24 8. V. Wood, fun. — American and British Surface- Geology. 



tion, wtiich, though it may be partly, is not wholly of morainic origin ; 

 neither has it been left (in Holderness, at least, where it rests on 

 fossiliferous stratified sands) by submarine ice-recession, as has been 

 the case with so much of the Upper Glacial clay. Further north, 

 and also at its higher elevations, such may have been its morainic 

 origin, but in Holderness and East Lincolnshire it presents very 

 little appearance of morainic derivation at all ; for the Chalk which 

 it contains is not only small in quantity in comparison with the 

 basement (Glacial) clay of that district, but is suhangular, whereas 

 that of the Glacial clay is all of it rolled. Moreover, as it occurs 

 directly over the basement clay (of Upper Glacial age), which is 

 densely crowded with Chalk debris, it ought, occupying the same 

 place in reference to any ice-sheet, and seeing that nearly all the 

 Chalk Wold would, by being left bare of Glacial clay, have supplied it 

 with Chalk debris, to be equally crowded also if it had originated in 

 the same way. Mr. Geikie illustrates his argument of its origin by 

 figures of sections which show not only the junction of the clay 

 with the sand to be irregular, but to be accompanied by the protrusion 

 of a portion (or leg as he says the workmen called it) of the clay 

 into the sand (Great Ice Age, p. 376). This, however, is a feature 

 which may be met with occasionally in the case of the chalky (upper 

 Glacial) clay resting on the middle Glacial sand in East Anglia, 

 where also a much more marked irregularity is not unfrequently 

 to be met with, which at one time misled me into the idea that a 

 small fault had occurred in those places. They, however, all now 

 seem to me explicable by the material in these cases having fallen 

 not only en masse, but with the mass possessing a ragged or irregular 

 form. I have already explained the reasons which forbid my be- 

 lieving that in any case, either where these quasi -faults occur, or 

 where the clay rests on the sands with an even line, the morainic 

 material could have been pushed over the sands by glacier-ice ; and 

 my convietion why such cases can only be reconciled with the 

 dropping of the material on the stratified and undisturbed sands 

 containing marine organisms upon which it reposes, while these 

 sands formed the sea-bottom unincumbered in that part with glacier- 

 ice ; and there, with that of the leg described by Mr. Geikie, I leave 

 the question. 



Mr. Geikie, however, is silent on the fact that I have from nearly 

 the outset of my investigations, and long before any one else took 

 the view, urged that the Hessle beds were synchronous, or nearly so, 

 with the Cyrena brick-earths of the Thames Valley ; ^ so that he 

 argues this synchronism as though the view were new to him ; and 

 Mr. Skertchly seems, in lecturing lately at Norwich, to have been in 

 similar ignorance of my long contention on this head. Mr. Geikie 

 also takes exception to my nomenclature of these beds as " post- 

 Glacial," insisting that they should be called '* Glacial " ; but had I 

 not called them what I did, my contention of their synchronism would 



^ See Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc. vol. xxiv. p. 174 (Nov. 1867) ; vol. xxvii. p. 22 

 (Nov. 1870) ; Geol. Mag, Jan. 1870, Vol. YII. p. 19 ; and April, 1872, Vol. IX. 

 p. 176. 



