ON THE BONES 01 THE OX IN BLUE CLAY. 



37 



two vertebrse in tolerable preservation, I could not have de- 

 termined that they belonged to a ruminant of considerable 

 size. The occupier of the pit being an intelligent man, I in- 

 formed him what I had met with, and requested him, when 

 he should again require 'clay for his land, to instruct his men 

 to look out carefully for more bones, and particularly for 

 teeth. This year (1841) they renewed their digging, and had 

 the good fortune to disenter a few more fragments of bone, 

 also the molar teeth complete of the upper jaw, with the 

 incisors, and one molar of the lower jaw ; the jaw bones 

 crumbled to a brown dust immediately upon exposure, but 

 by the teeth I was enabled to determine the animal to have 

 been one of the two species of ox, i. e. Bos taurus or B. urus. 

 The pit is of considerable size, and exhibits a large mass of 

 " till,'^ composed of beds of light coloured clay, having a 

 large proportion of sand (probably from the inferior green- 

 sand formation) mixed with it ; large chalk flints also occur 

 which have suffered no attrition, and a small assemblage of 

 brown gravel, lying upon the flints. There is no stratifica- 

 tion apparent; the bones were found in the sandy clay, 

 about four feet below the surface, which accounts for their 

 decomposed state. The pit is situated on the side of a nar- 

 row transverse valley, and upon the lower chalk stratum ; 

 the opposite side of the valley is occupied by an extensive 

 accumulation of" Drift" of blue clay, from the Kimmeridge 

 and Oxford Clays, which evidently entered it from the west, 

 and is stratified it contains a great abundance of minute 

 crystals of selenite. 



The bones of ruminants are rarely met with in the drift of 

 this division of the country.*'^ 



* " In the " Hertford Reformer," of the 11th September, 1841, an ac- 

 count was inserted of some fossil remains of the Bovine race having been 

 found in Scotland. We are indebted to our friend George F. Fordham, 

 Esq. for another account of a similar occurrence in the neighbourhood of 



