C— GEOLOGY 73 



West Midlands, a study which owes nearly all its data to the work of 

 amateurs. I will name the most outstanding that all may know our 

 indebtedness to them : Strickland, Lucy, Crosskey, F. W. Martin, Jerome 

 Harrison, Mantle, Codrington, Deeley, Harmer, Gray, Linsdall Richard- 

 son, Miss Tomlinson, and many others. 



For the purpose in hand I also want to record my appreciation of the 

 work of many professionals, especially members of the Geological Survey, 

 in particular Fox Strangways, Barrow, Gibson, and Cunnington, among the 

 older workers, and Whitehead, Dixon and Dines among the present 

 officers. 



A few years ago at the York meeting in 1932, we listened to Prof. Bos- 

 well's wonderful synopsis of our knowledge of East Anglian Drifts, and 

 his attempt at their correlation with others in various parts of the country. 

 He would probably agree with me that perhaps the weakest links in his 

 chain of evidence are those that connect the Midlands with other glaciated 

 areas. Here, the drifts are very denuded and for the most part belong to 

 the Older Series, the area is extensive, and despite a large number of rather 

 disconnected investigations a clear view of the whole is lacking. In my 

 attempt to rectify this deficiency, I have been forced, like my predecessors, 

 to limit the size of the area in which I could acquire a real intimacy with 

 the drifts. I have, however, drawn widely on published accounts of other 

 districts. In addition, I have employed a new line of approach by studying 

 the river deposits as an aid to the dating of the glacial drifts. Since much 

 of the region was, perhaps for the greater part of the Pleistocene, outside 

 the limits of the ice sheets, an understanding of the river development is 

 essential to any interpretation of the history of events. 



What Boswell essayed for East Anglian glacials. King and Oakley have 

 attempted for the Thames river deposits. The close correspondence 

 between the movements of sea level suggested for the Thames and those 

 which appear to have taken place in the Somme and the Severn, serves to 

 reinforce the interpretation of the very complex evidence presented by the 

 Thames which these authors have put forward. It encourages me also to 

 feel some confidence in my reading of the Severn evidence. In the sequel 

 I try to show how the river history helps to clear up the story of the 

 glaciation of the Midlands. 



At this point I wish to insert a warning. Syntheses, such as Boswell's, 

 and King and Oakley's, read so convincingly that beginners and even 

 maturer students accept the conclusions, gladly but uncritically ; whereas 

 the authors themselves are very conscious that their heroic attempts at a 

 general theory are little better than a number of working hypotheses put 

 up, like Aunt Sallies, for anyone to shy at. I, at any rate, regard this 

 attempt of mine in that light. 



The Different Types of Drift and Their Distribution. 



The region I propose to deal with is bounded on the west by the north- 

 south line of hills from the Glees in Shropshire to Malvern ; on the south 

 by the Cotteswold escarpment ; and on the east by the watershed 



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