234 H. B. WOODWARD ON THE SUPERFICIAL DEPOSITS 



the Bovey basin. This tends to show that most of the minor 

 features of the country have been produced subsequently to the 

 deposition of the gravel. 



Further, these deposits can be traced from Sandy Gate upwards to 

 Gappath and the borders of Ugbrooke Park ; and were the slope 

 continued without break, we might reach the Greensand of Haldon, 

 which is capped by analogous deposits of drift sand and gravel. 

 There seems to be some connexion between these plateau-gravels 

 which cap all the Greensand heights of Devonshire, and those which 

 were accumulated with this high marginal dip in the Bovey basin. 



The question of their formation seems to me to be a large one, 

 and to require for its solution a more extended study of the super- 

 ficial deposits of Devonshire than I have been enabled to make. 

 Mr. Belt, however, has taken up the subject boldly ; and my col- 

 league, Mr. Ussher, is gathering facts which will, I hope, soon lead 

 to very interesting results. 



It is not always easy and is sometimes impossible to tell where 

 these older deposits of gravel end in the valley, and where the modern 

 alluvial gravels come on. This, however, is only natural, because 

 the alluvial deposits are evidently very largely made up of the older 

 materials. 



The Bovey Clays are worked beneath the " Head " of gravel, 

 sometimes called " Pengelly's Head," which in most instances is a 

 comparatively modern fluviatile and estuarine deposit. It often 

 occupies a position above the alluvium proper, but is sometimes not 

 to be distinguished from it. 



Mr. J. H. Key, who has given an excellent description of this deposit, 

 has found in it the rib and jaw of a deer, and shells of the oyster 

 and cockle *. In the collection of Messrs. Watts, Blake, Bearne 

 aud Co., of Newton Abbot, are bones of the Ox, Deer, and Man , 

 obtained from the same deposit, and what is most remarkable, a 

 wooden doll, or idol, about a foot in length, which was obtained at a 

 depth of 20 feet in the coarse gravel, on the left bank of the river 

 Teign, in a pit called the Zithcrixon pit, near the toll-gate between 

 Newton Abbot and Kingsteignton. A bronze spear-head was also 

 found in the same pit at a depth of 15 feet. 



There is no doubt that this deposit was on the whole the latest 

 formed in the valley, partly by river and partly by estuarine 

 action. 



The material was evidently for the most part obtained " ready- 

 made," as it were, from the older gravels ; and therefore the de- 

 ductions are indicative of the rapid accumulation of the gravels 

 rather than of the antiquity of the remains found in them. 



Mr. John Evans considers that the spear-head "belonged to 

 the latter part of the British Bronze Period — say some few cen- 

 turies b.c, or even only one or two. The wooden figure," he adds, 

 "is much like some of those from the peat of the Somme valley, de- 

 scribed by Boucher dc Perthes. It is hard to say what is their age 

 or object." Mr. Carruthers, who examined the wooden figure, con-. 

 * See Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc. vol. xviii. (1862), p. 9. 



