THE BASALT OF ROWLEY REGIS. 
Ill 
striking it full tilt. You immediately fall behind, and with 
help of hands and hammer you succeed in baring the stone, 
and you find that the plough has left no mark of its passage 
over it; but, strange to tell, you may find the stone grooved and 
scratched, it may be at right angles to the direction of the 
plough. This sets you thinking, and on examination of the 
plough you find there is no part of it that could by any 
possibility in passing over a stone mark it with the grooves 
or strife you have just seen on the stone in situ or on those 
you had examined in the walls. Not satisfied with your 
partial examination of the stone you uncovered, you may 
desire to unearth it altogether, and, having got the necessary 
permission and bared the stone completely, you find yourself 
in possession of these facts :—You see a stone weighing half a 
ton or a ton, a stone that could not possibly be moved by any 
agricultural operations that had ever taken place above it; 
you find it grooved in about a north and south direction, not 
only on the uppermost side but you find the grooves on other 
sides also ; and you even trace one groove going across the 
stone in a connected manner over an angle and across another 
side, and this, remember, is a stone in situ which no agricul¬ 
tural implement could move if it struck it. How then has it 
come about that these curious markings are exhibited, and 
sometimes continuously on more than one face? We have no 
positive evidence as yet enabling us satisfactorily to reply to 
this query, but the negative evidence would lead us to confess 
that these marks were not made during the course of agricul¬ 
tural operations. 
To be able to read these markings correctly we must go 
below the surface. We therefore visit the sections exhibited 
in the various quarries upon the hills, and we may sum up 
briefly the result of our observations thus. Taking the 
sections of the quarries on the north and east sides of the 
hills, we find below the surface soil, generally about thirteen 
inches in depth, a mass of dry rocky material, which breaks 
up into small cubical morsels in the hand without any diffi 
culty, and this material obtains until you get down to the 
basalt itself, at depths varying from two to four, ten, twenty, 
and even one hundred feet. You can scarcely find a stone 
throughout the entire area; but directly we turn the southern 
shoulder of the hill a totally different class of facts confronts 
us. We have the surface soil as before, but we have no roche 
beneath it; instead, we find a tumultuous bed of stones, 
without arrangement of any kind. There is no attempt at 
stratification, the large and the small stones are tumultuously 
thrown together, just as much so as if they had been 
