Page:Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London, vol. 26.djvu/909

 in a pond, and it appears to rest directly on the Boulder-clay, in the sluice bank. A little south, at the foot of the embankment, on the shore, a thin seam of peat, resting on about 16 inches of grey clay, is seen lying on the Boulder-clay. The surface of the peat, between high- and low-water mark, is planted, so to speak, at every 20 yards, with a double row of young saplings, apparently hazels, about 3 feet apart, running in parallels diagonally to the shore in a north-west and south-east direction. Their roots are in the grey clay ; but there is some reason to believe that they were planted at a comparatively late date, as I was able to trace the " grey clay" in question to an horizon above that of the thick peat, which has so great a development on either side of the sea-bank.

From the end of the bank to the river Dee, at Hoylake, the coast is bordered by sand hills, occupying a tract about half a mile in breadth, and through which the Hoylake and Birkenhead Railway is built. Beneath the sand dunes at Dove Marks (fig. 3), east of Hoylake, the following succession of beds occurs : —

feet. 1. Bithinia-tentaculata sand 2-4 2. Peat. This bed occasionally appears to have formed a cultivated surface before the deposition of the sand 1 3. Tellina-balthica sand, with seams of bluish clay. This is apparently the seam in which Mr. Ecroyd Smith has recorded the presence of Saxon and Roman coins 2 4. Peat. The representative of the thick peat of Lancashire and Cheshire 3 5. Bluish -grey clay, the upper portion of freshwater origin 3 " " the lower of marine, and containing Scrobicularioe 1 6. Peat, with a few stumps of trees with their roots in 1-1/2 7. Boulder-clay. From half-tide to the lowest water-mark.

In the lowest/peat (6) no historical or natural remains have, I believe, ever been found ; but some of the flint weapons in the Liverpool Museum are believed to have come out of this seam, others from the base of the peat above. In addition to the flint weapons, Mr. Ecroyd Smith * believes it to contain bones of Bos primigenius and Megaceros hibernicus, and of Cetacea ; but these bones, I think, possibly are those that were found in the blue silt resting on a peat-bed with a forest on its surface, in excavating Wallasey Pool for docks in 1858, and which have been described by Mr. T. J. Moore in the ' Lancashire Historic Society's Transactions.' In this case they are more probably of the age of the Tellina-balthica sand, as the peat in Wallasey Pool no doubt belongs to the main or thick peat of the district, which, near the Birket, attains a thickness of nearly 20 feet. In this peat bones of horses, oxen, and deer have been found, as well as great numbers of Roman and Saxon coins, and in one portion arrowheads of stone, shell, and flint. The latter substance must have been brought to the spot, either from southern counties or from eastern Yorkshire. Great numbers of coins of all ages are constantly being

Morton's ' Geology of Liverpool,' p. 49 ; ' Proc. of Hist. Soc. of Lancashire and Cheshire ' for various years.
 * ' Reliquary,' April 1865 ; also, Rev. A. Hume, LL.D., in ' Ancient Meols ;'