24 



upon one and the same elevated platform of a common opinion, 

 having climbed up painfully thereto from many different directions. 

 The old subject of dispute has utterly disappeared, and there is 

 no longer any reasonable excuse for dissension. We have all been 

 partly right and partly wrong. It is a time for a hearty laugh 

 all round, a time to shake hands and be friends." 



D. GEOLOGY OF THE MIDLANDS. 



The time had now come when his residence in Birmingham, 

 on appointment to the Professorship at the Mason College, gave 

 Lapworth the opportunity of turning to the study of the rocks 

 of the Midlands. There is no local group on which he did not do 

 useful work from the Archaean to the Drift but his chief interest 

 lay naturally with the older rocks. 



I. Nuneaton and the Lickey Hills. 



In the discussion at the Birmingham Natural History and 

 Philosophical Society in 1882, upon a paper on the Drift Quartzites, 

 by Mr. W. J. Harrison, Lapworth expressed the opinion, founded 

 on work with Allport in October, 1881, that in all proba- 

 bility the Llandovery sandstones of the Lickey Hills would prove 

 to be based unconformably on a quartzite similar to that known 

 from Callaway's work at the Wrekin. Mr. F. T. S. Houghton 

 supported this, basing his view on work done at Rubery some years 

 previously. Early in March, 1882, Lapworth, in company with 

 Professor M. J. M. Hill, obtained proof of the truth of his forecast, 

 but he afterwards learnt that Houghton had seen the same facts 

 and drawn a similar conclusion a little earlier. 



A like suggestion as to the age of the Quartzites of Hartshill 

 and Nuneaton was communicated by Lapworth to W. J. Harrison, 

 when he found that the latter held similar views. The two worked 

 the Nuneaton quarries together early in May, 1882, when they 

 recognised the affinity of the Nuneaton to the Lickey quartzites 

 and inferred that they were superior to the rocks of Caldecote. 

 They also reached the conclusion that the overlying shales of 

 Stockingford, believed to be and mapped as Carboniferous, were 

 pre-Silurian. Lapworth confirmed this the following day by 

 rinding Cambrian fossils in them. 



Later work, and mapping, often with classes of students, 

 brought out the details of the Lickey area, enabled Lapworth to 

 demonstrate the existence of pre-Cambrian igneous rocks under 

 the (Cambrian) quartzite there, and further suggested to him the 

 logical conclusion that the materials which constitute the Permian 

 Breccias, and the fragments in the Bunter Pebble-beds, may not 

 improbably have been derived from the ancient floor of Palaeozoic 



