F. A. Bedicell — On the Bridlington Crag, etc. 519 



position of tlie bed ; for wliile he most positively assured me that 

 there was no Purple clay, or, indeed, glacial clay of any kind at all 

 over the bed, and also that it lay above the snuff-coloured clay, 

 Wood and Eome, on the other hand, placed the bed in the Purple 

 clay itself, and yet my own observations placed it below the 'Purple ' 

 clay and the snuff-coloured clay, and on the ' Basement ' clay. At 

 the same time, the extent of the bed, as shown by the specimens 

 found by me at a distance, formed an additional difficulty. But Mr. 

 Lamplugh's observations have cleared up all my doubts on these 

 points, and the recent exposure on the South Sands, which I have 

 inspected, quite confirms my observations on the North Shore 

 in 1875. I go further than Mr. Lamplugh, and I think the South 

 Sands Beds are conterminous with the Northern, and that the snuff- 

 coloured clay is a leading guide on this point. 



But the incident which strikes me as most remarkable and in- 

 structive in Mr. Lamplugh's observations is the fact that he has 

 found fragments of Crag shells extensively scattered, through the 

 Purple clay, over so large an area. Many of such fragments at 

 Bridlington actually lie in the cliff as high as twenty feet above 

 the horizon in which they must have been originally deposited, if 

 we refer them originally to the horizon of the true Crag bed. I 

 could hardly believe his statement when I first heard it, because all 

 appearances were against it, and because I had myself hunted the 

 Purple clay for shells in 1875, and quite failed to find any. That 

 Mr. Lamplugh is right, there is no doubt, and my eyes, once 

 educated by him to find them, soon discovered the fragments. As 

 a rule, they are very small, and easily overlooked by any person 

 who does not read a cliff with such exhaustive and intelligent ex- 

 actness as characterizes Mr. Lamplugh's observations. I have since 

 myself found a Tellina, nearly perfect, in the Purple clay of the 

 cliff, quite twenty feet above the true Crag-bed horizon, and about 

 600 yards distant from the spot where that bed was first seen. 



The association of these fragments of shells with the Purple clay 

 seems to me to point to two distinct ' sets ' or ' tides ' of glacial 

 action meeting on the area which the Purple clay occupies, because, 

 while the boulders in the Purple clay evidence a movement from 

 the north-west, these fragments, to my mind, are evidence of another 

 movement from the eastward. I cannot at present agree with Mr. 

 Lamplugh's implication that these shells represent a Crag deposit re- 

 moved by the glacier that brought down the Purple clay, because, 

 if ever these shells had got incorporated into the glacier, they would, 

 like everything else of so weak a structui'e that it removed, have 

 been comminuted by it, and converted into the finest debris, di- 

 gested, in fact, by its masticating grasp, and I should attribute the 

 presence of the shells rather to the long continuance of a process of 

 'churning,' that churning being the result of oj)posing forces, one 

 from the land of a glacial character, and the other from the sea 

 opposing the glacier with an accumulation of shore or broken ice. 



The absence of boulders of any magnitude in the ' Basement ' or 

 blue clay, and the fine quality of that clay, speaks of a glacier which 



