Vol. 51.] OE EASTERN EAST ANGLIA. 501 



by ice. They contain in places fragile shells, but not a scratched 

 stone, not a foreign boulder, nothing of the kind, and there seems 

 to me to be absolutely no reason, except a mere wanton devotion 

 to a priori theories, to justify the intervention of ice in any form 

 to explain these shingles and their distribution. 



It seems just as wanton to speak of these shingles as the result 

 of fluviatile action. They occur, not only on the plateau, following 

 its meandering contour, but down the sloping sides of the hills to 

 the bottom and lower part of the valleys ; and the way in which 

 they mantle the country makes it plain that when they were dis- 

 tributed the country had its present contour. If so, how is it 

 possible to speak or think of rivers in connexion with the distri- 

 bution of beds of shingle like these, which are formed of stones 

 much larger than ordinary gravel ; which no ordinary river could 

 move at all ; which are not deposited in old channels or river-beds, 

 but spread out in vast sheets, in many places piled up to great 

 depths, and arranged quite irrespectively of the drainage of the 

 country ? It seems to me that we can explain these beds only by 

 a tumultuous diluvial movement, a view supported by some great 

 names among the older geologists. Such a movement possibly broke 

 up and stripped off the old Tertiary gravels from the Chalk, swept 

 them along over the Crag-beds, tore the latter up, denuded them in 

 many places, and mixed their pebbles and shells with the moving 

 mass. Such a tumultuous current could alone, it seems to me, 

 move these gravels of abnormally large pebbles, could alone mix 

 them and distribute them in this fashion, and then leave its traces 

 in the actual internal arrangement of the beds, whose false-bedding 

 in some places and tumultuous arrangement in others point to a more 

 or less violent cause. 



There still remains a polemical issue upon which I have not said 

 anything : namely, the exact horizon of these shingles. On this 

 point I should like to reserve what I have to say until I have dis- 

 cussed the representatives of these shingles of Eastern East Anglia 

 further inland, and the problems connected with that much more 

 important deposit the ' Great Chalky Clay,' which you will perhaps 

 allow me to do on another occasion. At present we are committed 

 to nothing on this thorny subject, except that the East Anglian 

 Shingle overlies the Crag, and generally underlies the ' Great Chalky 

 Clay? 



Discussion. 



Prof. T. M C K. Hughes, referring to certain specimens of ballast 

 exhibited by Sir Henry Howorth, said that the ship to which they 

 belonged was the ' Katie Hannah,' an English vessel which had been 

 sold to Norwegians, had taken in ballast in Norway, proceeded to 

 Malmo, from which she sailed with a cargo of timber, but was driven 

 ashore north of Hunstanton in the winter of 1893-4. A great heap 

 of ballast was lying beside the vessel on the sand when first he saw 

 it, but she was subsequently blown up, and now (April 1895) there 

 is no trace of the vessel or the ballast, except a few projecting pieces 



