Correspondence — Messrs, Bristoiv and Whitaker. 575 



and confining ourselves as closely as possible to the main subject, 

 we may state that, if we had thought that the raised beach at 

 Portland Bill had been in any way connected with the Chesil Bank, 

 we should have said so in our paper ; but we have no doubt but that 

 the former is far older (a part, indeed, of that so often found at the 

 same height, as near Torquay) ; and we see no reason to imagine either 

 sinking or rising of the land to explain the formation of the latter. 



As 10 the " adoption " of the term " natural groin " — if one is 

 bound to put in inverted commas any two words that have been 

 printed together before, the articles in the Geological Magazine 

 will be little else than a mass of quotation. Such a term is so 

 simple that it might at once occur to any one, as well as to the 

 author of " Eain and Eivers," and might be used without any 

 thought of appropriation. 



We have distinctly stated in our paper that with the question of 

 the heaping up of the beach we had nothing to do, and that it has 

 been fully gone into by others ; therefore it is absurd to tax us with 

 avoiding that question. 



The '^assumed current" that Col. Greenwood speaks of is also 

 well known, of course going along with " the prevalence of south- 

 west winds." 



We do not consider " the shingle of the Chesil beach to be in an 

 anomalous position" simply because "it is longer than other beaches," 

 etc., as a careful reader of our paper would see at once, but because 

 it is differently placed to any other mass of shingle in the kingdom, 

 having the sea on both sides and joining what would else be an 

 island to the mainland. 



We must emphatically dissent from the statement that the travel- 

 ling of sea-beach is " a subject on which profound ignorance pre- 

 vails :" were Col. Greenwood as ready to refer to other authorities 

 as he is to find fault with writers who do not refer to him he would 

 hardly have made such a statement. We may particularly draw 

 attention to the papers by Mr. Eedmann (on the south-eastern coast) ^ 

 and to the older essay by Colonel Reid,- — to Mr. Coode's paper we 

 have already referred. 



Col. Greenwood seems to have lost sight of the chief aim of our 

 paper, which is to show that the Chesil beach may have been formed 

 where it now stands, but against the land, which being then worn 

 away by the small streams, etc., the beach became isolated, — a 

 theory which we venture to say has not been broached in any work, 

 not even in " Eain and Rivers ; " and we may as well state that this 

 idea occurred to one of us whilst mapping the Dorset country more 

 than twenty years ago, long before Col. Greenwood's work was 

 published ; although not then having the clue to the phenomena of 

 subaerial denudation,^ it went no farther than conversation. 



H. W. Bristow. W. Whitakeb. 



^ Published in the Proc. Tnst. Civ. Eng. 



2 Published in the Papers of the Royal Engineers. We are away from books, and 

 so cannot give references exactly ; indeed, we have not even a copy of our own paper 

 with us, nor of " U;iin and Rivers " 



3 We readily acknowledge the good work done by Col. Greenwood in illustration 

 of this subject. 



