458 Notices of Memoirs — Mr. Hudleston^s Address — 



by no means weathered as well as the Thanet Sand, and in many 

 cases the passage from the base of the shaft to the chambers is much 

 broader than it originally was. But even now an inspection of the 

 ground-plan shows that in none of them is there any widening out 

 from the base of the shaft like that of the Brightling pit, and that 

 in almost all of them the passage at the base of the shaft is very 

 decidedly narrower than any other part of the pit. It must have 

 been still narrower, at one time, to allow of the continuation of the 

 footholes to the floor of the pit. Then, those deneholes which we 

 were able to enter, though their makers had apparently been restricted 

 to a greatest length of 70 feet, showed certain differences in plan 

 and development such as might be looked for if each denehole were 

 a family hiding-place and storehouse, but unintelligible on the 

 supposition that they were originally pits for chalk.^ And the care 

 taken at the surface to preserve the flattened contour characteristic 

 of a gravel plateau, is a care that would be simply silly were these 

 deneholes pits for chalk, though absolutely necessary if they were 

 hiding-places and secret storehouses. 



I might enter into further details, but trust that enough has been 

 said to make it evident that Deneholes and Bell Pits belong to 

 totally different classes of excavations, the resemblances between 

 them being superficial and the differences fundamental. In short, 

 Deneholes were made for the sake of the excavation, and Bell Pits 

 for the sake of the material extracted from the excavation. The 

 archeeological evidence bearing on deneholes ancient and modern 

 and the uses to which they have been put, though of great interest, 

 would seem out of place in the Geological Magazine. 



British Association rou the Advancement of Science. 



Bristol, September 8, 1898. 



Address to the Geological Section, by W. H. Hudleston, 



M.A., F.R.S., President of the Section. 



Introductory. 



ABOUT this time last year British geologists were scattered 

 over no inconsiderable portion of the Northern Hemisphere, 

 partly in consequence of the International Geological Congress 

 at St. Petersburg and partly owing to the meeting of the British 

 Association at Toronto. From the shores of the Pacific at Vancouver, 

 on the one hand, to the highlands of Armenia on the other, there 

 were parties engaged in the investigation of some of the grandest 

 physical features of the earth's surface. 



The geologists in Canada were especially favoured in the matter 

 of excursions. Everything on the American continent is so big that 



1 It is worth adding that no attempt had been made to extract flint from 

 a prominent bund seen in each pit at Hangman's Wood 4 to 6 feet above the floor, 

 or from any other band. 



