330 STEANGWAYS: HAEEOGATE WELLS. 
percolation of water through their substance in all directions, whereas 
the shales admit its passage only along the planes of lamination, and 
only then when they have become tolerably arenaceous. From this 
it follows that water which issues from a certain orifice, say the old 
Sulphur Well at Harrogate, would be confined throughout its entire 
course to the same strata, although probably not to exactly the same 
beds as those between which it springs at Harrogate unless the con- 
tiguity of the shales were broken by large faults. 
Now we have noticed above that there are no very large faults 
in the country under consideration. Small faults, I do not think, 
would make any interruption in the passage of the water as their 
effect would be rather to bend the shales than to cause any abso- 
lute disruption of them ; and even supposing the strata to be broken 
this would not necessarily cause either a complete stoppage or even 
a partial diversion to the passage of the water. 
For instance, we have seen above, that in the country under 
consideration, the same, or nearly the same beds of rock come to 
the surface throughout the entire distance, thus showing that the 
effect of all the faults taken as a whole, is to neutralize one 
another ; so that a section taken along this line, any particular bed 
of strata would occupy the same position at either end. 
Let us suppose four beds of strata A, B, C, D, broken by faults 
1, 2, 3. Now the effect of the first fault is to throw C against B, 
that of the second to throw A against C, while that of the third is 
to throw B against A, thus giving B the same position as it occupied 
at first. Water entering any bed of strata, say C, would traverse 
any beds which were on the same horizon with it, namely, D and B, 
until it finally returned to the same strata, C, as that in which it was 
