Vol. 54'] EOCENE DEPOSITS OF DEVON. 237 



visited the deposits at Moreton, Hardy's Monument, Great and 

 Little Haldon, etc., and felt bound to say that his observations did 

 not allow him. to agree with the Author as to their Eocene age. A 

 careful study of the high-level gravels in the Thames and Hamp- 

 shire Basins, together with those of Dorset and Devon, had led the 

 speaker to suggest in a recent paper that the Elack Down (near 

 Weymouth) and Haldon gravels, together with the "W estleton Drift 

 as seen north of London, were due to Pliocene or older streams 

 flowing in various directions from Dartmoor. He asked the 

 Author to cite a section in the Bovey district where these gravels 

 were to be seen underlying the Bovey clays and not merely 

 inferred to do so. On Little Haldon the gravels in one place 

 rest upon an uneven surface of white pipeclay. 



Mr. Haemer, referring to the previous speaker's remarks, believed 

 that the correlation of some of the gravels of the South of England 

 with those of AVestleton, which are composed almost entirely of flint, 

 rested on a very slender foundation; but he felt inclined to fail back 

 upon an opinion once expressed by a distinguished Eellow of this 

 Society, that the beds at Wcstleton are not Westleton Beds. 



Mr. E. S. Heeries asked whether the Author made the state- 

 ment, that the gravelly deposits passed under the Bovey Beds, from 

 personal observation. He was glad to hear that the Author 

 confirmed Mr. Starkie Gardner's views as to the Eocene age of the 

 Bovey Beds. 



Mr. Strahan said that the Author's identification of the gravels at 

 Bovey seemed to depend upon the same sort of evidence as that of 

 the Dorset outliers. These outliers had been found to correspond in 

 character to gravels which could be actually seen passing beneath 

 undoubted Eocene strata. That they could be of the same age as 

 the Westleton Shingle, as suggested by a previous speaker, was 

 disproved by the fact that they shared in the flexures which affected 

 the Chalk and which were certainly older than the Westleton 

 Shingle. He enquired whether it was not a fact that, of the gravels 

 attributed to a Bagshot age, some lay at Bovey at a much lower 

 level than others on Haldon. 



The President said that he had been asked by Mr. H. B. Wood- 

 ward, who was unable to be present, to state his opinion as 

 follows : — 



He (Mr. H. B. Woodward) was quite prepared to accept the 

 Author's grouping of the older gravels at Newton Abbot. When 

 working in that neighbourhood he had been perplexed by these 

 deposits and had regarded them as Drift, partly because the coarse 

 boulder-gravels which occurred there looked more like Drift than 

 anything else; and partly because these deposits were met with 

 at various levels in the Bovey Basin, and appeared to overlie the 

 undoubted Bovey clays and lignites, which are confined to the 

 basin as if deposited in an old lacustrine area. Moreover, the 

 coarse flint-gravels occurred on the high grounds bordering the 

 basin : so that (as he had remarked in his paper read before the 

 Society in 1876) there seemed to be some connexion between these- 



Q.J.G.S. No. 214. s 



