8. V. Woodyjun. — American and British Surface-Geology. 551 
bed was accumulated prior to the excavation of the Waveney Yalley, 
and when the chalky clay formed a continuous table-land across it, 
the gravels of the Waveney Yalley associated with the bed being 
referred to a general System of high-level river-gravels over England 
and Northern France, which marked either the commencement of the 
excavation of the valleys of the rivers, or a period when that ex- 
cavation was in progress, and when the rivers ran at a corresponding 
higher level. The late Mr. J. W. Flower opposed this view, in- 
sisting that the physical structure of the country around forbade the 
possibility of the Waveney River having been the agent by which 
the valley containing it has been excavated — a contention that 
assists, if it be necessary, the proof of what seems clear to me, viz. 
that the valley originated interglacially between the Contorted 
Drift and Middle Glacial, and was then subjected to re-excavation 
by one of the glacier tongues, which in its recession left behind it 
the deposits of chalky clay which occur at intervals on the sides and 
bottom from the moutb to the head of the valley. These deposits 
seem to me to furnish irrefragable proof that the valleys in which they 
occur had been excavated to at least their present depths before the 
chalky clay had ceased to accumulate ; and, but for the physical 
conditions to which I liave referred as having succeeded the for- 
mation and conversion into land of the earliest part of the chalky 
clay, they would present a very puzzling problem. The passage, how- 
ever, of glacier tongues through some of these valleys (and amongst 
them that of the Waveney), by which the escape of the land-ice 
over the Fen took place, seems to me to remove the difficulty ; 
because, by filling up the valley, these glacier-tongues would have 
given rise to physical conditions similar to what would have existed 
had the Waveney Yalley not been excavated — conditions which have 
been deemed necessary to explain the position of the Hoxne brick- 
earth ; for if we regard the lagoon in which the brick-earth ac- 
cumulated as held up by the ice in the way in which glacier lakes 
are, then, as the glacier receded and the sea took its place at a 
lower level than the top of the ice, the water of the lagoon would 
escape, and in so doing denude that side of the brick-earth over 
which this escape took place, giving rise thereby to the Goldbrook 
Yalley. 
If I am right in this, the Hoxne bed, though necessarily posterior 
to so much of the chalky clay as crowns the table-land through 
which the valley runs, is yet anterior to the great mass of that 
clay which covers the Fen country and Lincolnshire, and about 
synchronous with such parts of it as occur in the valley bottoms of 
East Suffolk and Norfolk ; and this would carry the evidences 
of man’s occupation of Britain some way back into what I regard 
as the true Glacial period. 
( To be eoncluded in our next Number.) 
