Notes on the Palæontology and some of the Physical Conditions of the Meux-Well Deposits

Abstract

T he various deep borings which have been put down at Crossness, Harwich, Kentish Town, and more recently at Meux's Brewery, in the Tottenham Court Road, have amply established the correctness of Mr. Godwin-Austen's deductions that a ridge of Palæozoic rocks passes under the Jurassic and Cretaceous beds of the south-east of England, the probability, if not the certainty, being that the rocks of which that ridge is formed are a continuation of those which skirt the South-Wales coal-basin, and which, in passing through Somersetshire, are continued in the Mendip range until lost under Secondary deposits near Frome. In the above districts I have previously pointed out that the representatives of some of the Secondary beds are found associated with the older rocks, under very peculiar conditions, through a line of country from east to west of about sixty miles. At one spot thin deposits or pockets of Inferior Oolite may be seen lying unconformably upon the highly inclined but planed down edges of the Carboniferous Limestone; at another, conglomerates of Liassic or Rhætic age of a few feet in thickness, some of them exhibiting shore-conditions, may be found filling depressions in the limestone or passing down its vein-fissures; and however thin these deposits may be, they can be recognized as distinct, and as representing on the sides or otherwise of the southern portion of the Palæozoic anticlinal the presence in the district of Rhætic, Liassic, and Oolitic formations. Perhaps the most interesting evidence of these peculiar physical conditions is seen