CLAYS OF BOVEY TEACEY, DEVONSHIEE. 
1037 
than 15 fathoms above the ordinary level of spring-tide high water, so that the bottom 
of the lake would be at least 35 fathoms below the level of the sea. Yet, says Professor 
Heek, and apparently on unimpeachable data, “it was a fresh-water lake.” The 
coimtry, then, must have stood at a much higher level than at present, or a barrier 
existed between the lake and the sea. Unless, however, there have been very local 
changes of level, the former hypothesis is disposed of by the fact that the Hempstead 
beds are of fluvio-marine origin, and must therefore have been formed at a level much 
below that which they at present occupy. A barrier, then, must have existed somewhere 
in the present tidal estuary of the Teign, over which the surplus waters of the lake passed 
to the ocean, or which, by its superior height, caused the waters to find an outlet in 
Torbay. Judging from the physical featui’es of the two valleys leading from Newton to 
the English Channel, one by Teignmouth and the other by Torquay, the former is far 
more likely than the latter to have been the course followed. 
The period represented by the Bovey beds must have been of considerable duration. 
So far as the strata themselves show, it was, in the district under consideration, one of 
great tranquillity. A long series of beds, alternately vegetable matter and fine clay, 
succeed each other in scarcely interrupted order ; the three mtruded arenaceous layers 
probably mark nothing more than a somewhat increased velocity in the current, or river, 
which conveyed the detritus of the granite hills of Dartmoor into the area of deposition, 
but w'hich, instead of being permanent, was as short-hved as it was unusual. 
The late investigations at Bovey, then, have been so far successful that they have settled 
the vexed question of the age of the deposits occurring there, — added forty-nine species 
to the fossil flora of this country, of which twenty-six are new to science, — recognized the 
first traces of animal life which the deposit has yielded, — detected another British frag- 
ment of the miocene page of the earth’s history, which, until 1857, was supposed to be 
totally unrepresented in England, — taken us back to a remote period when the slopes of 
Devonshire were clothed mth a luxuriant subtropical vegetation, — and separated, by a 
wide chronological hiatus, the lignite and associated beds from the gravels overlying 
them — a hiatus e\idenced by the dissimilarity and unconformability of the two series, 
by a change in the direction by which detrital matter reached the Bovey area, by great 
vertical displacements of the lower series, followed by denudation of the consequent 
surface-inequalities prior to the deposition of the upper, and by the exchange of an 
extinct flora, requiring a high temperature, for an existing one, which is now confined 
to arctic and alpine regions. 
Ecmote, however, as was the earliest of the two periods thus represented, the great 
leading geographical features of the district were pretty much as at present. The Teign 
and Bovey rivers were then in existence, but instead of the latter being tributary to the 
former, their mouths were three miles apart, and both fell into the same deep, sluggish, 
fresh-water lake ; occupying the site of the present Bovey plain, and guarded by Dart- 
moor and the other hills which still constitute the prominent characteristics of the 
district. 
