230 Reports and Proceedings : 
to the resistance they might offer to the waste occasioned by the 
mechanical and chemical agencies of water. He proposed to show, 
in regard to certain great ridges and hollows which limit the 
drainage of the Lune and its branches, that these were plainly 
sketched out by ancient subterranean movements; that in regard 
to particular streams, as the Lune and the Rother, there must have 
been valleys on part of their course before the age of the Old Red 
Sandstone; and that the courses of others, as Leck Beck and Bar- 
bon Beck, were marked out by great faults; while others, not in 
directions of such faults, were yet traceable to lines of weakness in 
rocks, occasioned by joints, having a determinate relation to these 
fractures. The conclusion from the whole being, that the main 
features of the inequalities of the earth’s surface were always refer- 
able to displacements of the rocks and lines of weakness dependent 
on them; and that the agencies of waste along these directions were 
ancient operations of the sea, at the rising and filling of the level of 
the land, and other operations, sometimes very ancient, but often 
still in force, depending on atmospheric vicissitudes. In reference 
to the latter, the author gave proof, from the upper part of 
Leck Beck, that the narrow rocky limestone glen which runs up 
toward the ‘County-stone’ is nothing else than a line of ancient 
subterranean caverns, of which the roofs have fallen in; and that 
this process is still in progress, the water being received in ‘ swal- 
lows’ at higher levels on the slope of the moors, and employed in 
dissolving the calcareous rocks on its passage. ‘Thus the valley in 
question, and many others similarly situated, were not excavated 
from the surface, but, after long ages of underground action of water, 
were formed by the falling in of the unsupported roofs. After this 
had occurred, the usual surface-action of running water had modi- 
fied the sides and the slopes. 
On THE TurrMat Waters oF Batu.* By Dr. Davupuny, F.R.S., F.G.S., Professor 
of Botany, Oxford. 
pe uee alluding very briefly to the mineral constitution of the 
Bath Waters as affording no adequate explanation of the me- 
dicinal virtues ascribed to them, the author proceeded to one point 
of scientific interest connected with their appearance—namely, the 
large volume of gas which they have gone on constantly disengaging, 
apparently from time immemorial. ‘The nature and amount of this 
were made the subject of the author’s examination, in the year 1832, 
during an entire month ; and the result arrived at was that the gas 
consisted mainly of nitrogen, which is present, indeed, in most other 
thermal waters, but in none so copiously as at Bath. Judging from 
the circumstance that the majority of these springs are associated 
with volcanos, and likewise that the same gas is freely evolved 
from the latter both in an active and in a more dormant condition, 
we may fairly infer that the evolution of nitrogen at Bath is in some 
manner or other connected with the same widely spreading and deep- 
* Read before the Chemical Section. ‘The Reader,’ Oct. 1, 1864. 
