F. W. HARMER ON THE KESSINGLAND CLIFF-SECTION. 



130 



Mastodon, lihinoceros, and other animals whose remains occur in this 

 stone -bed been buried in it at the time they died, or soon after, we 

 could not fail to find a proportionally greater number of bones than 



Fig. 3. — Section representing the supposed Conditions under which the 

 Stone-bed ccdled Land-surface at the Base of the Norwich Crag 

 was formed. 



ncff* 



^HiEHiaiJ-ittilSiS 



1. Low cliff of Chalk with rows of flints (a) in situ. 



2. Beds of Older and Newer Pliocene age, capping the Chalk and contain- 



ing the remains of Mastodon arvcnicusis and other Mammalia. 

 b. Talus of chalk- flints, passing into b r , the basement-bed of the Norwich 

 Crag, as the sea encroached on the land. 



of teeth ; we should sometimes meet with entire skeletons *, or 

 portions of them, with associated bones more or less in juxtaposition, 

 and we should often find jaws with teeth attached, as we do in the 

 undisturbed Cromer Forest-bed and elsewhere; but the very reverse 

 of all this is the case. The supposition, on the other hand, that these 

 worn and fragmentary teeth were derived from the waste of some 

 older deposit explains these facts. The bones of a skeleton, washed 

 by waves from a cliff, fragile as such fossil remains always are, 

 would be, as a rule, quickly destroyed, while the teeth, being harder, 

 would be preserved and buried a second time. The cliff, of course, 

 would be worn away as the land sank and became submerged. 



A similar stone-bed occasionally overlies, and is bedded up to, the 

 denuded remnants of the Forest (which is by no means the continuous 

 formation it has sometimes been represented to be) on the North 

 Norfolk coast. It often contains mammalian fossils derived from the 

 freshwater deposit associated with the true Forest-bed in the imme- 

 diate neighbourhood, and has sometimes been mistaken for those 

 deposits in situ. It extends laterally beyond the limits of that for- 

 mation, forming, as at Weybourne, on the surface of the Chalk, the 

 basement bed of the Lower Glacial Pebbly sands. It contains at 

 that place marine shells of the same species as the deposit which 

 overlies it. The bed of flints in question at the base of the Norwich 



* The statement that an entire skeleton of the Mastodon was found some 

 years ago at Horstead, is one which rests entirely on hearsay evidence, and is, 

 I believe, from inquiries I have made, unworthy of credit. 



