Proceedings of the British Association, 127 



afforded many remains of animals long since extinct in this country. 

 The whole thickness of the peat is annually removed in many places, 

 laying bare a great extent of the surface of the subjacent clay, 

 and upon this have been found remains of the Irish elk, beaver, 

 wolf, bear, and bones of the badger, otter, roebuck and red deer 

 in abundance. The President illustrated his observations by sections, 

 of which the most remarkable were two in the neighbourhood of Ely, 

 exhibiting a dislocation of the strata by which the chalk on one side 

 of the line of gault was brought to the level of the lower greensand 

 on the other, from which both chalk and gault had been removed. 



In reply to a question from Capt. Ibbetson, the President stated 

 that the thickness of the boulder clays was 200 feet near Caxton, and 

 that the displacement of the strata seen in the great clay-pit near 

 Ely amounted to at least 150 feet. 



Mr. Murchison read a letter from Mr. Ferdinand Oswald, of Oels, 

 respecting the occurrence of Silurian rocks at the villages of Ober and 

 Neu Schmollen, near Breslau, in Silesia, and covering an area of about 

 eight English square miles. — Mr. Murchison considered this an 

 interesting discovery, as throughout Germany the older rocks belong- 

 ed almost exclusively to the carboniferous or Devonian systems, and 

 Prague was the only place from which many Silurian fossils had 

 been derived. It was a question whether this was really a little 

 island of Silurian rocks in situ, or whether it was only a part of the 

 boulder formation, which often contained Silurian rocks derived from 

 Scandinavia and Russia. In Mr. Oswald's copious list of fossils 

 were mentioned Illcenus crassicauda, Sphaeronites, and other cha- 

 racteristic lower Silurian fossils, together with almost all the best- 

 marked corals of Wenlock and Dudley, a remarkable and unexpected 

 mixture of the fossils of two very different periods. 



Baron Leopold von Buch observed, that before this was admitted, 

 it would be necessary to see the place. — Mr. Phillips remarked that 

 there were many unsatisfied problems in geology, particularly as 

 to what had been the probable physical conditions which had deter- 

 mined the uniformity of the types of organic life over great areas, 

 accompanied as it was by considerable diversity of local association. 

 Mr. Murchison' s Silurian system presented the same general aspect 

 in many distant parts of the world, but even in England there were 



