60 THE OLDEST ROCKS OF ENGLAND. CHAP. 



of Newent and Kingswood, where new red deposits (Bunter and 

 Keiiper) rest tranquilly on disturbed strata of the carboniferous 

 age. 



But this is only one part of the long history which can be traced 

 among the Malvern rocks. Passing downwards through the old 

 red sandstones, conformable, or nearly so, to the Silurians, and 

 still sinking lower and lower in these, in other words, ascending 

 the stream of time, we find toward the base of the upper Silurians 

 vertical strata of brecciated or conglomerated rock, with sandy 

 and micaceous laminae, full of fossils the fossils being Silurian, 

 the stony fragments derived from the Malvern rocks b . The whole 

 is like what an accumulation of detritus, such as now is gathered 

 at intervals on the slope of these hills, would become if it fell 

 into a sea rich in corals, crinoids, and brachiopoda. The Malvern 

 rocks, then, stood up in the sea and were subject to waste before 

 the later Silurian ages. 



Nor is this all. By continuing the search into earlier periods 

 we discover among the older strata on the western side of Malvern 

 proofs of unconformity among them, and deficiencies in the series 

 of deposits, such as clearly to indicate movements of the whole 

 region before the deposit of the May Hill sandstones, and again 

 before the very earliest of the Cambrian rocks which are found 

 along the Malvern chain. 



That which was disturbed in the pre-Cambrian age was the 

 old rock of Malvern there is no known case of older earth- 

 movement in the British Isles and unless, by some unexpected 

 discovery in the north-western Highlands, the geological epoch 

 of the disturbed ' fundamental' gneiss there should be carried back 

 ly fossils to a still earlier date, we must rank the Malvern rocks 

 as among the earliest of the solidified products of the globe. And 

 those products were, at least in part, stratified. They were stra- 

 tified : the traces of stratification remain. They were not, as far 

 as we can perceive, accompanied by organic beings : there are no 

 fossils ; there is no limestone among them, such as might indicate 

 that fossils had been. They are metamorphic in the sense usually 

 attached to this term when we speak of gneiss ; they are, in fact, 

 gneiss, that quasi-granitic rock, so very variable from place to place, 



b This important observation was made by my sister in 1842. 



