268 
NOTES ON ESSEX GEOLOGY. 
This is now alluded to because, although no classification of the 
Drift beds was given (either in the paper or elsewhere), I was 
disposed to regard those beds as belonging to the lower division 
of the Glacial Drift, that is as being older than what is generally 
known as the Great Chalky Boulder Clay. P. G. H. Boswell, 
however, as the result of much good work in the eastern counties, 
regards the various infillings of such channels (as at Sudbury 
and the opposite pait of Essex) as belonging rather to the Boulder 
Clay. 
I have never liked the name given to that clay : it is certainly 
great ; but, as far as I know, other Boulder Clays are just as 
chalky. As a rule adjectives are awkward things in geologic 
nomenclature, and I have generally been content to honour 
this particular clay as the Boulder Clay, leaving the various 
other and much smaller beds of like character in the position of 
poor relations, more or less without a local habitation or a name. 
Since this date further sections have given further proof 
of this channel. 
B. B. Woodward’s long paper on “ Pleistocene Non-marine 
Mollusca,” 4 deals with those from the Alluvium at the Royal 
Albert Dock, Tilbury Dock, and the Lea Valley at Walthamstow, 
and from the River-Drift at Grays, West Thurrock, and Ilford, 
with notes on some of the species and a full list. 
In his “ Notes on Pleistocene Sections in and near London ” 
W. J. Abbott describes a section 5 at West Thurrock (pp. 
476-478) which, however, is wrongly given as four miles west 
of Grays, being really less than three. It shows the Drift 
banked up against a chalk-cliff {not escarpment as it is termed). 
The precise site is not given ; but the author is not right in 
suggesting that no section (of the kind) so far west had been 
published : it may be that it is really the same as one of the 
two described in 1889 in the Geology of London, etc., vol. i, p. 
418, which work apparently the author had not seen. He gives 
more details, however. 
C. Reid’s monograph on the “ Pliocene Deposits,” 6 is of 
course chiefly concerned with other counties, Essex being 
specifically referred to only on pp. 82-85 and in most of the 
voluminous lists of fossils. Of the Upper Crag he says 
4 Proc. Geol. .4ssoc., Vol. xi., No. 8, p. 335, etc. 
5 Ibid., p. 473, etc. 
6 Geological Survey Memoir, pp. viii., 326, 5 plates. 
