Sheppard : The Making of East Yorkshire. 113 



Still ascending- these rocks in their natural order, we have 

 numerous other beds, principally of limestone, but particular 

 reference must only be made to one of these, namely, the Coral 

 Rag. This bed is nowhere better developed than in the 

 Scarborough district. Briefly, it consists of an enormous fossil 

 coral reef, resembling in almost every detail the coral reefs 

 formed in the Pacific and Indian Oceans to-day. On entering 

 a quarry (of which there are several for the purpose of lime- 

 burning and road-mending) one cannot but be impressed with 

 the nature of the material being excavated. On all sides are 

 great round masses of beautiful corals, some of them measuring 

 many feet in diameter. These occur, mushroom-like, all over 

 the quarry floor and on the sides. A near examination is not 

 necessary to see the beautiful designs worked by the coral 

 animal eons ago. A pocket lens reveals still further beauties in 

 every piece of limestone picked up. Between the large 

 fragments of coral, some of which are so fresh that they might 

 have recently been brought up by divers from the modern 

 ocean, one finds the remains of shells, sponges, teeth, and 

 spines of fishes, and other organisms which have found their 

 way into the crevices, and become entombed and eventually 

 solidified. Further, the masses of coral themselves are frequently 

 penetrated in all directions by rock-boring shells, in this 

 respect still further resembling modern coral reefs. In fact, 

 I know of no feature in the coral reef of to-day, down to 

 the minutest detail, but can be matched in the coral reef 

 composing the Rag around Scarborough, which is now a great 

 height above the sea, and some miles inland. No wonder that 

 this district has been the birthplace of so many prominent 

 leaders of geological science. William Smith, the father of 

 English geology, received many of his most important lessons 

 in this very district, and resided there to his (and our) great 

 profit for many years. John Philips, the pioneer of Yorkshire 

 geology. Bean, Huddleston, and a host of others might be 

 mentioned, all of whom owe their fame to the interest attached 

 to the rocks around Scarborough. 



These selfsame rocks also occur in the Malton district, and 

 in former years the late Samuel Chadwick did much good work 

 in collecting and preserving in the Malton Museum specimens 

 from these beds. 



Whilst this great mass of rock was in process of formation 

 in some parts of East Yorkshire, in the Market Weighton 

 district, as shown by Professor Kendall, there seems to ha\e 



1905 April 1. " 



