Correspondence — Mr. Jukes- Browne. 477 



excellent manner in which this new arrangement of the Geological 

 Museum has been carried out, and on the praiseworthy attempt to 

 give every possible opportunity and convenience for the study of 

 Geology in the great Northern Capital. 



COiaiaESIPOIiTZDIKSIiTGiH]. 



THE MAMMOTH AND THE GLACIAL DRIFT. 



SiE, — From the lofty heights of literary criticism Sir Henry 

 Howorth looks down upon the struggling company of practical 

 geologists, and seems to think that he gains a much better view of 

 the problems to be solved than those who are toiling among the 

 inequalities of the plain below. 



The toilers on the plain, however, will be apt to think that they 

 can perceive the structure of these inequalities better than the man 

 who surveys them from such a distant standpoint, and when this 

 person boldly proclaims from his mountain-top that the geologists 

 are making great mistakes they will naturally ask him if he has ever 

 taken a nearer view of the deposits he points to. Now it does not 

 appear that Sir Henry Howorth has had any practical experience as 

 a geologist ; he evidently has a considerable acquaintance with the 

 literature of Pleistocene geology, but geologists cannot accept this 

 as a sufficient qualification for dealing with such a difficult subject 

 as the relative ages of British Pleistocene deposits. His lack of 

 practical acquaintance with the deposits he is writing about shows 

 itself on page 400, where he quotes Prof. Flower's discovery of flint 

 implements " at Thetford on the Oose " as bearing on the age of the 

 gravels in the valley of the Ouse near Bedford ! Is it possible 

 that from his lofty standpoint Norfolk and Bedfordshire seem close 

 together ? 



It is of course perfectly logical to form a theory and then to see 

 if it harmonises with the facts, but if he imagines that he has 

 exhausted the data on which geologists ground their belief that some 

 of the mammaliferous gravels are of later date than the East Anglian 

 Boulder-clays, he is very much mistaken, and his claim to have 

 proved that deposits containing the Mammoth fauna are never 

 underlain by Glacial Drift is simply preposterous. 



To disprove a universal negative a single case is of course 

 sufficient, and he actually quotes such a case without recognizing it 

 as such. This is the section near Burgh, in Lincolnshire, where 

 gravel with mammalian bones is intercalated between two sheets of 

 Boulder-clay, the lower bed or " marl " being really the main mass 

 of Boulder-clay. Whether my description of the locality fails to 

 make this clear to the reader I cannot say, for I have not a copy of 

 the memoir with me in the country. 



I believe, too, though here I do not speak from personal know- 

 ledge, that there is no doubt about the superposition of the brick- 

 earth at Hoxne. Mr. H. B. Woodward distinctly states that the 

 section he saw in 1878 had chalky Boulder-clay beneath it/ though 

 1 Geology of England and. "Wales, 1887, p. 515. 



