Tertiary Deposits of the Sussex Coast," brought before the Society in 1857[1], called attention to the fact that a layer of glacial clay with erratics, some of very large size, was to be seen in the low and broken line of cliffs extending from Pagham Harbour on the east, past the little village of Selsea, to Bracklesham on the west, and that this rested on a deposit of estuarine mud, below which were lenticular patches of red ferruginous gravel lying on the eroded surface of the Eocene strata. In "the mud-bed," from time to time, many bones and teeth of elephant, found in juxtaposition, prove that whole carcasses had decayed in this spot. These were originally assigned to the mammoth; but on subsequent examination by Dr. Falconer they turned out to belong to his new species, the narrow- toothed, straight-tusked Elephas antiquus. Although the mammoth has been quoted from this horizon in 1870[2] by Mr. Godwin-Austen, and in 1878 by the editors of the new edition of Dixon's 'Geology of Sussex,' I am unable to obtain any further evidence on the point, and it is very probable that the species is not the mammoth, but the Elephas antiquus.
Whatever doubts may be thrown on the occurrence of the mammoth in Preglacial strata at Selsea, its presence in Hertfordshire before the period of the Boulder-clay was proved in 1858[3] by the discovery, by Prof. Prestwich, of a tooth and tusk in a bed of gravel underneath the Boulder-clay of Bricket Wood in the railway-cutting between Watford and St. Albans. The animal, therefore, was living within the area of the London Basin before it was submerged beneath the sea, on which the icebergs were carried as far south as the line of the Thames, or, in other words, before the time when the drift of icebergs in Britain arrived at its maximum extension to the south. In this sense, then, it may be said to be Preglacial in the South of England.
3. The Mammoth Preglacial in Scotland.
Several cases of the discovery of its remains in the Boulder-clays and subjacent deposits render it very probable that it was also an inhabitant of Scotland in Preglacial times. Nine or ten tusks and a molar tooth have been discovered from time to time, in a peaty clay underneath the "till," at Woodhill quarry[4], Kilmaurs, Ayrshire, along with the antlers of reindeer, and various insects and freshwater plants (pond-weed and ranunculus), under conditions shown in the following section (fig. 1). From their position below the Boulder-clay these remains are considered by Dr. Bryce, from whose paper the above section is borrowed, as well as by Mr. Young, to be preglacial. Dr. James Geikie, however, refers this stratum of Boulder-clay to the later[5] of the two Scotch Boulder-clays, and
- ↑ Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc. (1857), xiii. p. 50.
- ↑ Ibid. (1871), xxvii. p. 26.
- ↑ Geologist, 1858, p. 268.
- ↑ Dr. Bryce, Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc. xxi. p. 213; Mr. J. Young, 'The Antiquity of Man,' p. 292 (last edit.); Prof. Archibald Geikie, "Phen. of Glacial Drift of Scotland," Trans. Geol. Soc. Glasgow, i. part ii.
- ↑ Dr. James Geikie, 'Ice Age,' 2nd edit. p. 160.
