78 On the Sand-Pit at High Ongar, Essex. 
I therefore still believe the sand in question to be what I 
represented it; and as I suspect that its low position is due 
to a state of things not yet realised by geologists, though 
brought to their attention by me nearly twenty years ago, 
I venture to bring the subject to the attention of the Essex 
Field Club ; because, if my view of the case be correct, the 
position of the water-bearing sands beneath the London Clay 
in the neighbourhood of Ongar must be affected by it; and 
because the case is, I think, probably a part of the same 
problem which has received so important an illustration by 
the features disclosed in the boring at Wickham Bishop, 
which are described by Mr. Dalton in the ‘ Transactions ’ of 
the Club for 1881; the (to all but myself) unexpected results 
of which boring have caused the waste of a large sum of 
money by the county ratepayers of Essex. 
In a paper in the * Philosophical Magazme ’ for the year 
1864, 4 1 endeavoured to show that the entire system of hill 
and vale, over that part of England which lies east of a line 
drawn from the Bristol Channel to Flamborough Head, has 
arisen from a horizontal displacement of the formations 
ranging from the Jurassic to the Eocene inclusive, which 
was caused by two groups of movements; one of which, 
being the earliest, produced curvilinear contours spreading 
outwards from three centres where the elastic force giving 
rise to the feature rose from beneath; and the other of 
which, being the later, produced rectilinear upthrows from 
east to west, but was confined to the South of England. 
The centres from which, by a radiating lateral thrust, these 
curvilinear contours originated lie—one near Canterbury, 
another near the western extremity of the Isle of Wight, and 
the third in what is now the North Sea; and in the map to 
the paper I showed how the two latter meeting each other 
from opposite directions produced contours which crossed 
those emanating from the Canterbury centre, the result of 
this crossing being the valley system of East Anglia ; and in 
illustration of the effect of this crossing I pointed out that 
certain angles in the stream of the Thames thus caused were 
4 ‘ Philosophical Magazine,’ ser. 4, vol. xxvii., p. 180 (March, 1864). 
