GEOLOGY 



to be 150 feet thick. Mr. W. J. Harrison thinks this loamy deposit 

 was laid down in an old ice-dammed lake. 1 



The soft rocks of Warwickshire are not such as would receive or 

 retain ice scratches during the glaciation ; but a few cases have been 

 recorded of a crumpling and disturbance of the surface beds probably 

 by the passage of the ice. At Small Heath near Birmingham an expo- 

 sure of the Keuper Marls showed evidence of the passage of a heavy 

 body over the surface ; streaks of red marl had been torn off and em- 

 bedded in the superjacent drift, and the uppermost beds of the marl were 

 puckered and bent. 2 Again, according to Mr. A. H. Atkins, 8 at Garri- 

 son Lane near Birmingham 20 feet of tenacious clay, probably drift, 

 rests on an indurated, smoothed and polished surface of the Keuper 

 Marl. 



The late Dr. Crosskey * described a section between Key Hill and 

 Hockley Hill in Birmingham where boulder clay rested on Triassic 

 sandstone which had been greatly broken and disturbed and large frag- 

 ments of it torn off and embedded in the drift. Mr. C. J. Woodward 

 has described disturbances known as ' swilleys,' and possibly glacial, in 

 the Lias at Binton and Grafton, 6 and a smoothing and polishing of the 

 ' Permian ' sandstone under the drift near Coventry has been recorded 

 by Mr. F. T. Maidwell. 9 



As the climate of the country gradually ameliorated the ice melted 

 and gave rise to much flood water, which redistributed much of the 

 older drift and laid it down along the bottoms of the valleys ; subse- 

 quent erosion by the river has removed much of the infilling and left 

 only strips along the sides in the form of river terraces. It is in these 

 old gravels, sands and loams that the remains of early man and the 

 animals with which he was associated first appear. This fluviatile drift 

 of the Avon valley as already noted (p. 25) has yielded teeth of the 

 elephant at Shottery, and at Newnham near Church Lawford west of 

 Rugby were found in 1815 two skulls and other bones of rhinoceros, 

 tusks and teeth of elephant, and horns and bones of stag and ox, at 

 1 5 feet from the surface, in clayey gravel. 7 According to Professor Boyd 

 Dawkins 8 the mammalia from the freshwater deposits of the Avon valley 

 include wolf, hyaena, reindeer, stag, bison, hippopotamus, boar, horse, 

 rhinoceros, elephant and mammoth. 



But undoubtedly the most interesting discovery from our present 

 point of view is that of quartzite implements found in 1890 by Mr. J. 

 Landon in the old gravels of the Rea valley at Saltley near Birmingham. 

 They have been noted (and one is figured) by Sir John Evans. 9 The 



1 Harrison, Proc. Geol. Assoc. xv. (1898), 400. 



2 W. J. Harrison, Proc. Birm. Phil. Soc. iii. (1882), 157. 



s Mid. Nat. (1883), p. 230; also Rep. Birm. Nat. Hist, and Mic. Soc. (1883), p. I. 



* Proc. Birm. Phil. Soc. (1882), p. 209. 



5 Proc. Birm. Nat. Hist, and Mic. Soc. (1870), p. 63. 



6 Proc. Wartv. Nat. and Arch, field Club (1895), p. 47. 



7 Buckland, Relijuiie Di/uviartce, ed. 2 (1824), pp. 176, 177. 



8 Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc. xxv. (1869), 192. 



9 AncientStone Implements, ed. 2 (1897), pp. 578-81, and fig. 4JOA. 



27 



