﻿392 PROCEEDINGS OF THE GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 



into a quietude which is inconsistent with the proofs of her violent 

 revolutions. 



It is in this sense that I view the tumultuous accumulation of the 

 Brighton breccia, the translation of detritus to its present positions 

 between the chalk escarpments and the central dome of the Wealden, 

 and the discharge of materials from the transverse valleys, or down 

 the outward slopes of the chalk, as all of them antagonistic to the in- 

 ference, that any of these results could have been accomplished by the 

 ordinary long-continued action of water. 



Even in our own isles, but in tracts removed from the South-east 

 of England, the same materials of former masses of sea-gravel and 

 sand, and the same species of sea-shells contained in them being 

 arranged in different terraces at altitudes varying from 10 to 1500 feet 

 above the sea, is sufficient proof that the vibrations which produced 

 the present outline were of very unequal intensity, at points little 

 distant from each other and in the very same region. 



This memoir refers, I repeat it, only to the last great surface-ope- 

 rations in and around the Weald. But, if for a moment we carry back 

 our imagination to much earlier states of things, and reflect upon the 

 maimer in which the rocks must have here been broken athwart in the 

 original formation of the river-courses or transverse valleys, we may 

 rely on the coincidence so clearly indicated by Mr. Hopkins as exist- 

 ing between those natural features and the mechanical results of the 

 strain and rupture of a great ellipse of elevation. There seems in- 

 deed to be no escape from his inference, that such transverse fissures, 

 or their deepening and extension, were immediately dependent upon or 

 the direct resultants of the formation of the main longitudinal axis of 

 elevation. These views render it still less possible to refer the former 

 grand denudations of the Weald to the ordinary action of the sea than 

 the last translations of its local drift. If an arm of the sea had per- 

 manently occupied this tract during each of the long periods in which 

 the advocates of gradual causation suppose the strata to have been 

 successively broken, crumbled down, and washed away *, we ought to 

 find some relics of the water- worn shingle, of former times, along the 

 numerous escarpments of Upper and Lower Greensand, &c, if not 

 along the edges of the escarpments of the chalk or chief shores 

 of former seas. But if not along those main shores, the narrows 

 by which the great bay communicated with the ocean (for such 

 the transverse valleys must in that case have been) ought specially 

 to present to us lines of water-worn shingle, something like the 

 beaches of our own coasts or the raised terraces of Norway. We ought, 

 at all events, to be able to detect as good evidences of the former 

 abode of the sea as are observable in the valley of the Severn or former 

 " Straits of Malvern," and other parts of England, where sea-shells 

 and shingle coexist f . On the contrary, we find that, in accordance 

 with the view of great denudation and translation of materials, it is 

 just in such gorges that there are patches in the recesses, not, how- 

 ever, of the rounded materials which long-continued tidal action of 



* See Lyell's Manual of Elementary Geology, 1851, p. 242-257. 

 f See Murchison's Silurian System, p. 530. 



