Inverted Mass of Upper Cretaceous Strata. 55 



with a well-marked basement-bed, overlaps on to the current- 

 bedded Lower Greensand. 



At the present time development is proceeding actively in the 

 sand-workings of this neighbourhood. New openings are being 

 made and progress in excavation is so quick, both in these and in 

 older pits, that new geological information is made available within 

 a short interval of time. The stratigraphical relationships show 

 rapid lateral changes in this vicinity, owing to the Upper Gault 

 transgression and the active erosion which accompanied it. For 

 these reasons the detailed description of a section studied on a given 

 date may not be strictly applicable in the same pit at a later time. 



The following was the section seen in October last towards the 

 southern end of the western face in the pit north of Miletree Farm 

 (No. 8) :— 



ft. in. 

 Soil and subsoil ...... 3 



^Brown and mottled sand with thin hardened i 

 calcareous streaks along the bedding ; the top 

 6 inches with many pebbles and rounded grit- 

 grains ........ 3 



Passage-beds to Crowded flat pale-brown horizontally disposed 

 Gault, claystone-nodules, containing minute traces of 



with -< plants and with external films of secondary 



tardefurcata limonite ....... 6 



nodules. Pale-brown sand with rounded quartz-grains and 



small pebbles, darker in hue in lowest 2 feet ; 

 and with a few sporadic, partly indurated sand- 

 nodules and pale-coated dark gritty phosphatic 

 '^ nodules ....... 4 6 



y Horizontally bedded fine sands with streaks of 



black clayey sand, dirty " silver-sand ", and 



I thin layers of brown iron-stained sand ; lignite 



Lower J associated with the black clayey layers ; a few 



Greensand. \ inconstant brown ferruginous indurated courses, 



2 inches in thickness ..... 6 



( False-bedded white sands, iron-stained in places, 



with occasional scraps of lignite ; seen to . IS 



The tardefurcata bed is here separated from the false-bedded 

 Lower Greensand by a well-characterized 6 ft. deposit of sand, 

 many layers of which are peculiar by reason of their very fine 

 smooth texture and by the alternation of lighter streaks and dark 

 carbonaceous and clayey streaks. We recognized at once that this 

 bed shows a striking resemblance to the fine, similarly impure, 

 sand of bed G in Harris's Pit. 



The overlying stratum may be correlated with the tardefurcata 

 bed of Billington Crossing. We could not break open a sufficient 

 number of the nodules to enable us to obtain any of the characteristic 

 ammonites, although a few other fossils were found ;^ but the nodules 

 themselves are identical in character with those found at Webster's 



1 While working at BiUington Crossing we estimated that the yield of 

 ammonite specimens in Telation to the number of nodules broken open is 

 considerably less than 1 per cent. 



