326 Rev. 0. Fisher — Bovey Tracey Beds. 



I sometimes wonder whether the time is irrevocably passed, and 

 the opportunity irretrievably lost, for these problems to be solved. 

 Not only has the resistance to these problems on the part of 

 scientific authorities been most marked in my own case, but the 

 whole aims and objects of the British Association for the Advance- 

 ment of Science by Research have been altered. The Association is 

 now openly advocating the principle of teaching by professional 

 men. A leading scientific weekly rejoiced that the Association was 

 so much more in the hands of pi'ofessionals at Cambridge in 1904 

 than it was at Cambridge in 1862 ; and I cannot but acknowledge 

 that subjects which won for me the General Committee in 1879 

 would not now find me a place on a Sectional Committee. I cannot 

 pretend to say that I do not regret it, I regret it very much, not 

 for my own sake, but for the sake of what seems to me a most 

 profitable object of research, a subject which in the hands of such 

 men as Lyell, De la Beche, Godwin-Austen, and Daniel Pidgeon 

 would have borne much fruit : for in science, as in agriculture, the 

 hai'vest must be gathered when the crops are ripe ; missed 

 opportunities often, nay generally, do not recur. 



VIII. — On the Eelation of the Sands and Clays of Dorset 



AND Hants to those of Bovey Tracey. 



By the Rev. 0. Fisher, M.A., F.G.S. 



I HAVE read with interest Mr. Lowe's article ^ on Devonshire 

 geology, in which he discusses the question whether the Bovey 

 beds are Miocene or Eocene, and what may be their relation to the 

 Hampshire and Dorsetshire Lower Bagshots. 



In former years I have had some acquaintance with the Hants 

 and Dorset beds, and I have seen the Bovey deposit and was struck 

 with their similarity. I am much impressed with the weight of 

 Mr. Lowe's objection that the enormous amount of detritus repre- 

 sented by the sands and clays extending from Bournemouth — or we 

 may even say from Whiteclift' Bay, I.W. — to Bovey can hardly have 

 been derived from so small an area as Dartmoor. 



My own impression is that there once existed an area of plutonic 

 rocks in the Channel which supplied the clays and sands of the 

 Hants and Dorset Bagshots. We know not to how great a distance 

 the southern edge of those beds may have originally extended. 

 As far as they are exposed, from Blackdown west of Dorchester to 

 Whitecliif Bay, they are truncated by a great upcast fault. They 

 may, for aught we know, have once extended to the foot of a granitic 

 range now no more. The surface contour of the area south of 

 their basset edge must have been profoundly altered by that great 

 disturbance, and there is no impossibility in there having been 

 a lake or lagoon in which Bagshots were deposited where now 

 Cretaceous and Jurassic strata have been protruded. Such an 

 explanation of the phenomena would bring the Hants and Dorset 

 Bagshots into the same category with the Bovey deposit, both being 



1 See Geol. Mag., June, 1905, p. 269. 



