448 
Geology of Norfolk. 
Wash, and the Yare, this district extends from the coast of 
Holderness, in Yorkshire, to the banks of the Thames, if not 
further to the south. On the western side of the watershed of 
England we have again similar superficial accumulations, ex- 
tending from the mountains of Cumberland down both sides of 
the Cambrian Chain, fringing the western coast of England and 
Wales, and the eastern coast of Ireland, running up the hollows 
into the interior, and covering the central plain of the new red 
sandstone in the counties of Lancashire, Cheshire, Shropshire, 
Worcestershire, and ^Varwickshire, with tiiick beds of sand, 
gravel, loam, and clay, containing fragments of marine shells of 
existing species, and large blocks derived from far distant rocks. 
Although the superficial deposits are of so much economic 
importance, and from their position are those which might have 
been expected to have first attracted attention^ and although their 
history, if deciphered, would be so interesting, interposed as they 
are between that condition of nature with which man is contem- 
porar}' and those long epochs represented by the great series of 
fossiliferous strata which preceded the existence of our race, they 
are those with which geologists have the least acquaintance, be- 
cause they are those which they have studied the least. For a long 
time they were regarded, on the authority of the Huttonians, as the 
effect of atmospheric action and fluviatile erosion, during a long 
lapse of ages, on the surface of existing continents. At a later 
period they, as well as the tertiary strata, more recent than those 
of the Paris basin, were attributed by Cuvier, Smith, and others, 
to the Noachian deluge. " We saw," says Professor Sedgwick, 
in renouncing this .hypothesis which he had long advocated, " we 
saw the clearest evidence of diluvial action, and we had in our 
Sacred Histories the record of a general deluge. On this double 
testimony we gave unity to a vast succession of phenomena, not 
one of which we perfectly comprehended, and under the name of 
diluvium classed them all together." * 
While the supporters of the diluvial hypothesis were succes- 
sively abandoning it as the newer tertiary strata became better 
known, fragments of marine shells of existing species began to 
be discovered in these superficial deposits, the greatest height at 
which they have been observed at present being nearly 1392 
feet ; and immediately a geological party arose who regarded 
them as ordinary examples of tertiary marine strata, or as the 
raised beaches of an era still more recent, and shut their eyes to 
those characters which distinguish them from the strata of any 
other epoch. Some dismissed them with the summary conclu- 
• Sedgwick's Anniversary Address, ' Proceedings of the Geological 
Society,' vol. i., p. 313. 
