DILUVIAL GRAVEL AND ANIMALS IN DORSET AND DEVON. 247 
filled these valleys, such as chalk, sand, clay, and marl, having been 
floated off, and drifted far into the mid-channel or the ocean, by the 
violence of the diluvial waters. 
The quantity of diluvian gravel which remains lodged upon the 
slopes, and in the lower regions of the valleys that intersect this 
coast, is very considerable; but it is not probable that many animal 
remains will be discovered in it, because the large proportion of clay 
with which it usually is mixed renders it less fit for roads than the 
shattered chert strata of the adjacent hills, and consequently gravel- 
pits are seldom worked in the diluvium. Enough, however, has been 
done to identify its animal remains with those of the diluvian gravel 
of other parts of England, by the discovery of several large tusks of 
elephant, and teeth of rhinoceros, in the valleys of Lyme and Char- 
mouth. 
On the highest parts of Blackdown, and on the insulated summits 
which surround the Vale of Charmouth, I have found abundantly 
pebbles of opaque white quartz, which must have been drifted thither 
from some distant primitive or transition country, and carried to their 
actual place, before the present valleys were excavated, and the steep 
escarpments formed, by which these high table-lands are now on 
every side surrounded. These cases are precisely of the same nature 
with those of the blocks of granite that lie on the mountains of the 
Jura, and on the plains of the north of Germany and Russia, and 
with that of the quartzose pebbles found on the tops of the hills 
the pebbles of the Chesil Bank near Abbotsbury: it was rounded to the shape of a peb - 
ble and must have been washed up not long since from the diluvium above alluded to 
which lies at the bottom of the sea, undisturbed, except by extraordinary storms. Had 
the tooth been many years exposed to the waves on the Chesil Bank, it must have been 
totally destroyed; and the position of the bank will hardly allow us to suppose ,t to 
have been derived from any bed of diluvium on the land side of it. 
