Vol. 50.] PERMIAN BRECCIAS OP THE MIDLANDS. 407 



reasons it would seem that, with some exceptions, the striation of 

 the fragments was anterior to their deposition, and this conclusion is 

 upheld by an examination of the Church Hill quarry. Here a careful 

 search failed to yield any good specimens of striation, but on a few 

 of the fragments a careful examination revealed some traces, as if of 

 once deeply-marked scratches nearly obliterated. As has already 

 been explained, the Church Hill exposure consists of more waterworn 

 material than the Abberley, and, under these circumstances, it is 

 only natural that striations on the pebbles should be absent, if those 

 at Abberley were produced anterior to deposition ; while on the other 

 supposition it is difficult to see why they should not be as common 

 at the one place as at the other. On the Clent Hills the only toler- 

 able exposures I saw were in the finer and more waterworn type of 

 deposit, and here, too, striations were not to be found. 



But if the scratches were produced before the fragments on which 

 thej r are found were deposited in their present situation, the only 

 two agencies that could have been concerned are glaciers or move- 

 ments of the soil-cap. The soil-cap, either moving gradually down 

 a hillside or when precipitated as a landslip, may certainly produce 

 marks on the subjacent rock which it is difficult, and sometimes 

 impossible, to discriminate from those produced by glaciers, but it 

 is at least doubtful whether it can produce a close and parallel 

 striation of loose fragments such as is seen in many of the fragments 

 at Abberley. The fragments which have retained the striations are 

 all of hard rock, mostly of rhyolite or rhyolitic ash, and these 

 striations can only have been produced by a steady movement 

 accompanied by great pressure ; the stone which produced the 

 scratch must, in fact, have been held firmly and pressed hard against 

 the fragment that was scratched, and I am not aware that any case 

 has been observed of loose fragments in a scree or landslip being 

 scratched in the deep and regular manner that is seen on many of 

 the Abberley stones. 



Another consideration to be borne in mind is that these effects of 

 soil-cap movements are only locally developed, and that the Abberley 

 rock is certainly not the direct effect of a landslip or talus, but the 

 deposit of a stream. Under such circumstances it is difficult, even 

 if loose fragments could occasionally be scratched by soil-cap move- 

 ments in the manner these are, to see how they could be so abundant 

 as they are in this quarry ; while, if the deposits were composed of 

 rearranged moraine-material, their abundance is by no means too 

 great to be explicable : and this seems, on the whole, to be the most 

 probable explanation of the Abberley deposit and of the very similar 

 deposits on Woodbury and Berrow Hills. 



It is only by a consideration of the combination of characters 

 exhibited by a deposit that one can come to a correct conclusion 

 regarding the origin of such a rock as this is. Not a few of the 

 striated fragments I have seen are such as would most unhesitatingly 

 be accepted as truly glacial, if they were found in a recent moraine 

 or in a Pleistocene boulder-clay ; many are of a more doubtful 

 character, but not more so than specimens that might be collected 

 out of a boulder-clay of indisputably glacial origin ; while it would 



