Abstract
III. WE have in the series of beds, the aspect and formation of which I have endeavoured to describe, a total thickness of perhaps somewhere about 1,000 feet. We read in Lyell's “Geology” and other works that river and delta deposits are accumulated with comparatively great rapidity, as in the case of the Rhone delta above Geneva, which has advanced one-and-a-half miles in htstorical times. Throughout the Bournemouth district we have in the great and sudden deposits of coarse grit evidence of quick deposition. We also find leaves folded over with half an inch of sediment between the folds, and leaves sun-cracked and divided with that or more difference in level between the segments, which also shows extreme rapidity of deposition; and although we have proof that we in some cases see the actual soil in which some of the smaller plants grew, still penetrated by their roots, there is no evidence of its having been long occupied, or that it indicates more than a rapid fern growth between recurring floods. We have further, in the fine state of preservation of some of the leaves, which have been doubtless buried before decay set in, and in the breaking up and redeposition of beds, evidence of rapid accumulation; yet we must not hastily conclude that the time required for the formation of these deposits was, even geologically speaking, short. We over and over again see beds, one above another, which have been cut through and carried away after they had become consolidated, that is, after the muds had become so hard that they have resisted the dissolving power of water and been rolled and redeposited as pebbles and boulders.
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The Tropical Forests of Hampshire 1 . Nature 15, 279–281 (1877). https://doi.org/10.1038/015279a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/015279a0