Prof. T. G. Bonney—Pebdbles in the Bunter Beds. 205 
His objection of the absence of the pebbles towards Liverpool and 
North Notts is doubtless of some weight; but in the former place, 
vein-quartz pebbles (abundant in Staffordshire) occur with some of 
quartzite about Liverpool, and I have seen both in Nottinghamshire. 
Hence I think a more natural explanation—seeing that at any rate 
in the former district the total thickness of the Bunter increases— 
is that the main drift of the coarser materials happens not to be 
exposed. The absence of Bunter beds from the Carlisle district 
proves nothing. Keuper overlaps Bunter in many places. 
I should also be glad to learn, as a matter of physical geology, 
how currents ‘running at the rate of at least three miles an hour” 
could be set up along the coasts of an inland sea. I suggested that 
our Bunter beds were rather of the nature of a “ Weald,” because it 
seemed to me probable that they were not marine in the ordinary 
sense of the word. In some of the valleys and lake deltas of the 
large Kuropean rivers we find beds presenting a general resemblance 
to them, and in the Lower Carboniferous beds of Arran (admitted 
to be fresh-water) deposits almost indistinguishable. The resem- 
blance also to the Old Red Sandstone conglomerates of Scotland 
is very considerable. They may of course be lake deltas, but in that 
case they must have been near enough to the influent river to allow 
the velocity of its current to be maintained. The Keuper, however, 
with its finer sediments, salt and gypsum, is just the deposit we might 
expect in a true inland sea. 
I may add that the occasional presence, in the Bunter beds, of 
schists and granitoid rocks, generally too rotten for examination, 
and of a third group of much altered rocks, fine black quartzites, 
extremely indurated grits, lydites (?), and rocks of the “halleflinta” 
type, of which I have not yet completed the examination, all point 
to a distant source for the Bunter pebbles.? 
Where in the Midland counties can we, in a geological epoch so 
late as the Trias, locate with reasonable probability ridges which 
would be of sufficient magnitude to supply the enormous mass of 
material which the Bunter beds require for their pebbles alone? 
I cannot but think that the proximity of these quartzite ridges to his 
home, and the fascination of a discovery, has deprived Mr. Harrison 
of his power of mental perspective, or he would have seen the 
improbability of his theory. Some geologists of no mean reputation 
have even doubted whether the ridges of the Lickey and of Hartshill 
were not wholly buried in Triassic times. It is, at any rate, obvious 
that the masses exposed cannot have been large, and that they must 
have been mere insular outcrops in the area of deposition, be that in 
sea, lake, or river delta. 
1 Since the date of my last paper I have found two specimens of the compact 
quartzite with annelid tubes, one of the usual ‘‘fossiliferous’’ quartzite with Lingula 
Rouaulti, and two pebbles moderately rounded, of May Hill Sandstone. The last two 
are not quartzite, but one of the ordinary fine brown grits. 
