548 S. V. Wood, jun. — American ancl British Surface-Geology. 
was, I contend, witli disturbances of an intense character taking 
place under tbe sea at this period tkat the emergence of the South of 
England commenced, and it was to the long train of changes which 
thus beginning continued through the period of minor glaciation that 
we have hitherto called post-Glacial, and which I have endeavoured 
to trace in my paper on the Wealden Denudation in the Journal of 
the Geological Society for 1871, that in my view the South of 
England, including the Wealden Valley, was brought to its present 
form and condition. 
In reference to the elevation of the greater part of the East 
Anglian counties into a beit of land early in the progress of the 
formation of tbe chalky clay, there exist certain phenomena connected 
with the valleys of that district which have long been a subject of 
perplexity to me, and in reference to which the following passage 
occurs in the recent paper by myself and Mr. Harmer, “ On the 
later Tertiary Geology of East Anglia,” already quoted, viz. : “ It is 
also a perplexing feature that some denudation has occurred at 
the bottom of valleys by which the Upper Glacial (or clay un- 
distinguishable from it) rests directly on beds older than the Middle 
Glacial sand, as is shown in Section XV. [of that paper] in the 
case of the Ket Valley, and of which instances are also to be found 
in tbe Waveney, Blyth, and Gipping Valleys. This, if the clay so 
occurring be the Upper Glacial, seems to have taken place either 
during the accumulation of that deposit or that of the Middle 
Glacial, but to have been very partial or local.” 
The explanation of the difficulty has since occurred to me ; and it 
is, as already mentioned in these pages, that after the Middle Glacial 
had been deposited and received by dropping a covering of morainic 
clay, the area of the Eastern counties intersected by these valleys 
was converted into land which forrned a beit dividing the land- 
ice from the sea, as is the case at the present time in Central 
and South Greenland ; and that through the valleys traversing this 
beit, or some of them, the land-ice issued in narrow tongue-like 
glaciers to the sea, as it does in those parts of Greenland at the 
present time. In Greenland this beit is forrned of lofty land, but in 
East Anglia the beit must have been of land even lower than the 
present. 
The section afforded by the cutting of the Cromer Branch Bailway 
at Thorpe near Norwich, some years ago, though puzzling at the time, 
accompanied the acute upthrow of these rectilinear ridges, just as Mr. Prestwich 
shows it has done the portion of one of them which is continued through the Port- 
land district. 
The restoration map No. II. of the plate to the paper by myself on the Weald 
above quoted shows what I regard as the distribution of land and water at that par- 
ticular stage of this emergence, when the oldest part of the gravel lying within the 
Thames Valley commenced to form and when the West and South of England were 
to a great extent still submerged. 
I oughtto addalso that Mr. 0. Fisher in 1868 (Geol. Mag. Vol. V. p. 99), suggested 
that the lofty gravels over the Southern counties represented the Upper Glacial. At 
that time I regarded them as somewhat later, and as liaving accumulated after the 
glacial clay had been removed from that part of England by denudation, but I have 
ior several years past given up this view in favour of that of Mr. Fisher. 
