Correspondence — Horace B. Woodward. 335 



making a detailed siirvey of all the superficial accumulations lying 

 in a line (say) from Plymouth to Carlisle, and the ground would 

 have to be traversed to-and-fro, as the drifts of one district have 

 been found to throw much light on those of another. One great 

 and fundamental question to be solved would be the age of the 

 " Head " relatively to that of the Pinnel of the Lake District. The 

 former overlies the raised beaches of the South-west of England. 



D, Mackintosh. 



GLACIATION OF THE SOUTH-WEST OF ENGLAND. 



Sir, — The subject of the Glaciation of the South of England is 

 gaining more and more attention, and Mr. Lucy's observations in 

 West Somerset, as recorded in the June Number of your Magazine, 

 will be read with interest, particularly in reference to tlie identifi- 

 cation of glacial strise on a mass of sandstone near Porlock. In 

 regard to the gravelly deposits in the lowlands near Minehead, I 

 was led, during a short excursion to the neighbourhood in the 

 Spring, to assign to them an alluvial, or possibly estuarine, origin ; 

 at the same time it is not unlikely that the gravels on the high 

 grounds, as those in the neighbourhood of Tiverton, may be of 

 glacial derivation. Mr. Poole has recorded the occurrence of tusks 

 and teeth of the Mammoth in a deposit of clay and gravel at St. 

 Audries, and he remarked that "originally the whole skull was 

 there." 



On my return a few days since from a short holiday trip in 

 Norfolk to the Black Down hills in Devonshire, I was conducted by 

 my colleague, Mr. Ussher, F.Gr.S., to see some "rum stuff" on the 

 high ground between Little Down and Manning's Common, about 

 two miles N.N.E. of Yarcombe, and between Honiton and Chard. 

 Here the surface of the gi'ound is of a clayey nature, and the forma- 

 tion beneath is the Greensand. Mr. Ussher pointed out one or 

 two places where pits had been sunk for marl, and the presumption 

 was that there was a trace of chalk not noticed in the previous sur- 

 vey of the district. On careful examination we found traces of 

 chalky and chloritic marl and' true chalk (one piece contained a 

 small fish tooth), but the whole deposit w-as interbedded with clay. 

 The clayey and sandy deposit, which covered the surface of the 

 ground adjoining to the depth of eight or ten feet, contained numer- 

 ous large and well-worn boulders of Greensand chert, large pebbles 

 of quartz (one to three inches in diameter), numerous small pebbles 

 of quartz, rolled flints, and a few smooth and good-sized boulders of 

 quartzite. There were also a few pellets of Chalk, besides traces 

 of Fuller's Earth, and nodules of " Eace." A pit recently opened 

 showed about seven feet of greenish-j'^ellow carbonaceous clay with 

 a seam of gravel, resting upon an irregular surface of coarse reddish- 

 brown and pale-coloured sand. The nature of these deposits led me 

 to class them as Boulder-clay, and as such they seemed to possess 

 more than merely local significance. 



The great deposits of flint and chert found on the summits of the 

 Greensand hills of Dorset and Devon have been noticed by De la 



