8. V. Woodyj'un. — American and British Surface- Geology. 25 



have produced great confusion. The memoir of Mr, Prestwich in 

 the Philosophical Transactions of 1864 was, at the time of the paper 

 by myself and Mr. Rome, the principal work of reference relating to 

 the beds yielding Cyrena fluminalis, which either then had, or since 

 have yielded Palteolithic implements ; and Mr. Prestwich in point- 

 ing out that some of them afforded clear evidence of having been 

 deposited while ice-action, so far as rivers were concerned, was in 

 progress, designated them as post-Glacial only because he regarded 

 them as posterior to the Boulder-clay of the Eastern and East 

 Midland counties (the chalky clay), a formation which was then 

 regarded as the one great and only clay accumulation of the Glacial 

 period on the Eastern side of England, but which I have long been 

 endeavouring to show was preceded by the Cromer Cliff beds, and 

 succeeded by the Hessle. 



In this way the beds yielding Cyrena fluminalis, in common with 

 many other gravels yielding PaljBolithic implements, but which did 

 not contain that shell, though yielding other freshwater mollusca 

 (which in some instances may have arisen from their being more 

 remote from the sea or tidal water to which the Cyrena seems to 

 have had some proclivity), came to be regarded almost universally 

 by English geologists as post-Glacial ; and it was expressly with 

 the object of preventing confusion that I called the Hessle beds, 

 which, in Holderness at least, did not appear to me to possess the 

 same characters as are presented by the beds which I call Lower 

 and Upper Glacial, but yet were, in my opinion, synchronous with 

 the Cyrena brick-earths, " post-Glacial " also. In so doing, however, 

 both in our coast section and in the descriptive part of our paper, 

 Mr. Rome and I specially pointed out their anteriority to other 

 river and later valley-gravels of Holderness, some of which where 

 intersected by the coast, as at Hornsea, are of considerable thickness, 

 and interstratified with clay laminas containing freshwater shells ; and 

 the position of these may be seen in Section I. of the Plate which 

 accompanies this paper. Thus, while in order at the same time to 

 preserve their synchronism with the Cyrena brick-earths, as to show 

 their anteriority to many of the gravels yielding PalEeolithic imple- 

 ments that had been called indiscriminately "post-Glacial," we 

 distinguished these Hessle beds, as " older post-Glacial." It is not 

 a matter of much moment what names we select or accept for 

 geological formations, so long as, by their use, confusion and mis- 

 apprehension are avoided ; but if we relegate these Hessle beds to 

 the Glacial group, we abandon the age of deposits as the basis of 

 their nomenclature, for the conditions under which they have been 

 accumulated ; and thus, to be consistent, we should term Glacial not 

 only the deposits now going on in the Arctic regions, but even the 

 beds forming in the Sound at Copenhagen, on the shores of which 

 all our English cereals grow, for according to the authority quoted 

 by Sir C. Lyell (Principles of Geology, 1872 edit., p. 383), a ship 

 sunk at Copenhagen in 1807 is now almost buried in erratic blocks 

 brought by the Baltic ice since that year, 



I have confined my suggestions of probable synchronism between 



