408 Alfred Bell — Fossils of East Anglian Boxstones. 



Within these boundaries the bed-rock is a floor of London Clay, 

 formerly covered by a higher zone of the same material, replete with 

 a fauna of similar type to that found at Sheppey, including fishes and 

 Crustaceans in fine preservation, the broken-up clay and the fossils 

 being deeply phosphatized. Upon this, again, there seems to have 

 been deposited a bed of sand of which the actual presence can only be 

 inferred, since it has not been found in situ as a separate strati- 

 graphical unit or stratum ; but the suggestion is warranted by the 

 mass of debris yielding a particular group of fossils found in the 

 irregular blocks of indurated sandstone or loosely distributed in 

 the adjacent Crag sands, and in the tabular pieces present at 

 Trimley, Bucklesham, and other places, of which Dr. J. E. Taylor 

 writes in "White's History of Suffolk, 1874, "that it is not uncommon 

 to find slabs of the same kind of sandstone which appear to have 

 undergone little abrasion and to be in nearly the same condition they 

 were in when the formation to which they originally belonged was 

 broken up." Similar pieces of sandstone with sharply defined 

 impressions of the fossils and shells, more or less unworn, may be 

 obtained occasionally during low tides at Bawdsey, where a bed of 

 the nodules may be seen at times near the Haven. 



The petrology of the "boxstones" has been fully described by 

 Dr. Boswell, F.G.S., 1 and the general features of the detritus by 

 myself. 2 



In the discussion following the reading of Professor Lankester's 

 paper 3 "On the Newer Tertiaries of Suffolk and their Fauna", 

 Sir C. Lyell pronounced the boxstones then produced as being similar 

 to those he had seen at Berchem, near Antwerp, in 1851,* in a deposit 

 of llupelien age, the shells corresponding to those figured by 

 de Koninck in his well-known memoir 6 on the fossil shells of Basele, 

 Boom, etc. 



This particular horizon has been referred by M. van den Broeck 4 

 to the uppermost stage of the Middle Oligocene ; a system largely 

 developed, according to von Koenen, Bavn, and other writers, in 

 Denmark, Belgium, and North-West Germany ; with a few exceptions 

 the boxstone species agree with those found in one or other of these 

 localities. 



The English literature bearing upon the deposit and the faunas 

 associated with it before 1865 is very scanty. Charlesworth, in 

 1837, figured a tooth of Carcharias megalodon, with sundry notes on 

 the phosphatic nodules; and the so-called "Coprolites" and mammalia 

 recorded between then and 1851 are mentioned in the bibliography 

 appended to C. Reid's Pliocene Deposits of Great Britain (1890). 

 The earliest descriptive account 7 is that given by the Rev. W. B. 



1 " Petrology of the Suffolk Boxstones " : op. cit. 



2 "Sub-Crag Detritus": Proc. Prehistoric Soc. East Anglia, 1915, 

 vol. xi, pp. 139-48. 



3 Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc, vol. xxvi, pp. 493-513, 1870. 



4 Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc, vol. viii, p. 282, 1852. 



5 Mem. Acad. R. Sci. Bruxelles. vol. xi, 1837. 



6 Bull. Soc. Beige Geol., vol. vii, p. 299, 1893. 



7 Ann. Nat. Hist. (2), vol. viii, pp. 206-11, 1851. 



