

 of which the Saxon chronicle, the Roman epitaph, are nothing 

 but the closing passages of a many-chaptered story. 

 Through a study of the various operations by which to-day the 

 materials of the land are everywhere being worn down, carried away by 

 streams, and redeposited in seas and lakes as beds of gravel, as sandbanks, 

 or as mudflats, it is possible in some measure not only to realize the 

 physical conditions which prevailed in our district in those far-off ages, 

 but also to people again those ancient waters with their shelly denizens, 

 and to form some idea of the animal and vegetable inhabitants of those 

 long since vanished lands. 



For the beds of sandstone, clay, and limestone which make up the 

 bulk of our Warwickshire rocks are comparable in all respects with 

 accumulations forming at the present day ; they were for the most part 

 laid down in estuaries, seas and lakes ; and many of the inhabitants of the 

 waters, and not a few of the animals, insects, and plants from the adjacent 

 land became entombed in the gathering sediments. In the course of 

 ages these areas of deposition by slow upheaval have been more than 

 once converted into land ; and it is clear that these new lands would 

 consist of layers of hardened sediments (' stratified' rocks), and that the 

 entombed organic remains would be the ' fossils ' of succeeding times. 

 And so long as any particular part of our area stood up as a land-tract 

 above the waters, there the continuity of deposit would be broken ; 

 certain beds would be missing. Subsequent submergence of the whole 

 area would result in the burying of everything under newer sheets 

 of sediment which, while resting unconformably on the worn-down 

 ruins of the old land-mass, would have a closer parallelism to the 

 deposits immediately preceding themselves. In the sequel we shall 

 meet with several instances of these great gaps in the geological suc- 

 cession. 



Further, by a knowledge of the physical and climatic conditions 

 specially favourable to certain forms of life of to-day, we arrive at some 

 idea of the state of things prevalent in our area during the formation of 

 many of these fossiliferous rocks, and can distinguish marine from 

 lacustrine deposits, and deep-water formations from those laid down 

 along a shore. As we examine in succession the ascending series 

 of sediments it is found too that there has been a steady change in 



