Norwich Castle Museum, 163 
well seen at Bramerton and Thorpe just above the 
Chalk, represents a formation of about thirty feet, 
consisting of laminated clays and shingle, with in 
places seams of shells. ‘The story told by these fossil 
shells is that the climate was gradually getting colder, 
till at last we have many shells only to be found 
in the northern or Arctic seas. ‘There are no fewer 
than a hundred species of shells found in the Nor- 
wich Crag. 
The Forest Bed Series forms one of the most remark- 
able deposits of East Anglia. This bed, so noted for 
the mammalian remains which it has yielded, main- 
tains a remarkable persistence wherever it has been 
observed, at about the same level, along the shore 
or foreshore between Runton, Norfolk, and Kessing- 
land, Suffolk. It overlies the Norwich Crag Series. 
The late Mr. John Gunn, of Irstead, who made the. 
_ Forest Bed his special study, and who formed this 
grand collection of Mammalian remains, states that 
the soil of the Forest Bed appears to consist of an 
argillaceous sand and gravel (pan) or a compound 
of both, and to have been deposited in an Estuary. 
Bones of LEilephas meridionalis, together with those 
of a great variety of deer and other mammals, are 
found in it, especially in the gravel, which, on that 
account, 13 called the ‘‘Elephant Bed.” The bones 
are sharply fractured, but not rolled, and are 
associated with those of whales and fragments of 
wood, in licating that the Estuary was open to the 
sea, most probably northward, for the admission of 
the whal‘s; while it appears to have been closed at 
the Straiis of Dover and Calais to afford a passage 
for the mammals into this country. This deposit of 
the soil may be regarded as the first phase of the 
Forest Bed; and here, we may observe, a long 
interval may have intervened between this and the 
