136 report— 1879. 



In a cutting of the new Hales Owen Railway, passing through Frankley 

 Hill, the following section has been exposed : — 

 Permian clay. 

 Sand of clay texture. 

 Yellowish sand. 



Greyish sandy clay, with Biinter pebbles. 

 Clay, somewhat sandy. 



The heights of these various beds are very irregular throughout the 

 section, which is in itself about 60 feet in depth. 



The Permian sandstone is exposed at one point in the section, and 

 fragments of it are scattered through the sands and clays. 



Erratic blocks are rare in the sands and clays of the cutting itself; 

 one only, indeed, a greenstone, was noticed at the time of our visit, 

 although doubtless they occasionally occur. 



No part of this section can be called a boulder clay, if by boulder 

 clay be meant either a clay formed beneath land ice, or a clay carried 

 away by an iceberg and deposited over the sea-bottom as the berg melted 

 or stranded. 



The various sands and gravels present all the appearances of a ' wash ' 

 from older beds, effected during the depression and subsequent upheaval 

 of the present land surface. They are neither compactly crowded with 

 erratics, nor are any grooved and striated fragments of local rock heaped 

 irregularly together. The way in which the pieces of native rock are 

 scattered through the beds does not indicate any other force than that 

 which would be exerted by the ordinary wash of the waters during the 

 movements just mentioned. The presence of a few erratics shows that the 

 wash must have taken place beneath the waters of a glacial sea over which 

 icebergs floated. 



These beds appear to have been formed in the earlier rather than the 

 later part of the glacial epoch. In a field on the summit of the section a 

 large number of erratics are to be seen which have been taken from a 

 recent surface drain. These erratics constitute a group of allied rocks 

 evidently from one district. Among those observed (undoubtedly, how- 

 ever, a large number must still be concealed beneath the soil) twenty were 

 felsites, two were basalts, one was a piece of varied quartz, and another a 

 Welsh diabase. 



Professor T. G. Bonney makes the following remarks upon these 

 boulders : — 



' The basalts are very little if at all decomposed, such as might have 

 come from one of the basalts of post-carboniferous but pre-triassic age 

 at Rowley, Pouk Hill, or the Clee Hill. There is no reason, however, for 

 assigning them to the first or second of these localities ; with the third I 

 am not familiar. The " greenstone " is remarkably like several that I have 

 seen in Wales as, for example, in the vicinity of the northern end of Llyn 

 Padarn, from which locality, however, it is not likely to have come. If 

 examined microscopically it would doubtless be found to be composed of 

 a triclinic felspar augite and possibly olivine with some chlorite. Thus 

 it may be called a diabase. The felsites have a considerable semblance 

 one to another. They are of a greyish colour, weathering to a paler tint. 

 They present occasionally indications of fluidal structure and flow 

 brecciation, some looking rather slaggy as if from the outer part of a 

 flow, and I think they have been derived from this and not from an 

 intrusive boss. I feel certain they are from Wales, and are of Lower 



