'618 -Reports and Proceedings — Manchester Literary Society. 



2. " Sarsen-Stones in a Clay-Pit." By the Rev. E. C. Spicer, 

 M.A., F.G.S. 



Near to Bradenham, midway between High Wycombe and Prince's 

 Risborough, certain clay-pits yield a clay for brick-making, in which 

 are embedded large angular sarsen-stones, white saccharoidal sand- 

 stones with a siliceous cement. This clay is quite flintless : it rests 

 upon, and is 'contained' by, Clay-with-Flints based upon Chalk, 

 and is covered with roughly-mingled material containing horizontal 

 bands with worn flint-pebbles and drifted sarsens of smaller size. 

 Each patch of the clay fits roughly into a funnel-shaped depression 

 lined with Clay-with-Flints. The depressions are probably swallow- 

 holes, formed by underground solution of the Chalk, which was 

 covered by wet clay and that by sands of the Bagshot Series. As 

 the clay oozed out into the hollows the sarsens of these sands broke 

 away, and became involved in the clay, much as blocks of the 

 Malmstone at Atherfield become involved in the mud-glaciers which 

 descend from the underlying Gault in the sea-clifPs. The overlying 

 formation is due to much later, and probably Pleistocene, action 

 after the flints of the Upper Chalk had been exposed by denudation. 



3. "On the occurrence of Elephas mertdionalis at Dewlish 

 (Dorset). Second communication : Human agency suggested." By 

 the Rev. Osmond Fisher, M.A., F.G.S. 



This paper is in continuation of one published by the author in 

 1888. The site in which the elephant-x'emains were found is 

 a narrow trench, examined to a depth of 12 feet in places, with 

 nearly vertical sides, a smooth, chalk bottom, and an abrupt end. 

 It was not a fault or a stream-course, and it was partly filled with 

 fine dust-like sand which may have been wind-borne. The trench 

 cuts diagonally across the scarp ; and, even if it could be accounted 

 for by natural agencies, it is difficult to explain how it happened 

 that so many elephants fell into it. The author points out that in 

 Africa elephants are caught by the natives in pitfalls of similar 

 character constructed on the tracts leading to watercourses. This 

 trench is in a corresponding position with regard to a stream, and 

 it is suggested as possible that the trench may have been of human 

 origin. There is, however, no conclusive evidence elsewhere that 

 man was contemporary with Elephas meridionalis, which is character- 

 istic of the Pliocene Age. 



Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society. 



Folds in Rock Strata. — Professor W. Boyd Dawkins, F.R.S., 

 dealt with a subject of much interest to waterworks engineers in 

 a pj^per entitled " Notes on the effect of Relaxation of Pressure in 

 causing Folds at the Bottom of Valleys " read by him before the 

 Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, of which he is 

 President. It directed attention to a new cause of folding of the 

 rock other than that which has been long recognized by geologists 

 as ultimately due to the folding of the outer layers of the earth as 

 they follow the contracting nucleus. The deep cuts made through 



