Sir H. H. Hoicorth — Destruction of the Chalk. 65 



chalky clay, we should certainly find some of these angular and 

 Bubangular pieces of chalk, some of these great masses of shifted 

 Oolitic and Cretaceous rock, in the sands and gravels of the Crag ; but 

 nothing of the kind occurs in them, or in the so-called Chillesford 

 and Westleton Beds. But this is incredible, if the Chalk had already 

 begun to be broken up into this rubble. They come upon us 

 suddenly in the beds above the Crag, and were doubtless the 

 product of the same forces which contorted and faulted and broke 

 the Chalk in so many places, as I have shown. I cannot see how 

 we separate these dislocations from the forces which moulded the 

 surface of East Anglia into its present contour of wold and dale. 

 On this subject we are not entirely wanting in evidence : thus, it is 

 hardly possible to conclude otherwise than that the present depression 

 in the area occupied by the Fens, or the valleys of the Axholme and 

 the Trent, did not exist when these beds were being laid down in 

 the Crag areas, or else we should have had them developed in these 

 hollow troughs more conspicuously than further east. The way in 

 which the later Crag beds themselves occur at high levels above the 

 sea, as at Norwich, and in other inland parts of East Anglia far 

 above the present sea-level, unmistakably points again to the contour 

 of the country having greatly altered since these submarine beds, 

 the very latest so-called pre-Glacial beds, were laid down. 



Again, if we travel northward, the position of the Crag beds 

 in reference to the Forest bed points in the same direction. The 

 Middle and Lower Crag, whatever their actual horizon, can hardly 

 be placed above the Forest bed, yet we find in many parts of 

 Suffolk these marine deposits at a considerable elevation above the 

 sea-level, while the Forest bed itself occupies the strand actually 

 below low-water mark. This assuredly points to a considerable 

 dislocation since these beds were laid down. Again, there is 

 another remarkable piece of evidence which has been overlooked 

 — that presented by the well-borings at Boston in Lincolnshire, 

 and at Yarmouth and elsewhere on the Norfolk coast — namely, that 

 the great flexures of the Chalk which have rent it down there to 

 a depth of several hundred feet, were clearly made at this time, 

 since the hollows have been filled up with vast deposits of so-called 

 glacial sands, etc., and with nothing else, showing that these 

 synclinal hollows are among the very latest of geological phenomena. 



As I have argued, its effect was to fold the Chalk into a series of 

 anticlinal and synclinal curves, running more or less north and 

 south, and marked by the wolds of Yorkshire and Lincolnshire 

 and the plateau of East Anglia on the one hand, and the hollows 

 of the Axholme valley of the Fens and that forming the southern 

 part of the North Sea on the other. 



Now this last hollow was clearly cut out and shaped since the 

 Weald denudation. The denuded Weald area was originally 

 lenticular in shape, like similar denuded surfaces in Western 

 England and the Chalk districts of France. The eastern terminal 

 apex of the original denuded area is still to be found on the other 

 side of the Channel. It was athwart this formerly continuous 



DECADE IV. VOL. III. NO. II. 5 



