460 MR. E. HULL ON THE DRIFT-DEPOSITS 



as his opinion that these deposits were not post-Pliocene 

 beds^ but "warp/^ a river mud similar to that of the 

 Humber, which he had recently visited. He also thought 

 the stems of the birch too fresh-looking for so distant an 

 age as the Drifts and that the deposit was an evidence of 

 the former extension of the Mersey much beyond its present 

 limits. We examined the bed for shells or any other 

 objects calculated to throw light on the age of the beds, 

 but without success ; and_, until further evidence of the ex- 

 tension or absence of the peat beneath the gravel of the 

 Heaton Mersey hill^ the question of the age of these beds 

 must be left in abeyance. The section is 50 feet above the 

 present level of the Mersey. 



Gravel of the Valley of the Mersey. — The district of South 

 Lancashire affords conclusive evidence of the former exten- 

 sion of the rivers far beyond their present bounds. The 

 river-terraces in the neighbourhood of Manchester have 

 already been described by Mr. Binney * and myself f, and 

 I shall not recur to them here. I wish, however, to draw 

 attention to an old terrace of much wider extent and greater 

 length than any of those in the Irwell valley above Man- 

 chester J. So widely indeed is the country covered by these 

 gravels, that it is not improbable they may have been 

 formed in an estuary of the Dee, when the land was slowly 

 rising from beneath the sea at the last elevation of the 

 country ; but on this point, which it would be of so much 

 interest to determine, we are left in doubt by the absence 

 of shells, which I have failed hitherto to detect. 



The gravel is generally of a very fine character, evenly 

 bedded, seldom containing large stones, and often divided by 

 layers of fine sand and silt. On the north side of the 

 Mersey it extends as far up as Didsbury, occupying the flat 



* *' On the Drift-deposits, &c.," Mem, Lit. and Phil. Soc. vol. viii. 

 t Memoir on the Geology of Bolton-le-Moors. 



\ This terrace I have described at greater length in the forthcoming 

 memoir, " On the Geology of the Country around Oldham and Manchester." 



