GEOLOGY
to be 150 feet thick. Mr. W. J. Harrison thinks this loamy deposit was laid down in an old ice-dammed lake.[1]
The soft rocks of Warwickshire are not such as would receive or retain ice scratches during the glaciation; but a few cases have been recorded of a crumpling and disturbance of the surface beds probably by the passage of the ice. At Small Heath near Birmingham an exposure of the Keuper Marls showed evidence of the passage of a heavy body over the surface; streaks of red marl had been torn off and embedded in the superjacent drift, and the uppermost beds of the marl were puckered and bent.[2] Again, according to Mr. A. H. Atkins,[3] at Garrison Lane near Birmingham 20 feet of tenacious clay, probably drift, rests on an indurated, smoothed and polished surface of the Keuper Marl.
The late Dr. Crosskey[4] described a section between Key Hill and Hockley Hill in Birmingham where boulder clay rested on Triassic sandstone which had been greatly broken and disturbed and large fragments of it torn off and embedded in the drift. Mr. C. J. Woodward has described disturbances known as 'swilleys,' and possibly glacial, in the Lias at Binton and Grafton,[5] and a smoothing and polishing of the 'Permian' sandstone under the drift near Coventry has been recorded by Mr. F. T. Maidwell.[6]
As the climate of the country gradually ameliorated the ice melted and gave rise to much flood water, which redistributed much of the older drift and laid it down along the bottoms of the valleys; subsequent erosion by the river has removed much of the infilling and left only strips along the sides in the form of river terraces. It is in these old gravels, sands and loams that the remains of early man and the animals with which he was associated first appear. This fluviatile drift of the Avon valley as already noted (p. 25) has yielded teeth of the elephant at Shottery, and at Newnham near Church Lawford west of Rugby were found in 1815 two skulls and other bones of rhinoceros, tusks and teeth of elephant, and horns and bones of stag and ox, at 15 feet from the surface, in clayey gravel.[7] According to Professor Boyd Dawkins[8] the mammalia from the freshwater deposits of the Avon valley include wolf, hyæna, reindeer, stag, bison, hippopotamus, boar, horse, rhinoceros, elephant and mammoth.
But undoubtedly the most interesting discovery from our present point of view is that of quartzite implements found in 1890 by Mr. J. Landon in the old gravels of the Rea valley at Saltley near Birmingham. They have been noted (and one is figured) by Sir John Evans.[9] The
- ↑ Harrison, Proc. Geol. Assoc. xv. (1898), 400.
- ↑ W. J. Harrison, Proc. Birm. Phil. Soc. iii. (1882), 157.
- ↑ Mid. Nat. (1883), p. 230; also Rep. Birm. Nat. Hist. and Mic. Soc. (1883), p. 1.
- ↑ Proc. Birm. Phil. Soc. (1882), p. 209.
- ↑ Proc. Birm. Nat. Hist. and Mic. Soc. (1870), p. 63.
- ↑ Proc. Warw. Nat. and Arch. field Club (1895), p. 47.
- ↑ Buckland, Reliquiæ Diluvianæ, ed. 2 (1824), pp. 176, 177.
- ↑ Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc. xxv. (1869), 192.
- ↑ Ancient Stone Implements, ed. 2 (1897), pp. 578–81, and fig. 450A.
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