64 S. V. Wood, Jun. — Sequence of the Glacial Beds, 



more nominal than real ; for all of such clays appear to me to be 

 due — as Mr. Archibald Geikie has, in the case of Scotland, pointed 

 out — to the vast moraine^ which was extruded from the submerged 

 foot of that icy envelope, whose termination, during the Glacial 

 period, as it is now in West Greenland, was never short of the sea. 

 Such moraine, either rafted away to form the clays, or its soluble 

 and finer portions taken up by the water and carried away in sus- 

 pension, and its insoluble spread out by the currents to form the 

 gands and gravels, seems, according to my apprehension of the case, 

 to have supplied the whole of the beds of the true Glacial series, 

 that is, those formed during the subsidence, except, perhaps, the 

 very earliest — the pebbly sands, and even those partially so ; the 

 whole series being thus (but with one considerable alternation of the 

 contrary kind between g and /) retrogressive in their character, as 

 the moraine followed the ice in its recession from the action of the 

 sea during the progress of the subsidence. 



All that has been written of the Lancashire and Cheshire Drift, 

 and of the Mollusca from it, since it was described, in its general 

 features, by Mr. Binney in 1842,^ and by Mr. Trimmer in 184:6,^ 

 leaves the impression on my mind that none of it belongs to any 

 older part of the Glacial series than the beds, e,'' e' , and e, though I 

 would not be understood as asserting a positive opinion that such is 

 the case.'^ The existence of two Boulder-clays divided by a sand, 

 whether shown by isolated, or visible in repeated sections over a 

 considerable space, seems to me illusory, so far as it offers any 

 ground of correlation, because along the Yorkshire coast, north of 

 Bridlington, the purple clay without chalk {e of the Table) is 

 divided into two parts by sand beds, often of considerable thickness, 

 which, though not actually continuous, are of such length and 

 frequency that inland sections would convey the idea that they 

 formed a continuous deposit. So also along the great Vales of York, 

 and of the Tees' mouth, a bed of sand, apparently continuous, in 

 places divides a lower from an upper Boulder-clay. Whether this 

 upper clay be the Hessle, and this sand \hQ bed, c, or not, neither 

 the latter nor the sand so threading through the purple clay along 

 the coast can, according to my apprehension of the case, have any 

 connexion whatever with the Middle Glacial of East Anglia, the 

 Boulder-clay upon which these sands rest belonging, as it seems to 

 me, to the beds e or e' , according as their j)Osition occurs. 



With respect to the beds of Aberdeenshire, described by Mr. 

 Jamieson in 1858,^ to which Prof. Harkness refers, I think that we 

 should, for the present, suspend our judgment as to an identity be- 

 tween them and the East Anglian Middle Glacial, until a question of 



1 I use this term moraine for convenience, but in strictness there is little or no 

 identity between the sz<i-glacier degraded material thus extruded and the supra- 

 glacier collected material, which forms the principal part of the true Alpine moraine. 



~ Proc. Mauchr. Geol. Socy. 1842-3. ^ Quart. Joiirn. Geol Soc, vol. vii.,p. 201. 



* The great addition, however, made to the fauna of the Middle Glacial formation 

 Bince this p^per was in type, seems to place this beyond questinn, and to prove that 

 the Cheshire and Lancashire beds are all newer than this formation. 



5 Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc, vol. xiv., p. 609. 



