picturesque broken range running east and west under the name of the Forest Ridges. This forms the main water-parting of the Weald, dividing the Vale of Sussex from the Vale of Kent, and was also the seat of the iron industry which was prosecuted by the Romans and probably earher, reached its highest importance in the 16th and 17th centuries, and was maintained even till the early years of the 19th century. The Andredesleah had an early historical interest as forming a physical barrier which kept the South Saxons isolated from other Saxon kingdoms. Descending from over sea upon the coastal district of Sussex, to which they gave name, towards the close of the 5th century, they populated it thickly, and maintained independence, in face of the accretions of the West Saxon kingdom, for upwards of a hundred years.
WEALDEN, in geology, a thick series of estuarine and freshwater
deposits of Lower Cretaceous age, which derives its name
from its development in the Weald of Kent and Sussex. In the
type area it is exposed by the denudation of a broad anticlinal
fold from which the higher Cretaceous beds have been removed.
The Wealden rocks he in the central part of this anticline between
the escarpments cf the North and South Downs; they extend
eastwards from the neighbourhood of Haslemere and Elland
Chapel to the west between Pevensey and Hythe. This formation
is divisible into two portions, the Weald Clay above and
the Hastings Sands below. The Weald Clay which occupies the
central, upland part of the area from Horsham to the sea coast
consists of dark brown and blue clays and shales, occasionally
mottled in the neighbourhood of sandy lenticles, which together
with calcareous sandstones, shelly limestones and nodular ironstones
take a subordinate place in the series. About Horsham
the Weald Clay is 1000 ft. thick, but it decreases in an eastward
direction; at Tunbridge it is only 600 ft. Certain subordinate
beds within the Weald Clay have received distinctive names.
" Horsham stone " is a calcareous flaggy sandstone, often ripple
marked, usually less than 5 ft. thick, which occurs at about 120 ft.
above the base of the Clay. " Sussex marble " is the name given
to more than one of the high limestone beds which are mainly
composed of a large form of Paladin (P. fluviorum); some of the
lower limestone layers contain a small species (P. sussexiensis).
The Sussex marble (proper) occurs about 100 ft. below the top
of the clays; it is the most important of the limestone bands,
and its thickness varies from 6 ft. to 2 in.; it is known also as
Bethersden marble, Petworth marble, Laughton stone, &c.
It has been widely used in the Weald district in church architecture
and for polished mantelpieces. The ironstones were
formerly smelted in the western part of the area.
The Hastings Sands are divisible into three main subdivisions: the Tunbridge Wells Sand, the Wadhurst Clay and the Ashdown Sand. Like the overlying Weald Clay this series thickens as a whole towards the west. In the west, the Tunbridge Wells Sand is separated into an upper.and lower division by the thickening of abed of clay—the Grinstead Clay—which in the east, about Rye, &c., is quite thin; at Cuckfield a second clay bed 15 ft. thick divides the upper division. The upper beds of the lower Tunbridge Wells Sand cause good landscapes around West Hoathly and near East Grinstead. The Wadhurst Clay is very constant in character; near the base it frequently contains clay-ironstone, which in former times was the main source of supply for the Wealden iron industry. Much of the higher portion of the Hastings Sand country is made of the Ashdown Sands, consisting of sand, soft sandstones and subordinate clay bends; in the east, however, clay is strongly developed at the base of this group, and at Fairlight is more than 360 ft. thick, while the sandy portion is only 150 ft. These clays with sandy layers are known as the Fairlight Clays. Beds of lignite are found in these beds, and a calcareous sandstone, called Tilgate stone, occurs near the top of the Ashdown Sands and in the Wadhurst Clay. The old town of Hastings is built on Ashdown Sand, but St Leonards is mainly on Tunbridge Wells Sand.
Wealden beds occur on the southern side of the Isle of Wight and in the Isle of Purbeck in Dorsetshire. The Wealden anticline can be traced across the Channel into the Bas Boulonnais. A separate Wealden area exists in north Germany between Brunswick and Bentheim, in the Ostervald and Teutoberger Wald, where the Deister Sandstone (150 ft.) corresponds to the Hastings Sands and the Wälderthon (70–100 ft.) to the Weald Clay. The former contains valuable coal beds, worked in the neighbourhood of Obernkirchen, &c., and a good building stone.
