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THE GEOLOGIST, 



lish. history, Rosamond's well. At the distance of a few miles only, 

 memorials of oni- Celtic ancestors exist in the form of tumuli, 

 embowered among the venerable oaks of Wychwood Forest. It is 

 not, however, our present intention to linger amid the many historical 

 associations of Woodstock, deeply fraught with interest as they are, 

 but proceeding at once to our object, we invite our readers to accom- 

 pany us in a geological ramble to the village of Stonesfield, situated 

 in its vicinity, at a distance of between three and four miles. By far 

 the most agreeable portion of our road traverses the picturesque 

 slopes and luxuriantly wooded glades of Blenheim Park: leaving 

 these beliind, we soon arrive within sight of our destination. As we 

 approach the village we perceive it to occupy the sides and summit 

 of a somewhat elevated ridge of land, and our attention will not fail 

 to be arrested by the numerous precipitous piles or mounds of gray 

 stones surrounding it in every direction, and from long exposure to 

 the weather simulating at a distance much of the bleak and rugged 

 aspect of natural cliffs and storm-beaten crags, but, as we discover in 

 due time, they are in reality the gradually accumulated refuse of the 

 slate pits we design to visit in the course of our excursion. Before 

 ascending the hill into the village, the tourist, especially if at all 

 interested in antiquarian pursuits, may profitably devote a short time 

 to the examination of a Roman villa, although but few traces of it 

 exist beyond a portion of its tesselated pavement, for the protection 

 of which a rude hovel has been erected. This relic of that distant 

 era when Britain was a province of the Roman empire, and this 

 sequestered vale of Oxfordshire, the summer retreat of some wealthy 

 citizen of the " Eternal City," is naturally suggestive of the reflection 

 that the object of our visit to Stonesfield is in order to examine the 

 records of an antiquity so remote, that even the far-receding vista of 

 Roman annals affords no parallel by which a comparison may be insti- 

 tuted — an antiquity so vast that the very existence of the human 

 race furnishes no chronology adequate to express the distance of a 

 period so deeply enshrined in the dim eternity of the past. Let us, 

 then, invoke the aid of geological science, which alone can roll back 

 the strong barriers that have so long walled up the sepulchre of that 

 ancient time, and reveal to its disciples the various mysterious forms 

 and phases of hfe that prevailed during an age of which the historian 

 takes no cognizance, and whose only archives are engraved on those 

 " tables of stone," some of whose quaint inscriptions and marvellous 

 heiroglyphs, as embodied in the Lower Oolitic rocks of Stonesfield, 

 it is our present task to examine, and as far as practicable to 

 decipher. 



Strangers who visit this village almost invariably have one or other 

 of two queries proposed to them by its inhabitants, either " Do you 

 want a few thousand slates ?" or " Do you want any fossHs ?" The 

 products thus alluded to form the principle support of the villagers, 

 and arc chiefly obtained from the slaty fissile bed occurring at the 

 base of the Bath, or Great Oolite, that being nowhere developed on 

 so extensi\^e a scale as at Stonesfield, although present in some other 



