376 Reports and Proceedings. 



till, and thrown off tlie overlying " Silurians " and " Old Eed " on 

 the flanks like the coats of an onion — ^how the prolongation of this 

 line of npthrust passing under Port.worth and the Bristol Coal-field 

 is traceable over a vast area ; giving rise to a series of dislocations 

 and upheavals most important in an economical point of view, as 

 bearing upon the practicable working of many of our beds of coal 

 and iron. The speaker pointed out the Oolitic escai-pment of the 

 Cotteswolds, and the geological features of the vales of Worcester 

 and Grloucester. He described the action of ice and water, which, in 

 the course of ages, has ground down and worn away the super- 

 incumbent strata, leaving only a gravel-bed here and there, to tell of 

 what once has been ; and he wound up by an eloquent account of the 

 appearance of man upon the scene, in company with the extinct gi- 

 gantic mammalia — ^the mammoth and the hairy rhinoceros — now no 

 longer living on the face of the earth, but whose bones, entombed 

 with the works and remains of man, have been of late years fre- 

 quently found associated, under circumstances which render their 

 contemporaneity no longer doubtful. 



The address was loudly cheered ; but a fall of rain caused a some- 

 what hurried return to Gloucester, where, at the Bell Hotel, about 

 thirty -five members sat down to dinner. 



After dinner. Dr. Wright made a communication " On the Distribu- 

 tion of the Coral-beds of the English Oolitic rocks." He first gave an 

 account of the coral-reefs of the Pacific, their structure, mode of growth, 

 and geographical distribution ; he pointed out how that these forma- 

 tions occupy in oui* present seas a great area of depression, in which the 

 land has been sinking for long periods of time ; that the polypes which 

 form these reefs build at no great depth from the surface of the ocean ; 

 that as the land goes down these tiny architects build up, and that 

 where coral is found at depths of from 1500 to 2000 feet, it is not that 

 polypes live at such depths, but that the land on which they once 

 built has sunk ; that these animals only thrive in water above 66° Far., 

 and that wherever the temperature of the ocean falls below that point 

 they are no longer found. The magnitude of some of these struc- 

 tures far surpasses that of any other animal product, for the barrier- 

 reef on the north-east coast of Australia is about 1250 miles in length, 

 and in the low Archipelago many thousands of miles of ocean waste 

 is. studded over with these zoophytic structures. If there was any 

 one character more remarkable than another, in a zoological point of 

 view, by which the present epoch was distinguished from the past, 

 it was by the magnitude and extent of the coral-reefs and islands 

 which were developed within 28° of latitude north and south of the 

 equator. Dr. Wright then proceeded to describe the character of the 

 coral beds found in the Lias, of which he enumerated three in dif- 

 ferent zones. He then pointed out those in the Inferior Oolite, of 

 which he described three ; the lowest found in the Pea-grit of Crick- 

 ley-hm, Cubberley, at Brown'shill, near Painswick, and other loca- 

 lities, was well worthy of attention ; it was the nearest approach to 

 our modern reefs that they possessed, as it covered a considerable area, 

 and was from 20 to 25 feet thick. The Oolite-marl was the second 



