Page:A Treatise on Geology, volume 1.djvu/316

 300, and almost total want of laminar or stratified structure, in its mass: pebbles, and fragments of rock, of all sizes, of different nature, and from different regions, lie mixed indiscriminately in clay many yards in thickness; which seems clearly to prove that the whole was rapidly accumulated, and that the particles had not time to be arranged according to magnitude or specific gravity, but were heaped confusedly together by a force of extraordinary intensity and short duration.

Local Gravel. per Diluvium. Similar explanations seem applicable to the pebbly clays of Lincolnshire, Huntingdonshire, and Northamptonshire, &c.; and to the whole track of the diluvium from the lake mountains through Lancashire. Cheshire, Staffordshire, &c.

Many parts of England are almost totally free from the accumulation of proper diluvium,—as the Yorkshire coal-field, the Wealden denudation, large tracts in North Wales, the vicinity of Bath, &c. But these districts contain abundance of local gravel deposits, which sometimes appear to be quite as ancient as the diluvium, and may justly be styled "ancient alluvium;" for their aggregation seems not, in general, to require the supposition of watery agencies flowing in other than the directions of actual streams and inundations. Much of