62 Sir H. n. Hotcbrth— Destruction of the Chalk. 



When we turn to Professor Morris' paper on one of these famous 

 boulders, it is interesting to see him suggesting that it was not 

 a far-transported boulder, but in situ, or virtually in sitii. 



Professor Morris, speaking of these beds in Lincolnshire as long 

 ago as 1853, says of the famous Ponton cutting: ''The oolites are 

 frequently dislocated, the dislocated portions lying at high angles, and 

 are very irregular. . . . Emerging from the south end of the tunnel 

 [at Great Ponton] . ... we see the drift on either side of the cutting 

 buoying up an enormous irregular mass of oolitic roclc through which 

 the cutting has passed. This mass of rock is 430 feet long, and at 

 its deepest part 30 feet thick; it is much broken and disturbed, but 

 the parts retain to some extent their relative position, and belong 



to the lower portion of the oolitic beds of this district The 



depth of the underlying drift exposed at the lowest part between 

 the broken rock and the level of the railroad is about seven feet. 

 .... this great mass of disturbed oolite, which, although so distinctly 

 isolated, retains sufficient uniformity of character to lead us to infer 

 that it has not been far removed from its original site." (Q.J.G.S., 

 vol. lx, pp. 318-320.) 



These great masses of shifted rock, of course, occur elsewhere. 

 The typical instances are those in the Norfolk cliffs — that in the 

 Eoslyn hole near Ely, the great Merton boulder in West Norfolk, and, 

 more remarkable than all, the great mass of chalk, twenty miles 

 square, recently found by Mr. Cameron on the borders of Hunting- 

 donshire and Bedfordshire. These, and such as these, seem to me 

 to be instances, not of vast transportation, but rather the remains 

 of once continuous strata, and closely allied to the actual outliers 

 found in the county of Cambridge, west of the escarpment of the 

 chalk, and to testify to the once continuous Chalk having been 

 dislocated in situ by some far-reaching subterranean force. 



Let us now turn to the evidence that the Chalk has been so 

 dislocated and broken in comparatively recent times. 



In many places in Norfolk there have been found, as is well 

 known, evidences, not only of chalk quite disturbed and dis- 

 integrated, and reduced to a rubbly condition, but also instances 

 of its being curved and tossed up on end. These disturbances, in the 

 view of some of the best observers, like Mr. Horace B. Woodward, 

 Mr. J. E. Taylor, Mr. C Reid, Mr. Jukes-Browne, etc., belong 

 to the same date, and were caused by the same forces that made the 

 Boulder-clay. As the matter is one of considerable importance to 

 the argument, I propose to quote some of these cases as described in 

 the Survey Memoirs and elsewhere. 



In the Geological Magazine for 1865, Mr. J. E. Taylor described 

 a saddle-shaped anticlinal or ridge in the Chalk at Whittingham. 

 The beds, with conspicuous bands of flints, were so bent as to 

 form an acute angle, which was very well defined. The layers of 

 flint were not shattered, nor were the strata broken. At first 

 Mr. Taylor attributed this disturbance in the Chalk to a time before 

 the deposition of the Norwich Crag, but he subsequently (id. vol. vi) 

 attributed the twisting and dragging up of the Chalk to the agent 





