Page:Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London, vol. 35.djvu/807

Rh silty gravels bones and shells occur. Mr. Keeping carried his work a few feet further north beyond where the "coprolite-bed" runs out, and the base of the silt has there begun to rise.

There is another smaller coprolite-pit, not yet quite filled up, lying a few yards to the south-west of the present one. It exhibits a little similar stony and gravelly silt, but in patches only, and not in situ as deposited, but forming pockets of "trail" with festoon-like arrangement and the axes of the pebbles not horizontal. Those remnants still existing in the "trail" in this southern pit, as well as the manner in which the deposit occurs in the first pit, show that the gravel is a portion of a more extended mass, of which the upper parts have been denuded away.

[Since this paper was read a similar deposit, equally rich in bones, was laid open for a short time half a mile further up the valley, opposite to the blacksmith's shop on the Green.]

The materials of which the bone-bearing deposit consists are peculiar. The matrix is a grey sand with a slight admixture of clay. The pebbles consist of flint in subangular pieces of no great size, sometimes ochreous, sometimes grey, sometimes black. These are not rounded, but have their surfaces worn, polished, and the angles rubbed off. There are rolled lumps of chalk-marl and a considerable admixture of "coprolites," as might be expected, seeing that the coprolite-bed is abraded by the deposit itself. The remaining pebbles are well-rounded pieces of crystalline rocks, consisting of quartz, quartzite, syenite, jasper, and trap. These old rocks contribute a large part of the pebbles, so that the material cannot be called a flint-gravel, in that it appears to consist of the least destructible parts of the Boulder-clay, mixed with materials from the Chalk-Marl and Greensand.

There are splinters of bone worn smooth at their fractured edges; but most of the bones and teeth are scarcely abraded at all, though not often associated. There seems, however, to be reason to think that portions of the same individuals have also occurred in proximity, although mixed up with fragments of others. Thus one might find,