Sir E. H. Howorth— Dislocation of the Chalk. 301 



immediately within the Humber hank, reached it at 44 feet ; 

 another, in 26. feet of water, reached it at 24^ feet ; another, in 

 33 feet of water, at 22 feet ; another, in 33 feet of water, at 

 23 feet. In one case, a boring in 25^ feet of water, chalk was 

 not reached at 58J feet. In another, where the bore-hole started 

 at 3 feet below high-water, chalk was not reached at 72^ feet. 

 (Op. cit., pp. 39, 151.) In a bore-hole at Reed's Island, in the 

 Humber, chalk was reached at 185 feet. 



Mr. Reid speaks of the chalk south of Barton as glaciated (that 

 is, in ordinary language, broken and dislocated) to a depth of 

 several feet ; and the irregular depths at which it occurs from the 

 surface show that it must be much crumpled, bent, and wai'ped ; 

 and inasmuch as the hollows created by the flexures, which go 

 down considerably below low-water, are filled in by boulder-clay 

 only, it is virtually certain that they occurred either coincidently or 

 just before the clay was distributed. 



That these flexures and dislocations were caused by a very 

 different force than any that could be exercised either by glaciers 

 or icebergs, seems evident when we test the problem in the true 

 inductive way, namely, by placing side by side the phenomena in 

 question from Eastern England with those from Dorsetshire, where 

 we have effects largely of the same kind and degree, in an area 

 where ice-sheets and icebergs cannot be postulated. The dislocation 

 about Purbeck and in the Dorsetshire Chalk are good indices that 

 the effects in question were due to subterranean forces, and not to 

 the great ice monster continually invoked by the wilder glacialists. 

 Let us now turn our glance further east. It is a great pity that 

 so little has been done during the last half-century to illustrate the 

 constitution of the sea-bottom of the German Ocean. We know its 

 contour well enough, but the distribution of the rocks that form 

 its bed we can hardly be said to know, and yet materials are 

 available. At Southwold and other places on the east coast, the 

 so-called " crabs " to which the fishermen fasten their boats, are 

 piled up with subangtilar masses of rock, including lumps of chalk, 

 of Coralline Crag, as well as of crystalline rocks, which have been 

 trawled, and about whose provenance the fishermen have collected 

 considerable details ; and it is a great pity that the Geological 

 Surveyors, who have spent so much time on this coast, have not 

 made more inquiries on the subject, and furnished us with more 

 materials for settling some doubtful questions. 



Two things, however, seem perfectly plain : one is, that the folds 

 and bends which mark the chalk in East Anglia, Lincolnshire, and 

 Yorkshire, also mark the beds underlying the German Ocean ; and 

 inasmuch as we meet with the chalk again in folds when we reach 

 Denmark, it seems probable that the Cretaceous beds were once 

 continuous right across the North Sea. I am informed by a dis- 

 tinguished hydrographer, that when the Trinity House proposed to 

 erect a lighthouse on the Goodwins a boring was put into the 

 ground, and that chalk was rapidly reached. This shows that the 

 Goodwin Sands form an anticlinal saddle or down. The Admiralty 



