6‘2 
LOCAL OCCURRENCES IN NATURAL HISTORY. 
Pear-trees loaded with their green bunches, contrasted with the autumnal scarlet 
of their foliage, and the splendour of the Apple-orchards— 
“ red as evening sky”—* 
while, to diversify the scene, the silvery Willows dance their foliage bright with 
argent pubescence above the green softly-stealing waters of the Teme, as they 
wind on to the embrace of the Severn, can hardly fail to acknowledge the cor¬ 
rectness of the expression. But the naturalist who catches a glimpse of the 
44 solemnly vast” steeps of Malvern, bounding the vale as with a great backbone, 
will be excited to examine the landscape with other views than those of the lover 
of romantic scenery. He sees the protruding bones of his parent earth, and as 
the rolling vapours veil them in the sombre gloom, he considers in idea the period 
when some eruptive force heaved them up in air, fracturing previously-deposited 
strata, amidst convulsive uproar, and the turmoil of the retiring and baffled 
ocean, with deep curiosity, and is stimulated by the vastness of the apparent 
catastrophe, to an untiring attention to the phenomena before him. 
Any eminence in the immediate vicinity of Worcester, up the course of the 
Severn to Areley, on the borders of Bewdley Forest, or down its stream to 
Deerhurst, below Tewkesbury—within which points I purpose confining myself 
—offers to view in the landscape round many points of high geological interest. 
The Severn taking its course almost entirely through the New Bed Sandstone, 
displays the singular brick-red colour of that formation wherever a precipitous 
cliff is uncovered by the action of the currents; but this bareness of exposure is 
invariably softened by the festooning thickets that invest the summits of these 
natural prsetoria. In the mid-landscape the protuberant hills of the Old Storrage, 
Ankercline, Woodbury and Abberley, mark the belt of Limestone and Con¬ 
glomerate that, under the recent name of the 44 Silurian System,”f passes across 
the country obliquely from N.E. to S.W.; beyond this, to the westward, peer 
the Old-Bed-Sandstone hills of Herefordshire, while in the north-west the 
majestic twin Clees of Salop, crowned with their Basaltic 44 Giant’s Chair,” point 
out the Coal formation in that quarter, and in connection with the Quartzose 
ramparts of the Steiper Stones, and the rugged Acropoli of Caer Caradoc and the 
Wrekin, suggest topics for important and curious reflection. Turning eastward 
(though out of the scope of my particular scrutiny), the Oolitic outlyer of Bredon 
Hill forms a fine feature in the scenery, sloping gently down from its escarpment 
in an inclined plane towards the Cotswold ridge, from which it seems to have 
been separated; while from its base a curvilinear belt of gentle eminences, 
* Chatterton. 
+ An appellation given by Mr. Murchison from the ancient British tribe of the Silures, through 
whose country these rocks take their course. 
