WESTLETON^ BEDS TO THOSE OF NORFOLK, ETC. 147 



(Angular and subangular fragments of flint ;) 

 While quartz-pebbles (numerous) ; 

 Flat ovate pebbles of light-coloured quartzites ; 



Pebbles of light-coloured sandstones, veinstone, and subangular fi'agments 

 of a hard micaceous Sandstone, &c., — 



imbedded in a white and ochreous sandy matrix. 



In descending the river the terraces become wider, and in the 

 neighbourhood of Maestricht they spread out into plateau-sheets of 

 great breadth, as in an estuary. 



Another set of Drift-debris, including flint-pebbles from the Lowei* 

 Tertiaries together with debris from the Carboniferous and Cretaceous 

 strata, would be carried down by the Schelde, which flows through 

 rocks of that age ; while the llhine may have furnished debris from 

 the rocks of the l.lhenish Provinces, including possibly the basalt 

 of the llhine borders. 



This mass of shingle, transported into the open sea to the north 

 and aided by ice-action, drifted over to the coast of Norfolk 

 and Suffolk, and thence, as the land subsided, was carried west- 

 ward, in a direction towards the Severn Valley or the Eristol 

 Channel. What, then, turned it aside from the nortliern sea, 

 where it would seem it might have extended more northward as 

 the Crag did * at the period immediately antecedent ? Could it have 

 been that the great Scandinavian ice-sheet was then ploughing its 

 way across the sea towards the coast of Norfolk, and so blocked up 

 the sea in that direction and diverted the waters of the North 

 Sea through this westward channel ? 



(3n the south, the spread of the Westleton Eeds was limited by the 

 anticlinal of the Ardennes and the Weald, which then constituted 

 a low mountain-range, for there are no marine beds of that character 

 south of the line 1 have described, xit the same time pakconto- 

 logical evidence of contemporaneous land conditions is very scanty. 



In recent papers by the llev. 0. Pisher f and Mr. J. C. Mansel- 

 Pleydell, F.G.S. J, we have accounts of the discovery of the remains 

 of Eleiilias meridionalU on the Chalk-plateau at Dewlish, near 

 Piddletown, in Dorsetshire, in a bed of sand and gravel 90 feet 

 above the level of the adjacent stream. The facts of the case led 

 Mr. Fisher to suppose that the deposit might be Pre-Glacial, while 

 Mr. Mansel-Pleydell considered it to be of Pliocene age. 



It is possible also that the high-level fossiliferous Drift on the 

 summit of Portland §, which contains debris derived from the Ter- 

 tiary and Cretaceous strata of the hills to the north of Weymoutli, 

 may be of the same age, and older than I was first led to believe 

 on the evidence of the sparse remains of Elcphas antiquus, E. jrvimi- 

 (/enhis'^, and Eqnus fossilis. This view of tlic greater antiquity of 

 that deposit would be more in conformity with the enormous amount 

 of erosion, probably of Glacial date, that led to the formation of 



^ Mr. T. F. Janiicson, F.G.S., has shown that Crag-beds exist on the cast 

 coast of Scotland (Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc. vol. xvi. p. 371). 

 t Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc. vol. xliv. p. 818 (1888). 

 J Trans. Dorset, vol. x. p. 12 (1889). 

 § Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc. vol. xxxi. p. 31 (1875). 



