and the Basins of London and Hants. 129 



which lead us to conclude that it was the skull of one of the aboriginal inha- 

 bitants of the island, who had not the art of working metals. Along the north- 

 ern edge of this peat bog there is a considerable deposit of marl mixed with 

 calcareous tufa, known to the natives on the west of Newbury by the name 

 of the strand ; a name evidently derived from the circumstance of its forming 

 a kind of wide calcareous causeway along the edge of the moor, rising like an 

 artificial terrace a few inches above the present level of the adjacent meadows. 

 It is often 60 feet and more in width, and varies from 2 to 10 feet in thick- 

 ness, and is frequently interstratified with beds of peat varying from 6 inches 

 to 3 or 4 feet in thickness : its substance is, in some parts, a soft laminated 

 cream-coloured marl ; in others it is tufaceous and granular, and the grains 

 (which are usually rugged and of the size of a small pea) are often conglome- 

 rated into spherical and lenticular balls, varying in diameter from 1 inch to 2 

 feet. Many of these balls are formed of concentric layers concreted around 

 some extraneous body as a nucleus : occasionally, we find them elongated to 

 a cylindrical form, and containing a central cavity, in which there is either a 

 branch of wood or traces of the decayed remains of a branch. 



Other concretions are formed round the bones or horns of animals that ap- 

 pear to have been stranded on this terrace, whilst it was accumulating; and 

 throughout the substance of the marl, as well as of the tufaceous beds, are 

 dispersed the same varieties of horns and bones that occur in the peat, and 

 multitudes of shells of the same freshwater MoUusca; which now inhabit the 

 adjacent river. These freshwater shells are in various stages of decay ; and 

 from this circumstance, I am disposed to refer the origin of the calcareous 

 matter of the strand to the detritus of dead shells that have in former times 

 been accumulated along the boundary-line of the highest floods of the river, — 

 an opinion which derives support from the fact of this strand being almost 

 exclusively limited to the north frontier of the valley ; i. e. to that side of it, 

 which in the seasons of flood would be the repository of all drifted materials, 

 wafted by the prevailing winds of this country (namely the S. and S.W.) to 

 the lee-shore. 



The skimmings of these flood-waters would be composed nearly of dead 

 shells ; and if we suppose all but the most recent of them to have undergone 

 decomposition during the period of their lying in the strand, and their calca- 

 reous materials to have been converted into the marl and tufaceous concretions 

 of which this strand is composed, we adopt an hypothesis fully adequate to 

 explain the phaenomena. The slight traces of shell-marl which occur in a bank 

 parallel to the strand and nearly in the middle of Benham Marsh, and in a 

 few islands that rise occasionally in the main body of the peat, are to be ex- 



VOL. II. — SECOND SERIES. S 



