Correspondence—Mr. Searles V. Wood, jun. 189 
phosed. I write, however, less as a critic than an inquirer; and for 
any petrological autocrat or parliament who will fix our nomenclature, 
I will, as in duty bound, for ever pray. C. Cattaway. 
WELLINGTON, Satop, March 4, 1880. 
THE GLACIAL DEPOSITS OF CROMER. 
Sir,—If Mr. Reid had extended his observations he would possibly 
have suppressed the paper which appeared in your pages of last month. 
Geologists will find the refutation of it in the structure of the Wensum 
Valley by Foulsham, Guist, and Fakenham, where the beds of the 
Cromer Cliff have been cut through by this valley, into which the 
chalky clay in its unmistakable form has come, resting on the Middle 
Glacial (a later part of it than that which caps the Cliff section), near 
the valley bottom, but wrapping over this and lying upon the Till 
and Contorted Drift direct on the higher slope of the valley. The 
instances, however, of the excavation of valleys through the older 
Glacial beds and Crag, and their infilling by the gravel and chalky clay, 
are universal wherever the Contorted Drift extends, and occur as far 
south as the southern border of Suffolk. 
The gentlemen of the Survey, confined by their duties to very limited 
areas, form some of them very decided opinions upon the whole subject 
of the newer Pliocene formation from what they find there. Thus 
from a gentleman employed in Cambridgeshire and West Essex we 
have been presented with one theory of the Glacial formation; from 
another who was employed in the neighbourhood of the Fen country 
we have a most elaborate theory of it, which in most respects is the 
exact contrary of the former; and now we have Mr. Reid’s. From 
gentlemen unconnected with the Survey we have had that of Mr. 
Gunn, who finds everything —upper, lower, middle, ‘‘the great 
laminated series,’ and I do not know what besides,—in the Cromer 
Cliff; that of Mr. Geo. Maw, who made out that the beds of the 
Cromer Cliff were posterior to the chalky clay, and analogous in posi- 
tion to that part of this clay which Mr. Harmer showed, in 1866, lay 
in valleys cut through its general outspread ; and that of the late Mr. 
Belt, which was so vast and extraordinary as to be beyond definition 
here ; and besides these, there are my own more moderate views. The 
principal result of this excogitation must be that geologists in general 
infer that we are all quite in the dark, and I suspect are, many of 
them, laughing at us. 
Dr. Croll has in your pages insisted that the Glacial Clay of Holder- 
ness, which is without contortions, and contains numerous horizontal 
beds of sand or gravel, is the bed of the North Sea between England 
and Scandinavia shoved bodily over Yorkshire by the Scandinavian 
ice; and this, moreover, without disturbing the Chalk floor, Mr. 
Reid now has it that this ice has shoved Norfolk out of its place (still 
without disturbing the Chalk floor) and crumpled up the county. 
Beside, and in contrast with these hypotheses, we have Mr. Geikie 
and Mr. Skertchley insisting that the morainic clay, which is seen for 
miles overlying sand and gravel in the North Suffolk cliff, has been 
dragged thus over by the ice, without even the layer of sand actually 
in contact with it being disturbed. ‘lhese things are so far beyond 
