151 
and he has left an interesting account of the circumstances 
which led him to engage in those investigations, which have 
connected his name with the Archaeology and Palaeontology 
of Britain. It will be better understood if I briefly advert 
to the nature of the district in which they were carried on. 
The geological relations of Devonshire generally, and 
especially of that part of its southern coast in which Kent's 
Cavern exists, were long a problem to geologists, till the 
sequence of organic remains cleared up the obscurity which 
mineralogy could not alone remove, and decided its place to 
be in the old red sandstone, intermediate between the Silurian 
and Carboniferous systems. The whole of the coast from 
Berryhead to Watcombe appears to have undergone great 
disturbances in former times, from the agency of both fire 
and water. Raised beaches occur, — in one instance on a rock, 
which now stands out some hundred yards in the sea, 70 ft. 
above the present level of the shore, — containing shells 
entirely different from those now found in the adjacent seas ; 
and the remains of a submarine forest, with trunks of trees 
in a vertical position, are found opposite to Tor Abbey. The 
conglomerate, from boulders of which the beautiful marbles 
of Babbicombe are worked, must have been formed by the 
action of water. The crystalline limestone, which forms the 
hills over which the town of Torquay has spread itself, has 
been disturbed by igneous rocks, which have altered their 
composition and thrown them into every variety of inclina- 
tion. In one place, the contact with the trap has so 
changed the limestone that it will scarcely effervesce with 
acids. So anomalous is the structure of the coast that, at 
Watcombe, the red conglomerate, tilted into a vertical 
position, is in contact with the horizontal strata of the new 
red sandstone. 
This limestone, which is found in various parts of South 
Devon, as far west as Plymouth, everywhere abounds with 
