Abstract
II. ONE of the arguments usually relied upon in support of the belief in fluviatile, as opposed to diluvial, agency in the formation of the deposits in which the Stone Implements are found, is founded on the assumption that the constituents of these quaternary gravels are petrologically such, and only such, as belong to existing river basins; and this fact, Mr. Evans says, holds good in France and England, and cannot be too often reiterated. Without pausing to consider how far this argument might avail as against those who, like Dr. Buckland, believe in a simultaneous and universal cataclysm, it seems hardly applicable to the conditions under which the implement-bearing drifts are found; for if the term petrological is to be understood as meaning rocks found in situ in the river basins, and thus native to the soil, then it is not the fact that the constituents of the gravels in question belong to those basins; for we know that they are often largely made up—in one instance cited by Mr. Evans to the extent of 50 per cent.—of the quartzose stones known as Lickey pebbles, and rounded fragments of jasper, quartz, and other foreign rocks. Such rocks certainly do not belong petrologically, in the proper sense of that term, to the river basins in which they occur, but to strata of a far earlier date. As Dr. Buck-land has shown, the quartzite pebbles are derived from the New Red sandstone beds in Warwickshire and Leicestershire, and w,ere at some remote period forced over the escarpment of the Oolite into the south and east of England. Whether they were brought in before or after the present river valleys were formed is not very clear, nor perhaps very material. It is incontestable that they were transported from a great distance, and possibly by the same forces that brought the flint gravels; and it is equally certain, in several instances, that their transport cannot be attributed to rivers now in action, because those rivers flow, as at Brandon, towards the quarter from which the stones were brought.
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Evans's Stone Implements of Great Britain* . Nature 6, 225–227 (1872). https://doi.org/10.1038/006225a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/006225a0