MR. J. T. HOTBLACK ON STONES ON MUNDESLEY BEACH. 
9 
I shall mention first is by far the most important. Every one will 
know at once the cause to which I am about to refer, and I can 
imagine some asking themselves, Where do you want, or where can 
you find another ? Well, wait ! The great agency has, of course, 
been ice, leaving out of account the flints of which, as I have 
said, some have been washed straight out of the chalk. Almost 
everything I have mentioned, including most even of the common 
flints, and perhaps all the pink or red flints owe their presence 
here to glacial action. Some, as the rhomb-porphyry, have almost 
certainly come from distant Scandinavia ; others, like the red 
flints, may have come but from neighbouring Hunstanton. What 
a mighty force must that ice of the glacial period have exercised, 
whether it were in the form of glacier, iceberg, or ice-sheet ; but 
what is the second agency f I admit it to have been but a small 
one, but 1 think it can be found in the waters of that pre-historic 
Khine, which brought down Hints, stones, and fragments of rock 
from its banks, attached, perhaps, to the roots of trees which it 
carried down with its flood, and finally deposited in what we now 
know as the iron-pan of the Forest-bed, but which was really the 
bottom of its estuarine mud. Out of this iron-pan these stones are 
now sometimes washed, and so form a part, if a small one, of the 
pebbles on our beach. 
I have purposely omitted any reference to the aqueous or 
fossiliferous rocks, which, being much softer, are soon broken up 
by the action of the sea on the beach, though specimens of them 
are no doubt washed out of the boulder clay, the glacial drift, and 
the Forest-bed, and also sometimes, perhaps, out of the crag, of 
which there are some small exposures hereabouts. 
But stay, had I read this paper so far before my children they 
would have at once objected that I had forgotten and left out all 
reference to the carnelians and agates, of which they find so many 
on the beach at Mundesley. No, I have not forgotten these 
pebbles of pebbles ; these pebbles, par excellence , the carnelians and 
agates, I have left them purposely till the last ; and what judges 
those children are of what is and is not a carnelian, even my 
youngest little girl, when still unable to speak quite plainly, if 
I had shown her an exceptionally bright pink flint, or a specially 
clear bit of quartzite, and asked her is this one, would have turned 
up her little nose with disdain and answered without a moment’s 
