270 Sir H. H. Howorth—North Norfolk Geology— 
being daily exposed, so that every part of the coast may at one time 
or other be critically analyzed and mapped. 
The heartbreaking result of this renewal of the cliff sections, 
however, as Mr. Horace Woodward and others have frequently 
deplored, is that the constitution and the physical arrangement of 
the greater part of the beds in question differs so completely at 
different times and almost in every yard of these very famous cliffs 
that no section, however carefully drawn, is of more than ephemeral 
interest. This year’s section will inevitably be of no use to us as 
a picture of what the kaleidoscopic beds will be like when a fresh 
collapse has taken place and two or three yards have been shaven 
off the front of the cliff. This baffling inconstancy is a continual 
source of complaint among all students of Norfolk geology. 
It is, therefore, quite futile to generalize from any particular section 
without taking into account its purely transient, temporary, and local 
character. ‘The kaleidoscopic feature here referred to does not apply 
to the whole of the sections, of course, but only to their loose materials, 
to the clays, loams, gravels, and sands, which everywhere overlie the 
more stable deposits. 
I would first speak about these latter beds. From East Runton 
to the great shingle beds at Weybourne, where the cliffs abruptly 
end, the chalk, where exposed in or at the foot of the cliffs, is 
immediately covered by a remarkable bed, quite unmistakable, and 
occurring quite continuously, except in certain very limited lengths 
of the coast where it has been forcibly denuded. ‘This bed does not 
seem to me to have been adequately described by Mr. Clement Reid. 
He says of it: ‘‘ At Weybourne, and wherever the surface of the chalk 
can be examined, there is nearly always a bed of large unworn or little 
worn flints at the base of the Crag. This is the ‘stone bed’ of Norfolk 
geologists, but it does not necessarily belong to any one horizon ; 
exactly similar beds of unworn flints are now being formed from above 
high-water mark to about 10 fathoms, and are caused merely by the 
wearing away of the soft chalk. The ‘stone bed’ is not formed by 
the subterranean dissolution of the chalk, for among the flints we often 
find bivalves in the position of life, and beneath them the chalk is here 
and there bored by Pholas and Saxicava.” 
IT am bound to say I cannot think this description quite represents 
the facts as I have seen them in many visits. In the first place, to 
compare this continuous bed of flints overlying the chalk with the 
patches and insular areas now being formed on the foreshore occupied 
in some cases by an almost continuous pavement of paramoudras and in 
others by a similar pavement of very large unweathered and generally 
unbroken flints is most misleading. ‘he greater part of the flints 
in the continuous beds overlying the chalk are rounded and weathered 
or broken, and it does not contain, except very rarely, large bizarre- 
shaped flints and paramoudras, but consists mainly of true rounded 
boulders, mostly not much larger than a cricket ball, lying, not in 
a kind of pavement, but heterogeneously mixed and forming a rude 
conglomerate, in which the contents become smaller and more 
rounded as we travel eastward until they become in places mere 
fine gravel. This bed ranges from a yard or more in thickness to 
