﻿MURCHISON — FLINT DRIFT OF S.E. ENGLAND. 351 



con on the west to the sea at Hastings and Winchelsea. Admirable 

 examples of the clean denudation of this central tract are seen at 

 Tunbridge Wells and Hastings, where the bare sandstone stands out 

 in picturesque forms. The valleys of this central region do, indeed, 

 occasionally present local accumulations of re-aggregated clay or loam 

 which has been derived from the contiguous hills ; hut in these we 

 see no signs of a powerful former drifting agency, by which frag- 

 ments of rocks foreign to the locality have been transported to it. 

 Nor can I hear that these purely local surface-deposits have afforded 

 any examples of the large extinct quadrupeds, whose relics will be 

 presently adverted to as being distributed at intervals over the ad- 

 jacent and overlying formations. This coincidence of the absence of 

 transported debris ("terrain de transport") and also of the remains 

 of the great fossil mammals in the central dome is then the first point 

 to which I call attention. It is the more remarkable, because in some 

 of the above-mentioned depressions there are thick superficial accu- 

 mulations of clay and brick-earth, beneath which, at a depth of several 

 feet, stumps and stems of black oak are found, both in vertical and 

 horizontal positions, just as on the surface of the surrounding forma- 

 tion of Weald Clay, hereafter to be noticed, but where, in addition, 

 there are heaps of drifted chalk-flints or other rocks, together with 

 these bones of extinct animals. 



When, however, the observer moves westwards for about fifty-five 

 miles, from the environs of Winchelsea to those of Billingshurst, he 

 sees something approaching to the character of drift upon the surface 

 of the central dome. But even there, where the equivalents of the 

 Hastings group occupy low undulations, and are thinning out to an 

 apex, the only superficial covering which distinguishes them is a 

 loam, that here and there contains lumps of a bog-iron-ore, provin- 

 cially called 'Rag'*. This rock, which occurs in the ploughed 

 fields or along the banks of the Arun and its tributaries, is an ad- 

 mixture of very rich mottled ironstone with loam, the former in a con- 

 cretionary and semi-brecciated form. It is difficult to say whether 

 the ferruginous portions of this rock have been at all transported, or 

 whether they are not local accumulations of bog-iron-ore formed in 

 an ancient period, out of the subjacent bands of iron-stone, and before 

 the Wealden was finally desiccated and its rivers reduced to their 

 present limits. 



Distribution of the Flint Drift over the surface of the Weald Clay, 

 Lower Greensand, fyc. in Hampshire and Sussex. — When we quit, 

 however, the nucleus of the Weald and advance from it either to the 

 south or north, there are many localities in which heaps of flint-drift 

 are found upon the eroded surface of the Weald Clay and Lower Green- 

 sand. This fact is the more striking, because, although a spread of 

 flints will be spoken of as occurring at rare intervals on the Gault, the 

 surface both of that and of the Upper Greensand and Lower Chalk, 



* My attention was first called to this ' Rag ' by Sir Henry Goring, Bart., on 

 whose property near Billingshurst it is pretty copious, and was formerly, as Mr. 

 Martin of Pulborough tells me, worked for smelting into iron, by which process 

 vast quantities of it have disappeared. 



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