Horace B. Woodivard—The Chalky Boulder-clay. 485 



The ten subsequent years have tended in no ways to decrease the 

 enthusiasm which Mr. Brodie has ever manifested in the pursuit of 

 geological science. Owing to advanced age, he has had lately to 

 relinquish the office of rural dean of Warwick, which he held for 

 many years ; but we trust he may yet be spared some years longer 

 lor the tranquil enjoyment of his parochial work in the pleasant 

 home at Eowington. H. B. Woodward. 



II.— The Chalky Boulder-clat and the Glacial Phenomena 



OF THE Western-Midland Counties of England. ^ 



By Horace B. Woodward, F.E.S., F.G.S. 



THE extent of the glaciation in the Western-Midland Counties 

 of England during the formation of the Chalky Boulder-clay 

 has yet to be determined in detail. No accurate survey has at 

 present been made of the various Drifts that are scattered over the 

 country from Northamptonshire and Buckinghamshire on the east 

 to Worcestershire and Gloucestershire on the west; but the 

 observations of Strickland, Brodie, Lloyd, Lucy, and others, have 

 made known the characters of the superficial deposits at numerous 

 localities in and around the vale of Evesham, while the probable 

 limit of the action of land-ice during the period of maximum 

 glaciation has been delineated on a small map by S. V. Wood, jun.=^ 



The district is of considerable interest as being on the borders of 

 the large region which was mantled by the ice-sheet durino- the 

 accumulation of the Chalky Boulder-clay of East Anglia ; and it was 

 not affected by any marked glaciation during the later phases of the 

 Pleistocene period. The "Modified Drifts" which, in the form of 

 valley-gravels and loams, succeeded the Boulder-clay, yield, as at 

 Cropthorne, the Mammoth and associated fossils; and these deposits 

 merge into the old estuarine and marine deposits of the great Severn 

 Valley. 



The probable southern limits of the Chalky Boulder-clay in 

 England may be traced from Hornchurch in the Thames Valley to 

 the north of London and Watford, and thence from the neighbour- 

 hood of St. Albans, round by Luton and Leighton Buzzard, into the 

 vale of Aylesbury. A rough boundary may thence be traced 

 between Bicester and Buckingham, to the north of Banbury, and 

 into the vale of Moreton. Finally, the limits must be sought to the 

 north of the Cotteswolds and Bredon Hill, the evidences of ice-action 

 being discernible here and there in the vale of Evesham. 



It is noteworthy that the elevated regions of Edge Hill and the 

 Cotteswolds appear to have arrested the progress of land-glaciation. 

 This seems also to have been the case along the higher parts of the 

 Chiltern range, from Wendover to Tring and Dunstable, and these 

 elevated Chalk areas are indeed marked by S. V. Wood, jun., as 

 having been free from the ice which formed the Chalky Boulder- 

 clay. In other places, as along the Liassic scarp near Catesby in 



1 Bead before the Meeting of the British Association at Toronto. 

 Quart. Journ. Gaol. Soc, vol. xxxviii, map 4, pi. xxvi. 



