Dec., 1891. midland union of natural history societies. 271 
with which the coal could be reached would be very greatly 
enhanced. Years ago it was thought that here with us they 
usually followed the coal in regular order ; but evidence had 
been got in the north of the coalfield and elsewhere that the 
Permians often rested only on the edges of the coal measures. 
This discovery had opened up quite a new era in the econo¬ 
mical geology of the Dudley district, because there was now 
shown a possibility of winning coal between the nearly worked 
out old Staffordshire district and Coalbrookdale ; and of 
course precisely the same thing followed in regard to the 
Permian districts on the east of the South Staffordshire 
coalfield, so that now we might presume that from Walsall 
to Tam worth, and from Tamworth to Ashbv, the chances 
were that there was a continuous sheet of coal at no great 
distance from the surface ready to be worked, Of perhaps 
less economic interest, but of greater scientific interest than 
anything he had yet referred to, were some points in the 
Clent and Stourbridge neighbourhood. There, geologists found 
curious chips of limestone, ashes,lava, &c.,forming great sheets 
of strata. Professor Ramsay held the theory that these curious 
rocks were carried from Shropshire and Wales on the back of 
glaciers and dumped down where they now were,whereas Mr. 
Jukes, the Dudley geologist, was of opinion that the materials 
were brought down from rocks and hills then close by, and 
deposited by the ordinary denuding agencies. Within the last 
few years Jukes’s theory had been all but proved to be correct ; 
and, among the local geologists who were at work on this sub¬ 
ject, Mr. Wickham King, the secretary of the Dudley Geological 
Society, had already distinguished himself by discoveries in 
that direction. Reverting again to the coalfield of Dudley, 
Dr. Lapworth said that the local coal measures were simply a 
portion of the enormous sheet of black rock which underlay 
the new red sandstone. In the Northern English coalfields, 
the measures were very much thicker, and they rested upon 
an enormous thickness of the limestone belonging to the 
carboniferous. In the Dudley district this limestone, &c., was 
altogether wanting, and while the lower coal measures were 
unknown, there were left only the higher measures, in the 
middle of which occurred our Thick Coal bed, which con¬ 
stituted the finest seam of coal on this side of the Atlantic. 
The section, prepared by Mr. H. Johnson, hanging on the wall, 
was that of the thick coal as it once existed at Parkhead, where 
it measured about 32ft. The Thick Coal was not found over the 
whole district, but existed as far northward as Walsall, as far 
southward as Oldbury, and westward nearly as far as Stour¬ 
bridge ; but there was very little doubt it once extended under 
the red sandstone as far eastward as the neighbourhood of 