The fossils of the Wealden beds comprise freshwater shellfish, Unio, Paladin, Melanopsis, Cyrena; and estuarine and marine forms such as Ostrea, Exogyra and Mytilus. An interesting series of dinosaurs and pterodactyies has been obtained from the Wealden of England and the continent of Europe, of which Iguanodon is the best known—a large number of almost entire skeletons of this genus were discovered in some buried Cretaceous valleys at Bernissart in Belgium; other forms are Heterosuchus, Ornithocheirus, Ornithopsis, Cimoliosaurus and Titanosaurus. Among the plant remains are Chara, Bennettites, Equisitites, Fittonia, Sagenopteris and Thujites. The fishes, plants and reptiles of these formations possess a decidedly Jurassic aspect, and for this reason several authorities are in favour of retaining the Wealden rocks in that system, and the close relationship between this formation and the underlying Purbeckian, both in England and in Germany, tends to support this view.
See Cretaceous, Neocomian, Purbeckian; also W. Topley, " Geology of the Weald," Mem. Geol. Survey (London, 1875). (J. A. H.)
WEALTH, etymologically the condition of well-being, prosperity
in its widest sense.
The word does not appear in Old
English, but is a Middle English formation, welihe, on the O. Eng.
wela, well-being, from lucl, well, cognate with Dan. vcl, Ger.
wohl. The original meaning survives in the Prayer for the King's
Majesty of the English Bock of Common Prayer, " Grant him in
health and wealth long to live, " and in " commonwealth, "
i.e. good of the body politic, hence applied to the body politic itself.
In economics, wealth is most commonly defined as consisting of all useful and agreeable things which possess exchange value, and this again is generally regarded as coextensive with all desirable things except those which do not involve labour or sacrifice for their acquisition in the quantity desired. On analysis it will be evident that this definition implies, directly, preUminary conceptions of utility and value, and, indirectly, of sacrifice and labour, and these terms, familiar though they may appear, are by no means simple and obvious in their meaning. Utility, for the purposes of economic reasoning, is usuaUy held to mean the capacity to satisfy a desire or serve a purpose (J. S . Mill), and in this sense is clearly a much wider term than wealth. Sunshine and fresh air, good temper and pleasant manners, and all the infinite variety of means of gratification, material and immaterial, are covered by utility as thus defined. Wealth is thus a species of utility, and in order to separate it from other species some differentia must be found. This, according to the general definition, is exchange value, but a h'ttle reflection will show that in some cases it is necessary rather to contrast value with wealth.
"
Value, " says Ricardo, expanding
a thought of Adam Smith, " essentially differs from riches, for value depends not on abundance but on the difficulty or facility of production."
According to the weU-known tables ascribed to Gregory King (1648-1712), a deficiency of a small amount in the annual supply of com will raise its value far more than in proportion; but it would be paradoxical to argue that this rise in value indicated an increase in an important item of national wealth. Again, as the mines of a country are exhausted and its. natural resources otherwise impaired, a rise in the value of the remainder may take place, and as the free gifts of nature are appropriated they become valuable for exchange; but the country can hardly be said to be so much the wealthier in consequence. And these difficulties are rather increased than diminished if we substitute for value the more famUiar concrete term " money-price"— for the contrast between the quantity of wealth and its nominal value becomes more sharply marked. Suppose, for example, that in the total money value of the national inventory a dechne were observed to be in progress, whilst at the same time, as is quite possible, an increase was noticed in the quantity of all the important items and an improvernent in their quality, it would be in accordance with common sense to say that the wealth of the country was increasing and not decreasing.
So great are these difficulties that some economists (e.g. Ricardo) have proposed to take utility as the direct measure of wealth, and, as H. Sidgwick has pointed out, if double the quantity meant double the utility this would be an easy and natural procedure. But even to the same individual the increase in utility is by no means simply proportioned to the increase in quantity, and the utility of different commodities to different
