﻿S.V.Wood, jun. — American and British Surface- Geology. 551 



bed was accumulated prior to the excavation of the Waveney Valley, 

 and when the chalky clay formed a continuous table-land across it, 

 the gravels of the Waveney Valley associated with the bed being 

 referred to a general system of high-level river-gravels over England 

 and Northern France, which marked either the commencement of the 

 excavation of the valleys of the rivers, or a period when that ex- 

 cavation was in progress, and when the rivers ran at a corresponding 

 higher level. The late Mr. J. W. Flower opposed this view, in- 

 sisting that the physical structure of the country around forbade the 

 possibility of the Waveney Eiver having been the agent by which 

 the valley containing it has been excavated — a contention that 

 assists, if it be necessary, the proof of what seems clear to me, viz. 

 that the valley originated interglacially between the Contorted 

 Drift and Middle Glacial, and was then subjected to re-excavation 

 by one of the glacier tongues, which in its recession left behind it 

 the deposits of chalky clay which occur at intervals on the sides and 

 bottom from the mouth to the head of the valley. These deposits 

 seem to me to furnish irrefragable proof that the valleys in which they 

 occur had been excavated to at least their present depths before the 

 chalky clay had ceased to accumulate ; and, but for the physical 

 conditions to which I have referred as having succeeded the for- 

 mation and conversion into land of the earliest part of the chalky 

 clay, they would present a very puzzling problem. The passage, how- 

 ever, of glacier tongues through some of these valleys (and amongst 

 them that of the Waveney), by which the escape of the land-ice 

 over the Fen took place, seems to me to remove the difficulty ; 

 because, by filling up the valley, these glacier-tongues would have 

 given rise to physical conditions similar to what would have existed 

 had the Waveney Valley not been excavated — conditions which have 

 been deemed necessary to explain the position of the Hoxne brick- 

 earth ; for if we regard the lagoon in which the brick-earth ac- 

 cumulated as held up by the ice in the way in which glacier lakes 

 are, then, as the glacier receded and the sea took its place at a 

 lower level than the top of the ice, the water of the lagoon would 

 escape, and in so doing denude that side of the brick-earth over 

 which this escape took place, giving rise thereby to the Goldbrook 

 Valley. 



If I am right in this, the Hoxne bed, though necessarily posterior 

 to so much of the chalky clay as crowns the table-land through 

 which the valley runs, is yet anterior to the great mass of that 

 clay which covers the Fen country and Lincolnshire, and about 

 synchronous with such parts of it as occur in the valley bottoms of 

 East Suffolk and Norfolk ; and this would carry the evidences 

 of man's occupation of Britain some way back into what I regard 

 as the true Glacial period. 



(To be concluded in our next Number.) 



