SILURIAN, DEVONIAN, AND CARBONIFEROUS ROCKS NEAR LONDON. 291 
coarse-grained loose bed of sandstone underlay the Grault, and 
rested immediately and most unexpectedly upon the old and 
highly-inclined Palaeozoic rocks — a Silurian floor of the Wen- 
lock age, dipping at an angle of 40°, but to what point of the 
compass at present we do not know, although probably to the south. 
Not long since (June 1877) it was our good fortune to 
announce the discovery of the Upper Devonian rocks, under 
Tottenham Court Road, at Messrs. Meux & Co.’s Brewery, at the 
greater depth of 1,140 feet. They were penetrated 70 feet. 
This new feature in the palaeogeography of the eastern counties, 
anticipated in some form by Austen, Prestwich, and Hull, is 
now verified, and the age of the rocks determined. 
It will be asked by those who give attention to stratigraphical 
geology, whether these Silurian rocks are of the British or Con- 
tinental type ; in other words, are they or can they be correlated 
with our Welsh or English Wenlocks, or are they of the Ardennes 
type ? Do they constitute a portion of the Dudley or Wen- 
lock rocks of Wenlock spreading away eastwards, or are they 
a prolongation of the Silurian rocks of Belgium — the western 
edge or extension of which reaches beyond the longitude of 
Greenwich ? In other words, were these two separate basins, 
or one ? Is it an extension from the West of Europe, or an 
easterly expansion of the Upper Silurians of the Silurian area ? 
The facies of the fossils and the character of the rock in all 
its essentials are decidedly British, and it cannot be doubted 
that they are a continuous and denuded surface of the same rocks 
now conspicuously exposed in the picturesque scenery of the 
hills of Herefordshire and Worcestershire. The thirty species 
of fossils noticed in the cores are, species for species, identical 
with those of the Wenlock Edge, or Wren’s Nest, near Dudley, 
and no difference can be detected in the lithological characters 
of the rocks. 
In direct line or latitudinally the Wenlock rocks of the 
Malvern, Woolhope and May Hill may claim connection, but 
we regard the Ware fossils and rock as having more affinity 
with the Wenlock Edge series, or that group which borders and 
underlies the western side of the great mass of the Old Red 
Sandstone of the north-west part of Herefordshire, although 
distant nearly 160 miles. Could we remove the overlying 
Mesozoic series between Ware and Burford, in Oxfordshire, and 
again expose the Coal Measures known to occur there at the 
depth of 1,184 feet, then should we understand the thinning 
away of the Jurassic and lower Cretaceous series eastwards 
towards this Silurian ridge, and what we should probably call 
the Oxfordshire and Hertfordshire coal basins would be exposed 
and correlated, for we can hardly now doubt this extension of 
the known Burford Coal Measures, in all probability, however, 
