464 
Geology of Norfolk. 
reconstructed chalk, the lime-works near the town of Cromer and 
at Thorpe Market may be mentioned. Near Saxthorpe is a bed 
in which the transported chalk intimately combined with a bluish 
clay yields an hydraulic lime. 
The singular contortions into which the strata of the upper 
drift have been thrown, particularly between Sidestrand and Old 
Hythe Point, have attracted much attention, and various expla- 
nations of them have been offered, none of which can be consi- 
dered satisfactory. The contorted strata cover others which are 
perfectly horizontal, so that they could not have been caused by a 
force acting from below, nor by lateral pressure during move- 
ments of upheaval. I have suggested subsidence occasioned by 
the melting of masses of ice among which these contorted strata 
were formed, as more accordant with the conditions to be ex- 
plained, than the hypothesis of icebergs ploughing up the bed of a 
shallow sea in which they stranded. Woodward, in his ' Geology 
of Norfolk,' has given sections of the whole line from Happis- 
burgh to Weybourne, as they existed w hen he wrote ; but from the 
waste of the coast the details are in a constant state of change. 
In these sections he has exhibited the contorted strata as well as 
they can be shown on so small a scale. I have copied from his 
work a representation of one of them in Section III. 
Let us here pause to consider the events indicated by the suc- 
cession of deposits above described ; for those events have had 
an important influence on the agriculture of Norfolk. To geo- 
logists they will be sufficiently obvious; but in preparing this 
paper I labour under the double disadvantage of writing for the 
information of those who must be presumed to be unacquainted 
with geology, and of drawing conclusions of practical import- 
ance, partly from facts with which geologists are familiar, and 
partly from facts which are now for the first time publicly an- 
nounced. 
1. We have in the crag a deposit gradually formed beneath 
the sea by ordinary marine action, as is proved by the shells which 
it contains, and by the condition in which they are found. 
2. The freshwater beds and the rooted stools of trees show this 
marine bed to have been at a subsequent period sufficiently ele- 
vated above the sea to have been covered in some parts with the 
deposits of rivers and lagoons, and in others to have supported a 
forest. The size of some of the trees proves that the surface 
continued in this state for a considerable period. 
3. This terrestrial surface was ajain submerged and covered 
l)y a marine deposit. This, at its commencement (the marine 
bed at Runton), resembled the crag, but as the submergence 
proceeded, it assumed characters (the till) very different from 
those of any former or subsequent marine formation. The ques- 
