480 
Geologu of Norfolk. 
5. Sand of the upper drift. — Sand spread in a thick coat on 
the coarse turf is one of the first steps used in Norfolk for the 
improvement of peaty meadows ; a department of husbandry, 
however, in which that county does not shine. In a few instances 
I have seen a ferruginous sand employed on arable land — the 
soil a very light and thin loam — applied to the young clover. 
Whether any benefit had been found to result, or whether cus- 
tom had so established the use of underground manures, that 
sand was resorted to where clay and marl were not to be had, I 
know not. In the former case an analysis of the sand would be 
very desirable. 
6. The clay of the Nar with its beds of fossil oysters and other 
shells. 
7. The fresh -water clay and calcareous sand of Gaytonthorpe 
employed on Mr. Sooly's farm. 
If to the substances above enumerated, we add the hard and 
the soft chalk, raised from the solid strata, and also the London 
clay, and the shelly beds of the red crag — the two latter largely 
employed in Suffolk — we have no less than eleven mineral 
manures, besides varieties of some of them, used in Norfolk and 
the adjoining county for the improvement of the soil, ten of them 
bearing the names of clay and marl. 
The marl from which the light lands of East Norfolk have 
derived so much benefit is chalk — either chalk alone or mixed 
with a slight proportion of sand and clay — raised from the undis- 
turbed strata of chalk, or from its transported detritus imbedded 
in the upper and lower drift. To those parts of the district 
which do not possess chalk, in one or other of these forms, on 
the spot, and at accessible depths, it is conveyed from the chalk 
pits of Thorpe, Whitlingham, and Horsted, burthened in some 
cases with the cost of thirty or forty miles of expensive inland 
navigation, to which again is not unfrequently added a land car- 
riage, from the wharf at which it is landed, of four or five miles. 
The rotten and weathered chalk near the surface, and on the 
sides of the large pipes or cavities, which is partially mixed with 
" uncallovv," is sold to the farmers under the name of marl, not 
because it is better for the land than the pure chalk, but because 
it is unfit for burning into lime. Farmers who possess chalk 
pits on their land have informed me that the deeper they went the 
more they found the quality improve. 
Wherever, then, along the range of the chalk through Eng- 
land sandy and light loamy soils are found, they are capable of 
improvements like those which have so much raised the value of 
similar soils in Norfolk. The different beds of chalk vary con- 
siderably in the proportion of sand, clay, and phosphate of lime 
which is mixed with their carbonate of lime; and it may, in some 
cases, be found more economical to convey chalk from a distance, 
