54.0 REPORT—1904. 
It is remarkable that none of the borings in the South and East of England have 
touched Carboniferous Limestone, all having passed into older or newer rocks, 
The existence of that formation is neither proved nor disproved. 
The determination of the age of these disturbances and a discussion of the 
pre-Carboniferous geography may seem at first sight to be only of scientific interest, 
but that problems of great economic importance are involved has been shown 
recently. It has long been known that the principal coal-seam of South Stafford- 
shire deteriorates westwards as it approaches the pre-Carboniferous ridge evidenced 
in the neighbourhood of Wyre Forest. There seemed, however, to be no theo- 
retical reasons why it should not keep its characters on either side of the fault 
which forms the western boundary of the South Staffordshire Coalfield, inasmuch 
as that fault came into existence after the deposition of the Coal Measures. A 
shaft recently sunk has proved the correctness of the inference. The seam has 
been found to be well developed to the west of the fault, and a considerable 
addition has been made to our productive coalfields. 
So much has been written about the range of the Devonshire disturbance 
under the South of England that I shall add no more than a brief comment on some 
of the evidence on which reliance has been placed. We have seen that there has 
been some post-Triassic movement along old lines of disturbance in North 
Wales and the Midlands and along the Malvern axis. It is suggestive therefore 
to find that in the region which we believe to be underlain by the east and west 
disturbance east and west folding forms the dominant structure of the Secondary 
and Tertiary rocks. 
The anticlines of the Vales of Pewsey and Wardour, the London syncline, 
the Wealden anticline, the Hampshire syncline, and the anticline of the Isles 
of Wight and Purbeck, not only lie in the range of the axis, but show an increas- 
ing intensity southwards, towards what we may suppose to have been the most 
active part of that axis. A similar structure prevails in the Oolitic rocks also. 
They too had been thrown into east and west folds before the Cretaceous period, and 
this earlier set of movements also grew in intensity towards the south. It would 
seem, then, at first sight that the structure of the later rocks gives an easy clue to 
the structure of the older rocks buried beneath them. This is by no means the 
case. That the movements manifested in the Oolitic and Cretaceous rocks followed 
the same general line as the older movement admits of little doubt, but that the 
later structures correspond in detail with the earlier is improbable. 
A brief examination of the region where the Carboniferous rocks disappear 
under the Secondary formations will give the grounds for this statement. There 
we find that the Trias passes over the complicated flexures of the Mendip axis in 
undulations so gentle as to prove that those flexures had been completed before it 
was deposited. Nor again do the members of the Oolitic group of the rocks 
cropping out in succession further east show any such folds as those visible in the 
Carboniferous, and it is not till we have passed over a considerable tract of 
Secondary rocks in which there are no signs of east and west folding that we reach 
the anticlines of the Vales of Pewsey and Wardour. Nor can we then fit these 
folds in the Cretaceous formation on to any visible axes in the Carboniferous rocks. 
Under these circumstances it would be unjust to suppose that such synclines and 
anticlines as those of the London and Hampshire basins, or of the Weald, coincide 
with previously formed synclines and anticlines in the older rocks. They give a 
clue to the position of the old axis, but not necessarily to the details of its 
structure. Yet it is upon the determination of the position of the older anticlines 
and synclines, and of their intersection with the north and south disturbances, that: 
we must depend for locating concealed coalfields. So far but little has been done 
in the forty-eight years since the question was first mooted by Godwin-Austen, 
The existence of a coalfield in Kent has been proved, and what appears to be a 
prolongation of a disturbance from the Pas de Calais along the south-western side 
of it. The other borings which have reached the Paleozoic floor round London 
and at Harwich have thrown but little light on the details of its structure. By 
far the greater part of the ground remains yet to be explored. 
In this brief review of the earth-movements of on’e-period, as manifested in one 
