2 
LOCAL OCCURRENCES IN NATURAL HISTORY. 
Polypifers have been found, often so covered with minute triturated gravel silicified 
to the fossils, as to suggest the idea that this animal gluten, which has thus acted 
upon the water-worn fragments, must have oozed forth from the living zoophyte. 
As far as I have been able to learn, none but marine remains have been found 
here. 
Before venturing an opinion as to the way in which the fossil bones of quadru¬ 
peds, mentioned in my first letter, came in company with the gravel, it is necessary 
to consider the mineralogical substances of which this gravel consists. The 
pebbles are for the greater part referable to what were formerly termed u primitive 
rocks,” but now, more correctly, igneous, or pyrogenous,* as an examination of 
their constituents no longer admits of any doubt that they owe their origin to 
the longer or shorter action of intense heat. The varieties of these consisting of 
Granite, Syenite, Greenstone, Serpentine, Porphyry, Quartz, Felspar, Basalt, 
Jasper, Chalcedony, &c., are so numerous, that a collection might be formed by 
any mineralogist, as has often been remarked, from a single gravel-bed— e.g. y 
that of Kempsey, and very beautiful specimens of Chalcedony are often found. 
But in addition to these, though less numerous, are pebbles derived from the 
“ Silurian” and secondary formations, with their attendant fossils, and masses of 
Breccia are by no means uncommon, with Ochre, and Bed Sandstone. Dispersed 
over the top of the beds, Gryphites and other battered shells belonging to the Lias 
are often found; but Flints are rare, and Chalk is entirely absent. Neither are 
there any fragments of more recent deposits than the cretaceous. Nothing 
appears among the materials of this gravel from which the presence or vicinity 
of Man or any of his labours can be inferred, as would undoubtedly be the case 
among ordinary river gravel of the present day. 
I am not here called upon to give any opinion as to the date or extent of the 
historical deluge recorded by Moses. Naturalists were formerly anxious to make 
this gravel a silent momento of that great disturbance, but they have gradually 
retreated from the defence of such an untenable hypothesis; and, wherever else 
the inquirer may search for its traces, it appears to me that there are no per¬ 
ceptible vestiges of it here. But the veracity of Moses is not at all involved in 
this. The time is past when the regions of scientific inquiry are to be strictly 
preserved from the incursions of all whose eyes are not bandaged with the Jewish 
phylacteries ; for I have long been of opinion that it is about as reasonable for an 
Egyptian traveller of the present day to expect to find traces of the granaries of 
the patriarch Joseph in that country, as it is to insist upon the geologist’s turning 
* “ Rocks are divided into Hydrogenous, or of watery origin, and^Pyrogenous, or originating from 
heat.”— Professor Phillips’s Guide to Geology. The old Wernerian theory that all rocks have 
been deposited from a sedimentary fluid, is now universally abandoned. 
