102 
PRE-CARBONIFEROUS FLOOR OF THE MIDLANDS. 
Birmingham and Worcester line; while a new railway lias lately 
been opened from Rubery (at the north end) to Halesowen. 
The basement rock of the Lickey is best seen along a 
stream-course at the southern end of the hills. It is a greyish 
blotchy rock—probably an altered volcanic ash—which has 
harder (quartzose) bands in its upper part; only a small area 
is exposed, and there is no good section. This rock is probably 
of Pre-Cambrian age. 
Next m order we get the hard, much-jointed, greyish-white 
to red quartzite, of which the main ridge is composed. It is 
well exposed in numerous sections—that at Rubery Station 
being especially fine—where it is worked for road-metal. 
The thickness of the quartzite is about 350 feet, and its 
prevailing dip is to the north-east, at angles of from twenty 
to thirty degrees. But at the Rubery end of the hills—where 
the section is most complete—the quartzite rolls over, and 
dips westward, thus forming a true anticlinal. No fossils 
occur in the quartz-rock, but whitish specks of decomposed 
felspar are common in it. At the southern end of the ridge 
the rock is much contorted. The geological age of the 
quartzite is again a matter of difficulty. Lithologically it is 
identical with the Hartsliill quartzite, and rests, like it, upon 
Archaean strata. The Cambrian shales—which probably 
come above the quartzite—are here hidden by the overlap of 
the Silurian strata. The quartzite is, without doubt, either 
Cambrian or Pre-Cambrian, but, in the absence of fossils and 
of sections showing its relations to the rocks above and below 
it, it is hardly possible to refer it with certainty to its precise 
geological horizon. 
Above the quartzite we find representatives of several 
Silurian rocks. First we get the May Hill Sandstone—a 
coarse, friable rock full of characteristic fossils, Strickland inia. 
lirata being especially numerous—which is well seen in the 
road-cutting at Snead’s Heath, just opposite the wall of the 
Lunatic Asylum. Here the newer sandstone rests upon an 
eroded surface of the metamorphosed rock, filling up its hollows, 
and containing rounded pebbles of the quartzite. There are 
hard quartzose bands in the May Hill Sandstone, and these 
probably led to the erroneous idea—promulgated by Murchison 
and endorsed by the Geological Survey—that the Cambrian 
quartzite of the Lickey was simply a metamorphic form of 
the May Hill rock which reposed upon its flanks. The true 
facts of the case were observed by Professor Lapworth and 
Mr. Houghton early in 1882 ; the underlying Pre-Cambrian 
strata were discovered by the former geologist a little later, 
the clue to them being afforded by the rocks of like age which 
underlie the quartzite of Hartsliill. 
