DIAGRAM TO ILLUSTRATE THE GENERAL SUCCESSION OF THE STRATA IN THE NORFOLK CLIFFS, A Site of Cromer Jetty. 1 Upper chalk with flints in regular stratification. 2 Norwich Crag, rising from low water at Cromer, to 3 'Forest Bed,' with stumps of trees in situ and re- 3' Fluvio-marine series. At Cromer and eastward, with abundant lignite beds and mammalian re mains, and with cones of the Scotch and spruce 5 Contorted drift. 213 214 SECTION OF NORFOLK CLIFFS. CHAP. XII. This buried forest has been traced for more than forty miles, being exposed at certain seasons and states of the beach between high and low water mark. It extends from Cromer to near Kessingland, and consists of the stumps of numerous trees standing erect, with their roots attached to them, and penetrating in all directions into the loam or ancient vegetable soil on which they grew. They mark the site of a forest which existed there for a long time, since, besides the erect trunks of trees, some of them two and three feet in diameter, there is a vast accumulation of vegetable matter in the immediately overlying clays. Thirty years ago, when I first examined this bed, I saw many trees, with their roots in the old soil, laid open at the base of the cliff near Happisburgh; and long before my visit, other observers, and among them the late Mr. J. C. Taylor, had noticed the buried forest. Of late years it has been repeatedly seen at many points by Mr. Gunn, and, after the great storms of the autumn of 1861, by Mr. King. In order to expose the stumps to view, a vast. body of sand and shingle must be cleared away by the force of the waves. As the sea is always gaining on the land, new sets of trees are brought to light from time to time, so that the breadth as well as length of the area of ancient forest land seems to have been considerable. Next above No. 2, we find a series of sands and clays with lignite (No. 3′), sometimes ten feet thick, and containing alternations of fluviatile and marine strata, implying that the old forest land, which may at first have been considerably elevated above the level of the sea, had sunk down to as to be occasionally overflowed by a river, and at other times by the salt waters of an estuary. There were probably several oscillations of level which assisted in bringing about these changes, during which trees were often uprooted and laid prostrate, giving rise to layers of lignite. Occasionally marshes were formed and peaty matter accumu CHAP. XII. FOREST BED OF NORFOLK CLIFFS. 215 lated, after which salt water again predominated, so that species of Mytilus, Mya, Leda, and other marine genera, lived in the same area where the Unio, Cyclas, and Paludina had flourished for a time. That the marine shells lived and died on the spot, and were not thrown up by the waves during a storm, is proved, as Mr. King has remarked, by the fact that at West Runton, NW. of Cromer, the Mya truncata and Leda myalis are found with both valves united and erect in the loam, all with their posterior or siphuncular extremities uppermost. This attitude affords as good evidence to the conchologist that those mollusca lived and died on the spot as the upright position of the trees proves to the botanist that there was a forest over the chalk east of Cromer. Between the stumps of the buried forest, and in the lignite above them, are many well-preserved cones of the Scotch and spruce firs, Pinus sylvestris, and Pinus Abies. The specific names of these fossils were determined for me in 1840, by a botanist of no less authority than the late Robert Brown; and Professor Heer has lately examined a large collection from the same stratum, and recognised among the cones of the spruce some which had only the central part or axis remaining, the rest having been bitten off, precisely in the same manner as when in our woods the squirrel has been feeding on the seeds. There is also in the forest-bed a great quantity of resin in lumps, resembling that gathered for use, according to Professor Heer, in Switzerland, from beneath spruce firs. The following is a list of some of the plants which were collected by the Rev. S. W. King, in 1861, from the forest bed, and named by Professor Heer: The insects, so far as they are known, including several species of Donacea, are, like the plants and freshwater shells, of living species. It may be remarked, however, that the Scotch fir has been confined in historical times to the northern parts of the British isles, and the spruce fir is nowhere indigenous in Great Britain. The other plants are such as might now be found in Norfolk, and many of them indicate fenny or marshy ground. When we consider the familiar aspect of the flora, the accompanying mammalia are certainly most extraordinary. There are no less than two elephants, a rhinoceros and hippopotamus, a large extinct beaver, and several large estuarian and marine mammalia, such as the walrus, the narwhal, and the whale. The following is a list of some of the species of which the bones have been collected by Messrs. Gunn and King. The first four have been named by Dr. Falconer: Mammalia of the Forest and Lignite Beds below the Glacial Drift of the Norfolk Cliffs. Elephas meridionalis. Elephas primigenius. Elephas antiquus. Rhinoceros etruscus. Narwhal, walrus, and large whale, or Balaenoptera ? Mr. Gunn informs me that two large whales were found in the fluvio-marine beds at Bacton, and that the vertebræ of one of them, shown to Professor Owen, were said by him to imply that the animal was sixty feet long. A narwhal's tusk was discovered by Mr. King near Cromer, and the remains of a walrus. No less than three species of elephant, as determined by Dr. Falconer, have been obtained from the strata 3 and 3', of which, according to Mr. King, E. meridionalis is the most common, the mammoth next in abundance, and the third, E. antiquus, comparatively rare. The freshwater shells accompanying the fossil quadrupeds, above enumerated, are such as now inhabit rivers and ponds in England; but among them, as at Runton, between the 'forest bed' and the glacial deposits, a remarkable variety of the Cyclas amnica occurs, fig. 28, p. 218, identical with that which accompanies the Elephas antiquus at Ilford and Grays in the valley of the Thames. All the freshwater shells of the beds intervening between the forest-bed No. 3, and the glacial formation 4, fig. 27, are of recent species. As to the small number of marine shells occurring in the same fluvio-marine series, I have seen none which belonged to extinct species, although one or two have been cited by authors. I am in doubt, therefore, whether to class the forest bed and overlying strata as post |