308 Sir H. H. Hoicorth— Dislocation of the Chalk. 



implement was said to have been found with the bones of deer 

 (H. B. Woodward, " Geology of the Country round Norwich," 

 pp. 137 and 138.) 



I will now endeavour to sum up in a few phrases the main 

 conclusions which seem established by the evidence. 



1. Before the distribution of the Drift, the Chalk extending from 

 Norfolk, Lincolnshire, and Yorkshire, to Scania, in Sweden, was, 

 so far as we can judge, a perfectly continuous deposit, neither bent 

 into folds nor marked by conspicuous alternations of valley and down. 



2. This great stretch of more or less level chalk was overlain, 

 either completely or partially, by beds of Eocene age, consisting of 

 variegated clays and of smoothed and rounded flint pebbles, of 

 which considerable remains still exist under the Drift in East 

 Anglia ; while the debris of those which have been denuded and 

 broken up now form the shingle beds and various gravels of Eastern 

 England, there not being in that area, so far as we know, any pebble 

 gravels whose constituent pebbles do not date back to Tertiary times. 



3. Over these Eocene beds were placed the Crags. How far the 

 Crag beds extended over the bed of the North Sea, we do not know; 

 but among the lumps dredged by the Southwold fishermen are 

 several of the White, or so-called Coralline Crag ; while, as is 

 well known, in more than one place in the North Sea area, dead 

 shells of later Crag age have been dredged. 



4. Over these Crag beds, again, was a land-surface, on which the 

 mammoth and its companions roamed, and which extended from 

 Denmark to Yorkshire. We have no evidence to show that the 

 Rhine flowed through this now submerged land. It may be, on 

 the contrary, that its drainage was entirely reversed and that it then 

 flowed southwards. 



5. The beds above named, from the Chalk or perhaps the Oolites 

 upwards, were presently affected by a great movement, of which 

 other examples occur in geological history, by which they were 

 bent and moulded into a succession of wolds and intervening 

 valleys. This movement led to their very considerable dislocation 

 and disintegration, and to the denudation of large areas, such as 

 that occupied by the Fenlands ; and it was by this movement that 

 the present contour of Eastern England, of the bed of the North 

 Sea, and of Denmark, were shaped. 



6. The products of this disintegration, in the shape of chalk- 

 rubble, were subsequently moulded and mixed into what we 

 know as the Chalky Clay, which was afterwards distributed in 

 its present form. How this came about, 1 may be able to show 

 on another occasion. This view, which I reached independently, 

 is very largely the same conclusion arrived at by the father of the 

 Woodwards, who in his " Geology of Norfolk," published in 1833, 

 says that " the elevations in the neighbourhood of Cromer originated 

 in the disruption of the Chalk strata, and are most probably of the 

 same age as the valleys. The natural section of the cliffs shows, 

 in the disrupted chalk, the origin of the Beacon hill at Triming- 

 ham ; and to the westward of Cromer is seen a large mass of chalk 





