part 1] PROCEEDINGS OF THE GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY. vii 



Pliocene times, or not until Chellean times ; and further in what 

 manner it was suggested that Palaeolithic implements were carried 

 into the loess of the Somme vallejr. 



Mr. S. Hazzledlne Wareest was particularly pleased that the 

 Lecturer did not follow the Penck theory of identification of the 

 river-terraces with the giaciations : a theory which had always 

 appeared untenable to the speaker. As the Lecturer had said, the 

 river-terraces represented, not giaciations, but base-levels of erosion, 

 and it must not be forgotten that the base-level of a river- valley 

 was not a dead level with respect to the sea, but a curve which 

 rose upwards inland. 



The speaker wished to emphasize the importance of the cold marine 

 fauna of the Sicilian stage, as that was the approximate time at 

 which he believed the major glaciation of Europe to have occurred. 

 Mr. M. A. C. Hinton and Mr. A. S. Kennarcl relied upon the 

 poverty of palseontological evidence of cold in earlier Pleistocene 

 times ; but the Sicilian stage afforded another illustration of the 

 proverbial clanger of negative evidence. 



Prof. J. E. Make called attention to the difficulties which had 

 attended attempts to draw up a classification of 1116 deposits 

 containing relics of Man in relationship to glacial accumulations. 

 He felt that a study of the marine deposits would help greatly. 

 As the features of terraces would be destroyed in areas which had 

 undergone glaciation after their formation, he advocated a detailed 

 study of the Pleistocene marine faunas of Britain, on the lines of 

 the work of Prof. W. C. Brogger. There was much material, 

 scattered through many museums in this country, which awaited 

 the attention of an expert in Pleistocene conchology. 



Prof. P. Gr. H. Boswell remarked that the work of Prof. 

 Deperet on marine terraces in Western and Southern Europe had 

 produced results so consistent as to be doubtful. In particular, 

 being based on eustatic movements, it did not take into account 

 the prevalent and important diastrophic movements that charac- 

 terized late Pliocene and Pleistocene times. Other cogent argu- 

 ments against Prof. Deperet's views had recently been published 

 by E. Leverett, 1 E. de Martonne, and others. 



As a result of his studies, Prof. Deperet had added yet another 

 method to the already long list, by means of which the attempt at 

 correlation of British and Continental Pleistocene deposits had 

 been made. None of these methods had, up to the present, been 

 entirely successful : local maximum giaciations were not neces- 

 sarily synchronous; the range of the larger mammalian remains in 

 British deposits was not established, and mixtures of faunas were 

 detected ; ' cultural drift ' may have confused a possible correla- 

 tion of deposits containing established types of implements, and so 

 on. If, however, as a result of further work, it was found that 

 several of these methods converged to give consistent results, a 

 basis of correlation would be established. Before such could be 



1 Bull. Geol. Soc. Amer. vol. xxxiii (1922) p. 472. 



