540 
Mr. Buckland o?i the 
The accumulations of gravel on the low grounds between the 
oolite and chalk ridges along the valley of Buckingham and Bedford, 
and skirting the lower or south-east slope of the great oolite range, 
are almost exclusively composed of fragments of oolite and chalk ; 
older pebbles being there very sparingly intermixed. Examples 
of this may particularly be seen at Wittlebury Forest in North- 
amptonshire and near Buckingham. The above observations on 
this subject, by Mr. Conybeare, are in perfect harmony with my 
own in other parts of England. 
I am informed by Sir Joseph Banks, that he has observed 
pebbles of porphyry in the gravel used for repairing the roads on 
the north side of the town of Dunstable, near the escarpment of 
the chalk ; these also are referable to the same era with those 
which have been traced along the vallies of the Evenlode and 
Thames from Warwickshire to Hyde Park, and are connected 
with the gravel which Mr. Conybeare has noticed in the midland 
districts. The occurrence of granite pebbles and other fragments 
of distant primitive rocks, which have been transported into the 
valley of the Seine, near Paris, is another fact precisely of a similar 
kind. 
Mr. Farey, in his Agricultural Report of Derbyshire, gives a 
long and interesting list of the gravel patches in that county, from 
which it appears, that fragments of all the English formations from 
liave opportunity of visiting this spot, where its limits have never been ascertained, and 
its distance from the great mass of the same formation renders its occurrence and circum- 
stances deserving of further investigation. Its extent is probably very small, and it seems 
to present an interesting and valuable relic of the great mantle of chalk, whose distant 
outlying fragments which we find elsewhere, added to the enormous quantities of its 
wreck which are dispersed over the country in the form of diluvian gravel, shew it to have 
been once extensively spread out beyond the limits of its present area. 
