﻿386 PROCEEDINGS OF THE GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 



Lower Greensand, and is seen at the height of the railroad station, 

 about 150 feet above the sea, and from whence you look down upon 

 Folkestone. It there contains small fragments of the clinkers or iron- 

 stone derived from the greensand on the west. The same materials, 

 i. e. loam or clay with disseminated flints, rise up, in fact, upon the 

 slopes of the adjacent chalk -hills ; and thus, as in all the other cases 

 cited, you are insensibly conducted from the debris in the "combe" 

 or hollow to the wider but more thinly spread mass of similar 

 matter on the slopes and summits of the hills. 



Again, fossil bones have been found at and near Folkestone, at 

 heights varying from 80 to 110 feet, not in different beds, but always 

 in the same broken-flint-debris. They have also been detected in an 

 upper combe or recess in the chalk-escarpment, nearly two miles west 

 and by north from Folkestone, and at an altitude of not less than 222 

 feet above the adjacent sea. That spot, called the Cherry Grove, has 

 only to be looked at from the sea-coast to convince any one that its 

 gravel can never have formed a part of the bottom of the same lake 

 or estuary as that in which the Folkestone debris was accumulated. 

 If, however, we imagine a mass of drift transported by a former body 

 of water, the difficulty ceases ; and just as the town of Folkestone is 

 now supplied with water from that lofty reservoir or spring-head on 

 the west, so in ancient times may animals and debris have been 

 translated into the deeper cavities of the hollow, or arrested on its 

 sides *. 



With the fact before us, that these fossil bones lie at once upon 

 the bare rock in situ, without any deposit between it and the drift in 

 which they are commingled, it seems impossible to explain their col- 

 location (even if we put their position out of the question) by sup- 

 posing that they were tranquilly buried under a lake, or fell from the 

 banks of any former stream. In those cases it would indeed have 

 been miraculous, if ruminants and carnivores had assembled them- 

 selves at a particular moment of time to be interred, like a " happy 

 family," in one thin course of detritus, and at the bottom only of the 

 sedimentary matter ! To my mind, the circumstances of the same 

 drift being placed at such different levels at Folkestone, and of its 

 sloping up from the sea-board to a height of 222 feet inland, ar*e good 

 evidences that these creatures were destroyed by violent oscillations 

 of the land, and were swept by currents of water from their feeding- 

 grounds into the hollows in which we now find them, and where 

 the argillaceous materials which covered them have favoured their 

 conservation. Nothing can more strongly favour this view than the 

 manner in which fragments of chalk-flints, often angular, are wedged 

 together in the matrix of loam, and enter into the cavities of some of 

 the vertebrae and broken bones of the large quadrupeds. At the same 

 time I presume, that after the great animals in question had perished 

 and were lodged in the depressions and erosions of the rocks, the 



* Another fact communicated to me by Mr. Mackie, is the occurrence of 

 a Cetacean bone fifty feet above low-water-mark; and this tends to show how, 

 whilst the drift was translated to the coast, the remains of marine animals, as at 

 Brighton, were occasionally added to the mass of terrestrial animals. 



