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Clement Reid— Glacial Deposits of Cromer. 57 
surface of any of the older deposits. This “First Till” consists of 
a mixture of about equal parts of shelly sand and clay, with the 
addition of numerous striated pieces of hard chalk and oolites, and a 
smaller quantity of various Paleozoic rocks, granite, and trap of 
different kinds. The shells, though abundant, are certainly deriva- 
tive, for they are usually sharply fractured, sometimes striated, and 
in the interior of one or two I have found the remains of a quite 
different matrix from that in which they are now imbedded. 
The till was, I believe, formed by glaciers or an ice-sheet flowing 
partly over an old sea-bottom, from whence were derived the shells, 
and also the far-travelled stones. That this is the case seems to be 
proved by the fact that, besides the shells, several specimens of 
septaria and hard chalk, bored by annelids, and subsequently striated, 
have been dug out; this, 1 think, shows the agency of floating-ice, 
probably only coast-ice, which would bring stones from all parts, 
and scatter them on the sea-bottom, where they would be bored by 
the annelids, to be subsequently ploughed up and striated by the 
advance of the ice-sheet into the shallow water. It should not be 
forgotten, that though the first till is the earliest known bed which 
has been to any great extent accumulated by ice, the period imme- 
diately previous, when the arctic birch and willow flourished in 
England near the sea-level, must have been quite cold enough for 
the formation of coast-ice capable of bringing abundance of stones 
from Scotland and Scandinavia. 
If we now try to discover the direction of the ice-flow, the absence 
of hard rocks under the till of course precludes any hope of finding 
- strie. Another test is, however, available, for where the ice has 
flowed over laminated clays, the beds have been crumpled slightly, 
just as a table-cloth is crumpled by the sliding of a heavy book. On 
clearing sections at Bacton I was able, by examining the direction of 
the folds, to find that the ice flowed from a point a little north of 
west, and the occurrence of abundance of the hard lower chalk also 
points in the same direction. The gathering ground appears, there- 
fore, to have been on the chalk escarpment of Lincolnshire, which, if 
we take into account the enormous denudation it has suffered during 
the Glacial Period, must have been at that time much higher than at 
present. The ice flowed down the long dip-slope of the chalk till 
it reached the sea-level, and ground up the sand-banks, and a little 
of the underlying estuarine “ Forest Bed,” from which were derived 
the fragments of wood and bone and the green-coated Kocene flints 
which are sometimes found. 
Next the ice would appear to have retreated, perhaps only for a 
few miles, leaving the Till with a curious hummocky surface, over 
which was deposited ripple-marked clay and marl in thin beds. 
This deposit, well shown between Hasbro’ and Bacton, seems to be 
glacier-mud such as would flow from beneath the ice, and be evenly 
spread over the surface lately abandoned. I do not think that 
this evenly-bedded loam can be taken as sufficient evidence of an 
inter-glacial warm climate, though it is traceable nearly continuously 
for at least four miles, for at the present day the glaciers of the Alps 
