76 A. Bell — Succession of the Later Tertiaries in Gt. Britain. 



the Selsey superficial Brick-earth and the Brighton "Elephant" bed. 

 The often-quoted deposit at Copford in Essex, and another con- 

 taining a similar fauna, with flint flakes, at Stroud, Gloucestershire, 

 650 feet elevation, belong to this stage, some of the species being 

 living known only in Yorkshire and far-distant places. Since the 

 paper on the Copford beds was written by the late Mr. John Brown, 

 the beds, although visited, I cannot find to have been practically 

 worked by any one except myself, Mr. Dalton's memoir being 

 mainly a recapitulation of Mr. Brown, plus sundry errors. 



Will Mr. Dalton kindly say where Mr. S. V. Wood states that 

 " three of the Helices from the Shell Marl no longer live in England," 

 i.e. H. ruderata, H. incarnata, and IT. fruticum : of the many thousands 

 of Copford shells I have had in my hands, I have never seen one of 

 the latter, and Mr. Wood's figure, as already mentioned, is that of a 

 Stutton specimen. Mr. Wood further remarks that the H. incarnata 

 requires confirmation, and he does not say in what bed the H. rude- 

 rata was found, simply giving Copford. My experience of the Marl 

 is that very few shells, except freshwater species, are to be found in 

 it, and Mr. Brown particularly observes that it is only where the 

 marl passes into sandy clay at the sides, that they abound, and in the 

 peat. Dr. Gwyn Jeffreys speaks of the -iff. fruticum as at Copford ; 

 the reference, he told me afterwards, was under a misapprehension 

 of a remark of mine, that I had found the shell in England elsewhere 

 than at Stutton. Sir C. Lyell, " Student's Manual," uses the same 

 words as Mr. Dalton, but the account of Copford given by Sir 

 Charles is inaccurate. 



I have been a little more prolix than perhaps necessary, because 

 H. fruticum. belongs to a group of shells pertinent to an age long 

 antecedent to the Copford peats, and the deposit is a typical one, 

 often-quoted but so seldom correctly, that it is quite as well that an 

 error should be set right if possible. Curiously enough, Mr. H. B. 

 Woodward (Geol. England and Wales, p. 333) makes the blue clay 

 beneath the marl to be the source of the Molluscan fauna. From 

 this clay I obtained teeth of Ehinoceros, and a nearly complete set 

 of teeth of a small deer, of which the whole skeleton was found. 



Submerged forest and peat beds of this age may be occasionally 

 seen at Torbay, Anglesey, and beneath the Carse Clays of Falkirk, 

 and the Lothians, and the Buttery Clay of the Fens. Such peats as 

 yield Elephant remains may be safely placed here. There is no 

 improbability in supposing that the Mammoth lived on throughout 

 the minor glaciation, since we find his remains in the Reindeer 

 period in Kent's Hole, the two periods being, if not as they may 

 probably have been, coeval, yet certainly closely, together in time; 

 and there is every reason to believe that the Megaceros lived in 

 Ireland long after its extinction in England, and that the Beindeer 

 in Scotland was a still later survival. 



The Bovey Heathfield Clay with Betula nana and Northern wil- 

 lows is, I think, an inland bed of this period ; but it is possible that, 

 like the Crataegus pyracanthus and others obtained from Grays Thur- 

 rock by Mr. Prestwich and Pinus sylvestris by myself, the flora 

 belongs to the period succeeding the major glaciation. 



