312 Sir H. H. Howorth—North Norfolk Geology. 
place, was in all probability lying horizontally at the bottom of the 
sea, with the Crag shells living upon it or in its covering mud. If 
this was so, and I cannot see how the case for it can be answered, it 
is not merely possible or probable but it is absolutely certain that 
when the dislocation of the chalk took place vast tidal waves would be 
caused in the superincumbent sea, similar to but on a much greater 
scale than the monster tidal waves in the Pacific induced by earth- 
movements such as are known in Java, South America, and Japan. 
This I have always maintained. 
Granting the existence of these vast tidal waves, which great 
physicists and mathematicians of the first rank like Hopkins and 
Babbage freely appealed to as vere cause of great dynamical effects in 
geology, we at once have an efficient’ cause for the removal and 
portage of these vast masses of solid material in almost any form or 
shape or size, the carrying power of water under these conditions being 
only limited by the quantity and speed of the liquid in motion. 
We have no occasion, therefore, to appeal to transcendental ice ages 
or ice-sheets or to forms of ice acting contrary to all known forms of 
ice and supposed to have played a quite impossible jugglery with the 
laws of matter, but we have at our command a perfectly inductive 
proof supported at every point by the phenomena to be explained, as 
well as by the known physical qualities of matter. 
The a priort postulate here involved, as I have said, is consistent 
with all the phenomena to be explained, and especially with the 
conditions under which the chalk masses occur in the Norfolk clits. 
The position of these included masses in the soft beds in which they 
le makes it plain that the condition of the sands and clays cannot be 
treated as a separate phenomenon from that of the great masses and cakes 
of chalk. These latter lie in laminated sands precisely like in character 
to the laminated sands which overlie them, and neither the laminations 
above nor belowaredisturbed. When, again, the great masses of chalk are 
more or less globular or lenticular in shape, the laminations fold round 
the outlines of the contained masses, showing that the formation of 
the lamin was contemporary with the deposition of the chalk masses. 
Again, the laminations in the clays and the loams are in places 
continuous with those in the sands, showing that all the contents of 
the cliffs form one substantial phenomenon. 
* What is plain beyond measure is that these laminations could 
not have been made by any substance so rigid as ice and working in 
the fashion that ice works either in glaciers or icebergs. Everybody 
admits that, and I do not know anybody, in fact, who would now argue 
that the stratification and lamine in question were due to any other 
cause but water. Inasmuch as the chalk masses and chalk cakes 
are found at all levels from the foot of the cliffs to their summit and - 
are'found deposited under the conditions already described it is clear 
that water action, and water action alone, can be invoked for the 
building up of the bed of which the cliffs afford us a sectional view ; 
and if so, it is plain that the masses of chalk and chalk cakes can only 
have been carried to where they are found and redeposited by water. 
It is water alone which could have let them gently settle upon finely 
stratified beds of sand and clay without disturbing the laminations. 
