50 HOLDERNESS. 



extremities, of horse, ox, and deer, very little worn by attrition. These 

 bones, therefore, belonged to animals residing in the neighbourhood ; 

 and as they are now covered up by a great thickness of clay and pebbles, 

 derived from a far greater distance, we cannot doubt their antediluvian 

 origin. I think the rubbly layer of chalk and flint fragments is not found 

 on the highest parts of the wold-hills, but has been drifted chiefly to 

 the lower part of their slopes. 



The thickest and most extensive of the diluvial accumulations in 

 Holderness is a mass of clay and pebbles. In the cliffs north of 13rid- 

 lington and at Hessle, it is seen to cover immediately the water-moved 

 rubbly chalk and flint, which lie on the great stratum of chalk. It 

 extends in a connected mass, under nearly all Holderness, forming 

 most of the hills and "hard land," and underlying most of the ac- 

 cumulations of gravel and alluvial sediment. In the highest cliffs on 

 this coast, its thickness is not less than one hundred and thirty feet. 

 Its composition is remarkably uniform. We every where observe it 

 to be a solid body of clay, containing fragments of many pre-existent 

 rocks, which vary in magnitude, and in the degree of roundness to 

 which they have been reduced. The fragments are, in general, not so 

 numerous as to touch each other, but are scattered through the clay as 

 plumbs in a pudding. However, on the top, or in the uppermost part 

 of the deposit, they are sometimes aggregated into distinct layers of 

 gravel, which continue for a short distance, and furnish springs of good 

 water. The rocks from which the fragments appear to have been trans- 

 ported are found, some in Norway, in the highlands of Scotland, and in 

 the mountains of Cumberland ; others in the north-western and western 

 parts of Yorkshire, and no inconsiderable portion appears to have come 

 from the sea-coast of Durham, and the neighbourhood of Whitby. In 

 proportion to the distance which they have travelled, is the degree of 

 roundness which they have acquired. All the fragments of granite, 

 porphyry, mica slate, and clay slate, which can be compared with no 

 fixed rocks nearer than those of Cumberland and Westmoreland, are 

 rolled to pebbles ; the angles are worn away from every mass of lime- 

 stone which has been drifted from the north-western hills of Yorkshire ; 



