350 Mr. Lyell on the Boulder Formatioji, 



on ' the know!,' a bank 20 iniies off shore, brought iip an entire tusk of 

 an elephant nine feet six inches long. The elephants must have been 

 abundant ; I have at least 70 grinders, and the oyster dredgers reported 

 that they had fished up immense quantities and thrown them into deep 

 water, as they greatly obstructed their nets *." 



Mr. Woodward had previously spoken of the same oyster 

 bed, which was discovered off Hasborough in the year 1820, 

 and says that during the first twelve months, many hundred 

 specimens of the molar teeth of the elephant were dredged up 

 by the fishermen, and that the remains of upwards of 500 

 animals must have been found there f. 



1 was not so fortunate either here or elsewhere on this coast 

 as to see the stools of trees erect in this stratum, but so many 

 independent eye-witnesses have lately described them to me 

 with such minuteness as to leave in my mind no doubt of the 

 iact. Besides the accounts of several fishermen, Mr. Simeon 

 Simons of Cromer states, that at Cromer he saw ten or more 

 trees in the space of half an acre exposed below the cliffs 

 eastward of that town, the stumps being a few inches, or all 

 less than a foot in vertical height, some of them no less than 

 9 or 10 feet in girth, the roots spreading from them on all 

 sides throughout a space twenty feet in diameter. Many others 

 were seen by him laid open on the beach opposite Sidestrand, 

 about three miles further to the eastward, evidently belonging 

 also to a submerged forest. All these roots were in a lami- 

 nated blue clay, with associated blue sand, the whole, six or 

 seven feet thick, resting on chalk. In one place a thin layer 

 of Norwich crag intervenes between the chalk and the bed of 

 blue clay with lignite. Shells had been found immediately 

 below the roots, but I have been unable to obtain them. 



I ascertained that at Woolcot Gap, between Hasborough 

 and Bacton, the bed of lignite, containing the bones of ele- 

 phants, pieces of wood, and the roots of trees in situ, had been 

 exposed at the base of the cliff in the preceding winter of 

 1838-39. A mass of incumbent drift about 30 feet thick 

 must have been removed by the waves and currents, in order 

 to lay open this lignite on the spot alluded to, and the great 

 extent of the submerged forest is proved not only by the nu- 

 merous points between Paling and Runton, which are about 

 18 miles apart, reckoning by the sea-coast, and nearly as far in 

 a direct line, but also by the proofs afforded of its extension 

 inland in proportion as the overlying beds are swept away by 

 denudation. 



It follows then from the facts above stated that the chalk 

 in this region had been overspread with layers of sand and 



* Rev. James Layton, cited in Fairholme's Geology, p. 281. 

 t Geol. of Norfolk, pp. 7 and 23. 



