-H". H. Eoworth — Traces of a Great Post-Glacial Flood. 517 



exclusively of the remains of a land fauna; its high position of 

 150 to 26U feet above the arljacent river level; the irregularity of 

 its bedding ; and its wide spread, westward, towards Hendred over 

 the adjacent plain. He identifies it with the angular drift of 

 Sangatte and Brighton, with which it agrees in containing similar 

 Mammalian remains, having the same irregular bedding, the same 

 absence of wear in the component materials, and at Sangatte the 

 same land shells. The only difference being that the drift at 

 Sangatte and Brighton was more flinty and coarser, which is 

 accounted for by the adjacent flint at Chilton being the Lower Chalk, 

 and that at Brighton the Chalk with flints. This deposit of inland 

 drift which, as Mr, Prestwich says, follows no river course, and is 

 neither a marine drift nor a glacial drift from the northward, shows 

 very clearly that the so-called Channel river which even the most 

 exuberant imagination would hardly carry as far as Chilton is, apart 

 from all the other considerations we have urged, utterly inadmissible 

 as a postulate to explain the angular drift, whose distribution there 

 can be little doubt, as Mr. Prestwich has so well urged, is due to a 

 translating mass of waters which has filled the hollows and pockets 

 in the surface of the chalk with it, and also distributed the Sarsen 

 stones which occur at Chilton as they do further north. 



The opinions here quoted are assuredly most weighty, and they 

 more than justify the conclusion which I have arrived at inde- 

 pendently, and which was formulated by Professor Sedgwick, an 

 " Old Master " whom I have not previously quoted in these papers, 

 where he says that " diluvial torrents have swept over the land, 

 driving before them immense masses of gravel," adding, " that all 

 the diluvial detritus originated in the same system of causes, which 

 having produced their effects, were never repeated " (Ann. of Phil, 

 vol. ix. p. 248). 



Well may Mr. Belt remark that of late years, " the evidence that 

 abounds of violent and tumultuous deposition has been almost 

 ignored under the influence of the teachers of the theory of sub- 

 aerial denudation." . . . " In Cornwall and in Devon," he adds, "as 

 well as in Sussex and Surrey, independent observers, including the 

 most illustrious of our geologists, have published their convictions that 

 great currents of water poured across the country. I do not know what 

 other geological conclusion has more evidence to support it " (Journ. 

 Geol. Soc. vol. xxxii. p. 87). 



This is the view I maintain most strenuously. I ventured to say 

 in a previous paper that the geological evidence amply supports the 

 position required by the archa3ological and pala3ontological evidence 

 that the period of the Mammoth came to an end by a catastrophe in 

 which a vast movement of water overwhelmed a large part of the 

 Northern Hemispliere. In order to examine the problem methodi- 

 cally, I have first considered those areas which are outside the 

 limits of ordinary glacial phenomena, and have consequently limited 

 myself entirely to that southern zone of European deposits marked 

 by loams and gravels, but free from boulders and glacial clays, a dis- 

 trict generally considered to be bounded in England by the Thames 



