J 32 Dr. PiTTON on the Strata below the Chalk. 



(38.) Extensive quarries have long been v^^orked in the lowest part of the 

 green-sand at Boughton, on the south of Maidstone^ the geological relations 

 of which are the same as at Hythe. The stone for the construction of 

 Westminster Abbey is said to have been procured there. It is a variety of 

 Kentish rag, like the Hythe stone, in nearly continuous beds, alternating with 

 a soft sandrock, called by the workmen "hassock," and passing occasionally 

 into chert*. 



At the top of these quarries irregular fissures or cavities, approaching to a 

 conical figure, called "vents" by the workmen, are frequent. These are 

 filled with loose rubbly stone and sandy clay. In one of them the bones 

 of hyaenas were found, in 1827, by the late Mr. Braddick, of Boughton 

 Mount, under circumstances like those in which similar remains occur in 

 fissures in other parts of England. My specimens include several fragments 

 of the long bones and jaws, with the canine and incisor teeth, some of 

 which are much worn down by use; and these are accompanied by Album 

 GrtEcum f . 



Fragments of chalk-flints are found upon the surface near Boughton, 

 about four miles and a half from the outcrop of the chalk: a fact which de- 

 serves attention, as such remains of the superior strata have been supposed 

 either not to occur, or to be extremely rare, within the space between the 

 North and South Downs. 



(39.) The manner in which the rivers make their way to the sea, by an ap- 

 parently unnatural course, across the ridges both of the chalk and the inferior 

 strata, is one of the most interesting points in the general structure of 

 Kent; and has been already dwelt upon by Mr. Conybeare];, Mr. Scrope§, 

 and Mr. Martin ||. 



(40.) The great variation in width of the space occupied by the strata between 



* This better stone is called here "Calkstone" (Kalkstein ?). Foreign workmen were often em- 

 ployed formerly in the British mines and stone works; and in some other instances, — as at the 

 mines of Lead Hills in Scotland, they have left traces of their native languages in the technical terms. 



•j- Since these pages have been at the press, the remains of an animal, which Mr. Mantell himself 

 has ascertained to be distinctly an Iguanodon, hitherto found only in the freshwater beds of the 

 Wealden, have been discovered by Mr. Brinstead, at Rockhall, near Maidstone, in a stratum of 

 Kentish rag, abounding in the usual fossils of the Lower green-sand. They confirm the propriety 

 of referring to the same animal the great bones and the teeth, previously discovered at Tilgate 

 and other places in Sussex. See Jameson's Edinb. Journal, July 183't. (Vol. XVIL p. 200.) 

 A full account of these and other new remains of this extraordinary reptile, will be laid before 

 the Royal Society by Mr. Mantell. 



J " Outlines," &c., pp. xxvii. and 145. 



§ " On Volcanos," p. 213. 



II " Memoir on Western Sussex," pp. 12 — 57. 



