E. H. Ho worth— A Great Post- Glacial Flood. 271 



this incoherent mass of Thanet Sands, and deposited it again (with- 

 out breaking it up into sand) 35 feet lower down upon a mass of the 

 "Woolwich beds, which must have descended 46 feet and changed places 

 with the Thanet Sands " {id. p. 89). Surely the difficulty disappears 

 in the presence of the explanation which we offer. This explanation 

 explains completely the existence of these large masses of trans- 

 ported strata and of the great boulders of which Mr. Tylor, in fact, 

 in another place says, " These materials loere evidently ivashed in hy 

 heavy floods, not covfined to the valleys, but passing over the whole 

 surface of the land, tearing up the ground and carrying it to lower 

 levels into the valleys" {id. pp. 60, 61). 



If we turn from the deposits contained in the Thames Yalley to 

 the layer of brick-earth which covers upland and dale in the South 

 of England, washed over the surface of the land evenly, we shall 

 find it supporting the same apparently inevitable conclusion. It 

 will be well first to show that this upland brick-earth corresponds 

 to the limon of Belgium. In the first place it is found on the high- 

 lands. Thus it is found at Folkestone at 150 feet above the sea near 

 the station, and in the words of Murchison, •' it rises up upon the 

 slopes of the adjacent chalk hills and you are insensibly conducted 

 from the debris in the ' combe ' or hollow to the wider but more 

 thinly spread mass of similar matter on the slopes and summits of 

 the hills." This mantle of brick-earth covers the drift gravels 

 which occupy so much of the district, and has protected the bones, 

 etc., they contain, from being destroyed. It is found, therefore, 

 exactly as the upper limon of the French writers in some places in 

 thick beds of clay, and in others thinning out and evidently resulting 

 from the same effects of a wave of translation which has buried the 

 Mammoth and his companions in so manj'^ other places. Speaking of 

 Kent, Murchison says, " Fossil bones of Mammoth, Ehinoceros, 

 Hippopotamus, Stag, Horse, etc., have been found, as I was informed 

 by Mr. Bensted, in the excavation of brick-earth and flint drift on 

 the slopes above the jail at Maidstone, which I had examined, and 

 Bot less than 80 feet above the river. Dr. Plomley, indeed, gave 

 me specimens of the teeth of Ehinoceros tichorhinus which had been 

 found there. Fresh-water and land shells also occurred in some of 

 the overlying loam, and the whole case is therefore precisely in accord- 

 ance with that of other places cited. No one can separate this drift 

 of the summits of Pennenden and Barming Heaths from the bone 

 drift of Maidstone " (Journ. Geol. Soc. vol. vii. p. 382, note). Again, 

 the chief localities where fossil mammalia occur in this part of Kent 

 have, indeed, been clearly described by Prof. Morris (Loudon's Mag. 

 Nat. Hist. vol. ix. p. 693, 1836) ; and this good naturalist informs 

 us that the species of shells {Helix hispida. Pupa marginata and 

 Siiccinea ohlonga), found usually in the upper (loamy) portion of the 

 detritus, belong to land testacea and to such as "inhabit the banks 

 of rivers and marshy places, no decidedly fresh-water shell having 

 yet been detected," while the large fossil bones lie in the lower mass 

 and under the clay {id. p. 383). This is precisely as in Belgium 

 and in France, and the same explanation of it is given by Murchison 



