Yol. 57.] DRirrs of the Baltic coast op Germany. 19 



was surprised that so little use of it had been made in England, for 

 with the exception of some references of his own it had been almost 

 entirely overlooked until quite lately. The main conclusion of 

 these memoirs, and also of the symposium of Northern geologists 

 which met at Kiel some years ago, was to emphasize the enormous 

 difficulty of solving the problem in question ; and the speaker was 

 not surprised that every one of the explanations which had occurred 

 to the present Authors had been in turn discarded by them, and that 

 we should be left in the same position of doubt as before. 



What he felt quite certain of was that the phenomenon could not 

 be treated as a local one, nor could it be explained if we limited 

 •our horizon to the small locality of Eiigen. As Wahnschaffe and 

 others have shown, it is intimately connected with disturbances 

 that occur in nearly all parts of the JN^orth German Plain and 

 (as the speaker believed) with areas a great deal farther off. 

 In these localities, stretching westward as far as the Ehine, the 

 Drift-beds are found intercalated with, and apparently undergoing 

 a common disturbance with, those underlying them. Similar phe- 

 nomena occur in Schleswig and in Mecklenburg, and very largely in 

 the brown-coal and Middle Tertiary deposits of N'orthern Germany, 

 as has been shown by the well-sections published by Wahnschaffe, 

 and by many superficial sections elsewhere. The phenomenon is a 

 continental one, and not limited to the islands of Eligen and Moen. 

 With regard to the introduction of ice or snow as factors in the 

 •explanation of this particular difficulty, the speaker said that he 

 would not repeat what he had said elsewhere in papers on the 

 dislocations of the Chalk. He would merely remark, for the 

 benefit of those who are always looking to ice in some form as 

 the explanation of every geological difficulty in the surface-beds, 

 that in this particular case the dynamical problem involves that 

 the ice should have come from two directions at right angles one 

 to the other at the same time, since the stones in the local drift are 

 •a mixed collection, partly from Gothland, CEsel, and Esthonia, and 

 partly from the Christiania Eiord. This is one serious nut to crack 

 cut of a great many. 



Personally, he was greatly delighted that these Baltic beds, 

 which probably contain an answer to difficulties nearer home, 

 should again be attracting attention in England. They were well 

 known to * the old masters ' whom he loved ; and he only wished 

 that the Authors of the paper would extend their researches over 

 the much wider field where similar beds were shown many years 

 ago to exist, by the German geological surveyors. He felt certain 

 that nothing but tentative results could follow from generalizing 

 from so local and limited an area as the one described in this and 

 the Authors' previous paper. 



The Rev. E. Hill replied that the Authors had extended their 

 researches to Moen in Denmark, Warnemlinde in Mecklenburg, aud 

 the North German Plain; besides examining all the papers that they 

 could discover. He repeated that the Piigen cliffs were not like 

 those at Cromer, as they were continuous solid Chalk, instead of 

 continuous Drift including isolated boulders of Chalk. 



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