190 ._Mr.8.V. Wood on the Red Crag 
absent. The portions of this band rich enough to work are 
those resting on the clay, being the deeper parts of the channels 
thus eroded through the older beach, the band becoming poorer 
as it rises up the sloping sides formed of beach Crag. Many of 
the sections of this fifth stage expose a thickness of not less than 
20 feet of it; and one near Sutton Hall (now open) is a furlong 
anda half in length, and full of the most intricate false bedding. 
An interesting illustration of one of these channels is afforded 
by the pits at Foxhall and Bucklesham. (See Section A.) The 
Pectunculus-band with nodules invariably underlies the fifth 
stage only where that stage rests on the clay; when the stage 
rises over the beach Crags, the nodule-band either becomes 
feeble or disappears altogether. The Crag of the fifth stage 
may always be detected at a glance, and distinguished from the 
lower stages by its horizontal stratification and the contrast it 
presents to the underlying beach stages. The Crag of the fifth 
stage, however, does not resemble the genuine deposit underly- 
ing the beach stages at Walton Naze by containing shells in 
the state in which they died; on the contrary, although mani- 
festly water-deposited, the organic remains in it are as worn and 
travelled in appearance as those in the beach stages, and show 
their origin to have been mainly from the material of the older 
beach stages through which the channels have been eroded. 
While this seems to have been the mode of formation of the 
fifth-stage Crag, that of the beach stages seems to have resulted 
from a sea forcing itself backwards from the shore by the growth 
of the beach that it heaped up, until, by a slight subsidence, 
the sea, recovering its place, planed down the old beach into the 
small thickness that we find the lowermost stages now present- 
ing, and recommenced the process of beaching up and forcing 
itself back. 
The fifth stage, south and west of Chillesford, is everywhere 
divided from the overlying red sands by aline of erosion, sometimes 
very faint, but generally strongly marked, and often, like the surface 
of the fourth stage where overlain only by the lower-Drift sands, 
irregular and deeply cut in. At Chillesford, however, the fifth 
stage (under which I could not detect the nodule-band) resting 
upon a beach stage, passes up, without the slightest break or 
line of erosion, into the micaceous sands and laminated clays 
first noticed by Mr. Prestwich in 1849, and which have as their 
characteristic fossil the Mya truncata in the position in which it 
lived ; and these sands and clays, again, pass up in other places 
(as at Iken and Aldbro’), without a break, into the extensively 
developed sands of the lower Drift. At Chillesford (and it is 
here alone that I have been able distinctly to recognize it) we 
have the unbroken passage upwards of the fifth-stage Red Crag 
