462 Notices of Memoirs — 8tonesfield Slate Section. 



■wbile of the Government to undertake a series of experimental 

 borings, which would indicate the exact position of the buried Coal- 

 fields. In the present state of the mining laws it is a task not likely 

 to be undertaken by the private adventurer. It might, however, be 

 carried out by the County Councils, or by a combination of land- 

 owners, either with or without a compulsory rate, as the property 

 would be benefited by the discovery of new fields. It is one of 

 those objects of public utility which are especially worthy of the 

 support of the British Association at this time aud in this place. 



11. — Stonesfield Slate. Eeport op the Committee, consisting 

 OF Mr. H. B. Woodward (Chairman), Mr. E. A. Walford 

 (Secretary), Professor A. H. Green, Dr. H. Woodward, and 

 Mr. J. WiNDOES, appointed to open further sections in the 

 neighbourhood of Stonesfield in order to show the relationship 

 of the Stonesfield Slate to the underlying and overlying strata. 

 (Drawn up by Mr. Edwin A. Walford, Secretary.) 



fTlHE basement beds of the Great Oolite in the Midlands and in the 

 i south-west counties of England have been hitherto supposed 

 to be well defined ; for in all the records of the many writers on 

 this geologic subdivision, to the Stonesfield Slate has been assigned 

 the line of separation from the Fuller's Earth or Inferior Oolite, or, 

 where tne Stonesfield Slate is absent, as in the extreme west, to the 

 Minchinhampton beds has been assigned the same position. Undue 

 prominence has been given to so inconstant a set of beds sis the 

 Slate, as much from the ease with which fossils for its study have 

 been collected as from the varied character of the fauna and flora 

 found in it. From the days when the finding of the mammalian 

 remains in the Slate called the attention of geologists prominently 

 to it, every text-book of geology has found a place for it at the 

 bottom of the Great Oolite limestones. Though, however, text- 

 books and papers have defined the lower boundary of the Great 

 Oolite so clearly, the ofiicers of the Geological Survey in their work 

 in the neighbourhood of Stonesfield found the lines so difiicult to 

 define that it became necessary, where the Slate had disappeared, 

 to adopt an intermediate colouring, a kind of no-man's-land. Since 

 then an argillaceous stratum, " the Kift bed," has been recognised 

 as the lowest of the Great Oolite beds in the Banbury and Hook 

 Norton area. 



The endeavour of the work, for which the British Association 

 made a money grant in 1893, has been to ascertain the thickness 

 and composition of the beds underlying the Slate, for hitherto no 

 account of these beds has been obtainable, Prof. Ed. Hull's record ^ 

 of 70 feet being the only assumed thickness of the Great Oolite, 

 and to this he adds 30 feet for the Inferior Oolite. Though their 

 thickness seems to be over-estimated, no correction or account of a 

 series of rocks so important has since then been made. Nearer 

 Chipping Norton, however, Mr. J. Windoes, Mr. W. H. Hudleston/ 



1 Eeport Brit. Assoc, p. 82 (sections), 1860. 



2 W. H. Hudleston, Proc. Geol. Assoc, vol. v. No. 7. 



