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CHAPTEE XVI. 



MIOCENE EPOCH. 



THE MIOCENE STKATA in England play a very unim- 

 portant part, in a physical point of view, excepting that 

 the remains of many land plants which they contain 

 give a high interest to these deposits from the light 

 they throw on the climate of the time. 



These strata lie not far from the mass of granite 

 that forms the high ground of Dartmoor Forest, the 

 highest point of which, called Yes Tor, is about 2,050 

 feet above the sea. At the foot of this mountain 

 land there is a plain, of a kind of pear-shaped form, 

 stretching, about seven and a half miles in length, be- 

 tween the neighbourhood of Bovey Tracey and Aller 

 Mills, near Newton Abbot. It is about three miles in its 

 greatest width from Blackpool to Knighton, two miles 

 south-west of Chudleigh. 1 



1 For these and some other details I am indebted to Mr. Horace 

 B. Woodward, of the Geological Survey, who lately re-mapped the 

 Bovey Tracey district, and also to the joint work of Mr. William 

 Pengelly F.E.S. and the well known botanist, Professor Oswald 

 Heer of Zurich, whose masterly description of the plants of the Bovey 

 beds threw the first clear light on the geological age of the strata. 

 See Woodward's ' Geology of England and Wales,' and ' On the 

 Lignite Formation of Bovey Tracey,' by Messrs Pengelly and Heer, 

 ' Philosophical Transactions,' 1862. The expense of the production 

 and republi cation of this work was defrayed by the Baroness 

 Burdett Coutts, who thereby conferred a boon on all students of 

 Tertiary Geology, 



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