420 CONSISTENCY OF GEOLOGY WITH SACRED HISTORt. 



above described, for they contain boulders of tertiary sandstone, and 

 breccia ; while, in the older tertiary, the remains of the elephant have 

 not been discovered. The perfect state of the teeth in the deposits at 

 Brighton, forbids the supposition that they were transported from a 

 distance : and we have, too, the remarkable fact, that while the shin- 

 gle on which the elephant bed reposes, is composed not only of chalk 

 pebbles, but of boulders of granite, porphyry, and other primary rocks 

 which must have been brought from a distant part of the country, and 

 of tertiary sandstone and breccia, and the sand beneath contains the 

 bones of whales, no remains of elephants have been found therein. It 

 would seem, therefore, that the sand, and the shingle, were formed in 

 an estuary, and that when the upper beds were deposited, all commu- 

 nication with the ocean was cut off ; for neither the bones, nor the 

 materials of which the bed is composed, appear to have suffered from 

 attrition, nor is there any intermixture of marine exuvise. These de- 

 posits were evidently of considerable extent : there are outlying 

 patches on the chalk along the coasts of Sussex and Kent, and also at 

 Etables, and other points on the opposite shores of France. Similar 

 beds occur on the banks of the Loire, and probably the same series is 

 represented by the Crag, overlying the London Clay, on the eastern 

 shores of England ; facts which tend to prove that the estuary once 

 extended over a considerable portion of the area now occupied by the 

 British Channel.* The geological relations of this group of deposits 

 are as yet but imperfectly known. The zoological characters which 

 distinguish them from the older tertiary strata, are the absence of the 

 palcEotheria, and the occurrence of the remains of the mammoth, rhi- 

 noceros, and other mammalia, whose bones are so constantly found in 

 the superficial gravel of Europe, intermixed with those of recent spe- 

 cies. 



To this epoch we may probably refer the existence of hyenas, ti- 

 gers, and other carnivorous animals, whose skeletons are entombed in 

 such immense numbers in caverns, and fissures, and in beds of super- 

 ficial gravel, in various parts of England, and the continent. One sol- 

 itary instance only is known of the occurrence of remains of this kind 

 in the south-east of England. The lower jaw and a few fragments of 

 other bones of a hyena were discovered, a few years since, in a chasm 

 in a stone quarry at Boughton, near Maidstone. 



The next era is that during which the Crag, and the tertiary strata, 

 and the chalk on which they repose, were lifted up to their present 

 situations ; the channel which separates England from France was 

 broken through, and the transverse valleys of the North and South 

 Downs were produced or enlarged ; for, although these valleys are 

 now river courses, yet it is obvious that they originated in disruption, 

 for Ihe strata, in every instance which I have observed, diverge from 



*Mr. Samuel Woodward, of Norwich, the author of the ' Synoptical Table of 

 British Organic Remains,' (a work indispensable to the practical geologist) states, 

 that in the crag on the coast of Norfolk, the remains of Mammoths are so abund- 

 ant, that on the oyster-ground ofil'HarboroDgh, the grinders of these animals which 

 have been found must have belonged to upwards of 500 individuals. 



