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Mr. Buckland on the 
been describing ; so that if they were not transported hither by the 
vallies of the Evenlode or the Cherwell, they must have come over 
some more elevated point of the oolite escarpment, and from some 
still more distant part of the red sandstone plains that traverse the 
centre of the island in a line bearing north-west and south-east, 
parallel and subjacent to this escarpment. 
The probable history of these pebbles then is briefly as follows : 
Their native bed is the quartz rock of the Lower Lickey,Caer Garadoc 
and the Wrekin. From this they were broken down and rolled to 
pebbles, and buried in the new red sandstone, at the period of the 
deposition of that formation ; from this lodgement they were again 
torn up by the waters of the last deluge, and dispersed by them over 
the surface of the various rocks on which they are now scattered. 
The exact identity of substance in the greater part of the pebbles 
with that of the quartz rock, to which they have been referred, 
affords a satisfactory corroboration of the hypothesis which has been 
suggested to explain their origin. They present the same glassy 
brilliancy of fracture, the same gradation from compact, through 
subgranular and granular, to sandy structure, the same small crystals 
of decomposing felspar disseminated throughout, and occasionally 
the same traces of lines of stratification, which characterise the quartz 
rock of the Lower Lickey and Caer Caradoc. We find with them 
several other varieties of pebbles, referable to the transition series, 
and occasionally to the coal formation ; but these also accompany 
the quartzose pebbles in the beds of the young red sandstone, and 
are the wreck of rocks which suffered by the same destruction that 
affected the quartz ; and thus we have pebbles of grauwacke, Lydian- 
stone, flinty-slate, porphyry, porphyry-slate, trap, and many kinds 
of sandstone, dispersed over the oolite strata of Oxfordshire, as well 
