860 KEPORT— 1898. 



The origin and date of tlie Severn Valley is a still bigger question, and this 

 was hroached by Ramsay, some five-and-twenty years ago, in a suggestive paper on 

 the River Courses of England and Wales.' He there postulates a westerly dip of 

 the chalk surface, -which determined the ilow of the t-treams in a westerly direction 

 towards the long gap which was being formed in Miocene times, near the junction 

 of the Mesozoic with the Paheozoic rocks. The still more important streams from 

 the Welsh highlands had no doubt done much towards initiating tiiat gap ; and by 

 the end of the Miocene period, if one may venture to assign a date, the valley of the 

 Severn, which is one of the oldest in England, had already begun to take form, 

 though many of the valleys of Wales are probably much older. 



We may now be supposed to have arrived at a period when the physical 

 features of this immediate district did not differ very materially from what they 

 are at present. The great Ice Age was in full force throughout Northern Europe, and, 

 accordiner to views which meet with increasing favour, the German Ocean and the 

 Iiish Sea were filled with immense glaciers. What was taking place at that time 

 in the estuary of the Severn ? 



This is a case which requires the exercise of the scientific imagination, of course 

 under due control. There is probably nothing more extraordinary in the history 

 of modern investigation than the extent to which geologists of an earlier date per- 

 mitted themselves to be led away by the fascinating theories of Croll. The astro- 

 nomical explanation of that ' will o' the wisp,' the cause of the great Ice Age, is 

 at present greatly discredited, and we begin to estimate at their true value those 

 elaborate calculations which were made to account for events which in all proba- 

 bility never occurred. Extravagance begets extravagance, and the unreasonable 

 speculations of men like Belt and Croll have caused some of our more recent 

 students to suffer from ' the nightmare.' 



Nevertheless Croll, when he confined his views to the action of ice, showed 

 himself a master of the subject, and his suggestions are often worthy of attention, 

 even when we are not convinced. Writing in the ' Geological Magazine ' in 1871, 

 he points out that the ice always seeks the path of least resistance ; and he refers 

 to the probability that an outlet to the ice of the North Sea would be found along 

 the natural hollow formed by the valleys of the Trent, the Warwickshire Avon, 

 and the Severn. Ice moving in this direction, he says, would no doubt pass down 

 into the Bristol Chanuel and thence into the Atlantic. Again," referring to the 

 great Scandinavian glacier, he says, ' it is hardly possible to escape the conclusion 

 that a portion of it at least passed across the South of Ivigland, entering the 

 Atlantic in the direction of the Bristol Channel.' These views were not based on 

 any local knowledge, but merely on general considerations. The problem as to 

 whether there are any traces of the passage of such a body of ice in the basin of 

 the Lower Severn must be worked out by local investigators. Irrespective, too, 

 of the hypothetical passage of a lobe of the North Sea glacier, we are confronted by 

 a much more genuine question, namely, what was the possible termination towards 

 the south of the great body of ice with which our more advanced glacialists have 

 filled the Cheshire plain. 



A recent President of the Cotteswold Field Club, of whom unfortunately we 

 mast now speak as the late Mr. Lucy, took a lively interest in the Pleistocene 

 geology of the district, and his papers in the ' Proceedings' of the Cotteswold Field 

 (Jlub have always attracted attention. His map of the distribution of the gravels 

 of the Severn, Avon, and Evenlode, and their extension over the Cotteswold Hills, 

 prepared in conjunction with Mr. Etheridge, is a valuable contribution to the history 

 of the subject.^ Again he wrote on the extension of the Northern Drift and 

 Boulder-clay over the Cotteswold Range,' and on this occasion described the_ in- 

 teresting section in the drifts presented by the Mickleton Tunnel. In his previous 

 paper, Mr. Lucy had carried the drifts with northern erratics to a height of 750 feet, 



' Qjiart. Jour. Geol. Soc. vol. xxviii. (1872), p. 148. 



= Oj). cit. Dec. 2, vol. i. (1874), p. 257. 



' Proc. Cuttes. Nat. Cliih, vol. v. pt. ii. (1869) p. 71. 



« Oj). cit. vol. vii. pi. i. (1878), p. 50. 



