494 S. V. Wood-—The Long Meadend Bed. 
The second bed which my father described he termed the ‘ Lower 
Marine,” and says that it began in the gorge called Beacon Bunny 
as a light-coloured sand under a bed of lignite, which he regards as 
the base of the Lower Freshwater, and might be traced to the east- 
ward until lost below the freshwater beds at a point about 300 yards 
from Meadend, disappearing there beneath the shingle of the beach. 
This point of seeming disappearance was west of Meadend; and it 
was there that the bed yielded shells, and where Mr. F. E. Edwards, 
my father, and I (together with Mr. J. W. Flower, and the Rev. D. 
Laing, visitors for a few days to my father and Mr. Edwards 
respectively, and both now dead) worked at it; and it was from 
the result of our combined labour that the list of genera given by 
my father at p. 4 was made. The bed here was crowded with shells 
at one part (the part yielding them being of very small thickness), 
and showed itself under the mass of talus which masked the lower 
portion of the cliff; and as it was thus visible for only a few yards, 
it may, as Mr. Keeping says it had, have slipped from a higher place 
in the cliff above it; for this would agree with the position assigned 
to it by my father at Beacon Bunny, which is further west. Neither 
case, however, as explained in the sequel, by any means gives it the 
geological position on which Mr. Keeping insists. 
The genera which my father gives from this ‘ Lower Marine,” or 
Meadend bed, are 16 in. number, viz. Oliva, Potamides, Ancilla 
(Ancillaria), Natica, Melania, Mclanopsis, Pleurotoma, Bulla, Mactra, 
Cyrena, Corbula, Sanguinolaria, Venericardia (Cardita), Cytherea, 
Lucina, and Potamomya. Of these 16, four, viz. Oliva, Potamides, 
Sanguinolaria and Potamomya, do not occur either in my father’s 
list of shells from his ‘“‘ Upper Marine,” which is the Middle Headon, 
or in Messrs. Keeping and Tawney’s list of Middle Headon shells, 
which is made out by them from no less than seven distinct, and for 
the most part widely separated localities, which have for very many 
years past been assiduously searched by various collectors. Not 
only are these four thus absent, but only seven of the sixteen genera 
given by my father appear in that column of Messrs. Keeping and 
Tawney’s list which is headed ‘‘ Long Meadend.” ! 
Of the four genera thus absent from every Middle Headon locality, 
two are freshwater, and have no significance beyond contributing, 
with the other freshwater genera mentioned by my father, to show 
the truly estuarine character which he assigned to this Long Mead- 
end bed; but the other two are marine and Bartonian, and one of 
them, Oliva, is of the highest significance in this question. It com- 
prised only one species, Oliva Branderi,? and I well recollect that it 
1 Their list does not appear to be intended as a complete one for Meadend, but 
only to show what Middle Headon shells occur at that place, for they mention species 
of two more of these genera, viz. Cytherea and Corbula, as occurring there, but 
explain that they are omitted from the column because they are not Middle Headon 
species. In that paper Messrs. Keeping and Tawney seem to take the correct view 
that the Meadend bed is Upper Bagshot, though Mr. Keeping now wishes to be 
understood to maintain that it is Middle Headon. 
2 This species is represented in the Edwards Collection, now in the British 
Museum (Natural History), Cromwell Road, and is marked by F. E. Edwards as 
from Meadend.—Edit. Grou. Mac. 
