BEACHES, ETC., OE THE SOUTH OE ENaLAIfD. 323 



Mantell, who first noticed this drift in the Brighton cliffs, merely 

 gave it the local name of ' the Elephant Bed ' in consequence of 

 its containing Elephant and other mammalian remains. He spoke 

 of it as a confused mass of alluvial materials without stratification,^ 

 and thought it might have been formed by the action of inland 

 waters after the communication with the ocean, which existed at 

 the time of the old shingle beach, had been cut off. 



Sir H. De la Beche,^ who afterwards described the analogous 

 phenomena in Devon and Cornwall, looked upon this deposit, which 

 he named ' Head,' as a talus formed after the rise of the old beach, 

 and the growth of the submerged forests. He accounted for its 

 formation by the washing down from the slopes of the adjacent 

 higher ground (owing to an excessive and long-continued rainfall 

 towards the end of the Glacial period) of the debris of the rocks 

 disintegrated by the destructive effects of the atmosphere. He con- 

 sidered that the Stanniferous Gravel indicated the sudden rush of a 

 great body of water from the north. 



We are indebted to R. A. C. Godwin-Austen for a more special 

 investigation^ of this drift, for which he retained De la Beche's 

 term of ' Head.' He noticed " that the materials are always strictly 

 local as to origin," and he attributed their accumulation to the 

 " wash of a terrestrial surface under a far greater amount of annual 

 rainfall than we have at present," combined with a great elevation 

 of the land, such as would place the luhole of the higher portions of 

 this country in regions of excessive cold. He considered that the 

 local angular drift of Exmoor, the detritus of the Wealden district, 

 the broad alluvia of the Arun, and the gravelly clay and brick-earth 

 of the Sussex Coast plain were formed under the same subaerial 

 conditions ; and he further correlated the Eaised Beaches with the 

 Norwich Crag, and the overlying drifts and submerged forests with 

 the " freshwater deposits and mammalian remains (Westleton and 

 Eorest-beds) of the Norfolk coast." 



Sir Ptoderick Marchison's paper ' O21 the Elint Drift of the South- 

 east of England ' appeared the same year.'^ Considering that 'Head' 

 was a term of too limited significance for a drift which was not 

 limited to the Eaised Beaches, but had a wide spread over the whole 

 country, Murchison employed the more general term of ' Angular 

 Flint Drift.' He contended that, with a few exceptions in some of 

 the larger valleys, all the Elint Drift of the South of England was 

 to be attributed to one common cause — that cause being a local 

 cataclysm or wave of translation resulting from the sudden eleva- 

 tion and breaking-up of a large tract of Chalk and Greensand in the 



^ ' Geology of the South-east of England ' (1833), p. 348. In a later work 

 he describes it as obscurely stratified. 



2 ' Eeport on the Geology of Cornwall, &c.' (1839) p. 432. 



^ ' On the Siiperficial Accumulations of the Coasts of the English Channel 

 and the Changes they indicate,' Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc. vol. vii. (1851) p. 118; 

 and ' On the newer Tertiary Deposits of the Sussex Coast,' ibid. vol. xiii. (1857) 

 p. 42. 



^ Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc. vol vii. (1851) p. 349. 



