Sir IT. H. Howorth — Destruction of the Chalk. 59 



by enormous fractures and by the breaking up of large portions of 

 it into fragments, is as clear as any mechanical problem can be. 



When we turn from this a priori reasoning to the actual facts we 

 can hardly doubt that the Chalk of Yorkshire, of Lincolnshire, and 

 of East Anglia, which now exists in a disconnected and discrete 

 form in these thi'ee areas, was once continuous, and that the vast 

 mass of chalk rubble which exists in the chalky clay of the Eastern 

 and Central Counties of England, is the result of the violent dis- 

 integration and dislocation of the beds once occupying large areas 

 now denuded of their chalky covering, and notably of the depression 

 in the Fenland. This dislocation and disintegration I hold to have 

 been coincident with the spread of the chalky clay, and to have 

 occurred, not in the older Tertiary times, but to have been the very 

 last chapter of East Anglian geology. 



Let me first partially clothe my heretic self in the garments of some 

 orthodox men. Professor Seeley argues that before the Drift began 

 a Cretaceous barrier dammed out the sea from the Fenland, extend- 

 ing from Hunstanton, in Norfolk, to Wainfleet, in Lincolnshire ; and 

 he further argues that before the Drift began this barrier was not 

 broken through (Geol. Mag., Vol. Ill, pp. 1-3). Mr. Skertchly 

 agrees in this, and says that before the Glacial age the site of the 

 Fenland basin was very different from its pi'esent condition. The 

 Chalk and other Cretaceous and Neocomian rocks stretched from 

 Hunstanton to Lincolnshire, across what is now the mouth of the 

 Wash (Geology of the Fenland, p. 217). 



While the orthodox geologists are quite willing to allow this 

 considerable denudation in comparatively recent times of the Chalk 

 country of Eastern England, they mostly attribute it to the effects 

 of either marine or fluvial denudation, or to the action of ice, 

 and do not correlate it with the general alteration of the contour 

 of the country by which the North-and-South-Chalk Wolds of 

 Eastern England were formed. 



The following sentence in a paper by Mr. Horace Woodward 

 condenses the current view of the Uniformitarians on this point. 

 " Mention," he says, " has previously been made of the connection 

 of the Norfolk Chalk with that of Lincolnshire. In Miocene and 

 Pliocene times, rivers may have commenced to erode their courses in 

 it, making outlets to the sea. These actions (to quote Mr. Skertchly) 

 resulted in reducing the barrier to outliers ; one between the 

 Witham and the three united rivers (Welland, Nene, and Ouse), 

 the other between that united stream and the Little Ouse. As 

 submergence went on, the sea added its powers to that of the 

 rivers, and finally the Chalk disappeared entirely. The sea was 

 now brought directly in contact with the widespread outcrops of 

 the yielding Kimmeridge and Oxford Clays, and the denudation of 

 the Fenland basin proceeded at a rapid pace." (" The Scenery of 

 Norfolk " : Trans. Norfolk Nat. Soc, iii, 445.) 



Mr. Skertchly and others merely treat the chalk lumps as the 

 debris of marine denudation. 



It seems to me that whatever theory is adopted to account for 



