250 
THE GEOLOGIST. 
lisli history, Rosamond's well. At the distance of a few miles only, 
menioi-ials of our 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 behind, 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 smrounding it in every direction, and fi'om long exposure to 
the weather simulating at a distance much of the bleak and rugged 
aspect of natm-al cliffs and storm-beaten crags, but, as we discover in 
due tiine, they are in reality the gradually accumulated refuse of the 
slate pits we design to visit in the course of our excm'sion. 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. Tliis 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 life that prevailed dui-ing 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 fossils ?" The 
products thus alluded to form the principle support of the villagers, 
and are chiefly obtained from the slaty fissile bed occurring at the 
base of the Bath, or Great Oolite, that being nowhere developed on 
so extensive a scale as at Stonesfield, although present in some other 
