332 Geological Excursion to Guildford. 



Professor Morris occupied the attention of the party in one of the 

 picturesque lanes near Shalford, by explaining the origin of the sandy 

 soil they stood on, and the clay-beds to which the slope of the road 

 was leading ; how the sandstone, now turned up and exposed, was once 

 horizontally laid down in the shallows of a wide sea, reaching from 

 the raised land of the West of England far away into what is now 

 Europe, and there deep, and richer in marine life, the waters deposited 

 calcareous layers, now constituting the Neocomian formation of 

 Neuchatel, represented in Surrey by a thin continuation, recognised 

 as the Perna bed, as originally observed and explained by Mr. 

 Godwin-Austen, of Chilworth, more than twenty years ago. Sands 

 and mud filled up those primeval waters, leaving as the results the 

 Lower Greensand beds, with their iron sandstones, white glass-sand 

 (Eeigate and Aylesford), Fuller's-earth beds (Nuffield), and Kentish 

 Eag, where the oysters and other shells abounded more fully than 

 elsewhere. Mr. Meyer pointed out in the Shalford sands the few 

 isolated shells representing the thick oyster-beds of the Kentish 

 Eag, and indicated the exact horizon in the Surrey lane-cutting, 

 where fossil lobsters are abimdantly found in the so-called " Cracker 

 beds" of the Lower Greensand of the Isle of Wight. 



The very source of the pebbles and rolled bits of older fossils in 

 these old sands of Surrey was indicated by the leaders to the 

 students. Thus the Oolite beds of Mid-England were credited with 

 the bits of rolled Ammonites, and the older Sandstones and Palaeozoic 

 rocks had to acknowledge the quartz-pebbles and fragments of 

 lydian stone forming the grits and pebble-beds seen in the section 

 of the Lower Greensand, in the ascent from the ford at East Shal- 

 ford to the crest of Chilworth Hill, the many layers of the uplifted 

 and denuded beds of which give rise to the picturesque escarpment. 



On Chilworth Hill the party assembled among the rustic graves 

 under the tower of St. Martha's Church, and there, backed by the 

 North Downs, and looking out over the broad extent of undulating 

 country at the distant South Downs, they listened to Prof. Eupert 

 Jones explaining how the succession of hill and vale coincides with 

 the harder and softer strata, of chalk, clays, and sandstones, brought 

 up by grand but gentle curves, in orderly arrangement, aroimd a 

 long elli]ptic dome, reaching from Alton on the west to Hastings, and 

 beyond the Straits to France, and worn down, by natural agencies, 

 of long continuance, from a high broad ridge to the present com- 

 paratively low series of lesser ridges, and drained by rivers, follow- 

 ing the radiating cracks of the raised ellipse, which have still kept 

 their outward course through sandrock and chalk downs, deepening 

 the widened rifts until the Pluvial period was over-passed, and now 

 meander slowly among the gravel-beds and alluvial flats, till they 

 reach the Thames on one side and the Channel on the other. On 

 their way to Guildford the geologists visited, near Titlings, a pit of 

 chalk-marl (used for jDlaster-lime), where the beds, upturned at an 

 angle of 80°, afford a key to the general configuration of the country, 

 as they show by local intensity the bending force to which all the 

 strata have submitted. After some refreshment at Guildford, Mr. 



