24 Notices of Memoirs — W. Wkitaker's Address. 



areas of Chalk, in part of the London Basin, that were open to 

 receive and absorb water. It was only those parts over which the 

 Geological Survey had mapped the various subdivisions of the Drift 

 that were available for this purpose, for fairly clear reasons, which 

 will be referred to at some length, further on ; where the Drift has 

 not been mapped, the Survey Maps are comparatively useless. 



It is to the particular subject of this set of maps, namely, the 

 accessibility of the chalk to surface-water, that I wish to draw your 

 attention, illustrating it by copies of some of the original maps, by 

 what I may call an improved or second edition of some of them, 

 and by an extension of the work into Norfolk and Suffolk. 



Before doing this, however, it may be well to allude to the present 

 state of Chalk water-supply in the county, as far as my knowledge 

 goes. There are three ways of getting public supplies of water 

 from the Chalk, and it is to public supplies only that I shall refer : — ■ 

 namely, the underground way, by wells and borings ; the guarded 

 surface way, by closed pipes from a spring-head ; and the over- 

 ground way, by an open channel, natural or artificial. 



I believe that Cromer, Dereham, Swaffham and Thetford are the 

 only Norfolk towns that get their supply by the first way. I know 

 of no Norfolk town that gets water from the Chalk by the second 

 way, though the seaside resort of Hunstanton is thus supplied ; but 

 the Cambridgeshire town of Wisbech does so, leading the water from 

 the springs near the base of our Norfolk Chalk at Marham through 

 some sixteen miles of pipes, and thus giving the great boon of good 

 water to a district in which none occurs. The enterprise of Wisbech 

 is thus in strong contrast to the apathy, and one may say the 

 stupidity, of the larger town in which I have the misfortune to live, 

 its Norfolk rival, Lynn, the corporation of which treat the inhabit- 

 ants to one of the worst supplies that I know of. These guardians 

 of the public health allow a set of Chalk springs, some pure, but 

 others contaminated, to mix together and to flow along an open 

 channel of six miles or so, as the crow flies, receiving on the way 

 the drainage of a fair tract of country, and, at the last, close by the 

 borough-boundary, some part of the sewage of the village of Gay- 

 wood. Notwithstanding that the evil of this course has been 

 pointed out for years, and constant complaints occur, yet our town- 

 councillors, in the multitude of whom there is not wisdom, have not 

 yet made up their minds to any decided action, and a question that 

 really admits of no debate is the subject of apparently endless dis- 

 cussion : ''Words not deeds" should be the town-motto, at least as 

 far as regards water-supply. 



Since the above paragraph was written, the Town Council of Lynn 

 adopted a scheme for the supply of good water ; but I fear in a half- 

 hearted way : at all events their scheme has been rejected at a 

 meeting of the ratepayers, and I am therefore compelled to transfer 

 the charges above made from the members of the coimcil to the 

 bod}' of the townsmen, who seem not to be educated up to pure 

 water pitch 1 When they have had a serious epidemic, perhaps they 

 may acquire more sensible views on this matter. 



