70 Whitaker—-On Whitecliff Bay. 
for my present purpose. Those who wish for details can find 
them, and in plenty, in the papers of Mr. Prestwich* and the 
Rey. O. Fisher,f and in the Geological Survey Memoir on 
the Isle of Wight by my colleague, Mr. Bristow. 
When in the Island last autumn, after thoroughly observing 
the cliffs of Whitecliff Bay, I gave an hour or so to an exami- 
nation of the new brickyard, but a little way inland, opened 
for the supply of the fort that is bemg built on Bembridge 
Down. I found that the pits were all small, and that none of 
them showed a perfect section of the beds worked: this, how- 
ever, did not matter, as they were close enough to give a con- 
tinuous section, and that at more than one part of the yard. 
The order of the beds thus shown was the same everywhere, 
and as follows, beginning from the south :— 
A. Light grey buff and yellow sand, clayey at its northern boundary, where itis 
succeeded by 
B. Brown sandy clay, passing up into 
c. Stiff brown clay with septaria (roundish masses of clayey limestone with 
septa, or divisions, of crystalline carbonate of lime). 
The bed a must belong to the Lower Bagshot Sand; for, as 
noted above, the Reading Beds are all clay here: indeed, by 
the lane just to the south, at the foot of the Chalk ridge, there 
were two small pits in the mottled plastic clay. The beds B 
and c, therefore, should be higher beds, for they are further to 
the north, the direction in which higher beds come on; but 
is exactly like the London Clay, and not like any higher bed. 
Unfortunately, I could not find a single fossil, either in the 
clay or in the septaria, which again are not to be known from 
those so common in the London Clay. However, from a fairly 
long and close acquaintance with that formation, I could hardly 
feel any doubt that the bed c belonged to it: the mineral cha- 
racter and the general lock would have settled the matter at 
once in other circumstances. 
Moreover, the bed B is like the upper part of the London 
Clay, when it is passing up into the Bagshot Sand; and a is 
clayey towards B, just as the lowest part of the Bagshot Sand 
is mostly clayey in its passage down into the London Clay. 
Now, if c, the most southerly bed, should turn out to be 
London Clay, as I think it is, there must be some disturbance 
here, and that hardly a mere fault, for the beds being nearly 
vertical, it would need’a fault of very great upcast to bring a 
mass of London Clay to the surface within the outcrop of the 
Lower Bagshot Sand, and there is no sign of afaultin the cliff 
section close by. I am led to think, therefore, that there may 
* Journ. Geol. Soe. vol. i. pp. 262-6. t Ibid. vol. xviii. pp. 70-73. 
