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As a rule, if you ask a geologist for a definite date, you will find him very chary of giving you a distinct answer. He knows that the chalk is older than the London clay, and the oolite than the chalk, and the red marl than the oolite; and he knows also that each of them took a very long time indeed to lay down, but exactly how long he has no notion.
But as some Cretaceous and even Tertiary rocks have been raised to the height of more than 9000 feet in the Pyrenees, we must not assume that plutonic formations of the same periods may not have been brought up and exposed by denudation, at the height of 2000 or 3000 feet on the flanks of that chain. Junction of granite with Jurassic or Oolite strata in the Alps, near Champoleon.
No feathered creatures so closely approach the lizard-tailed birds of the oolite or the toothed birds of the cretaceous period as do these Australian and New Zealand emus and apteryxes.
These rocks occupy in England a zone nearly thirty miles in average breadth, which extends across the island, from Yorkshire in the north-east, to Dorsetshire in the south-west. Their mineral characters are not uniform throughout this region; but the following are the names of the principal subdivisions observed in the central and south- eastern parts of England. UPPER OOLITE: a. Purbeck beds. b.
Wide valleys can usually be traced throughout the long bands of country where the argillaceous strata crop out; and between these valleys the limestones are observed, forming ranges of hills or more elevated grounds. These ranges terminate abruptly on the side on which the several clays rise up from beneath the calcareous strata. Clay. Upper Oolite.
Rippled slabs of fissile oolite are used for roofing, and have been traced over a broad band of country from Bradford in Wilts, to Tetbury in Gloucestershire.
Stonesfield Slate. Fossil Mammalia. Fuller's Earth. Inferior Oolite and Fossils. Northamptonshire Slates. Yorkshire Oolitic Coal-field. Brora Coal. Palaeontological Relations of the several Subdivisions of the Oolitic group.
So David kept to the seaward side, where the land was higher, and where he could see the roll of a spent gale swinging round Vatternish toward the red, rent bastions of Skye, and hear its thunder amid the purple caves of the basalt and the whitened tiers of the oölite, silencing all meaner sounds.
Between the Great and Inferior Oolite near Bath, an argillaceous deposit, called "the fuller's earth," occurs; but it is wanting in the north of England. The number of mollusca known in this deposit is about seventy; namely, fifty Lamellibranchiate Bivalves, ten Brachiopods, three Gasteropods, and seven or eight Cephalopods.
There are three shades of brick a bright red, a dull or Indian red, and a shade between the two; slate from a neighboring quarry gives a dark bluish gray; an oolite supplies the warmer buff; and a fine white composition resembling limestone is used for the center points and borders. In addition, the outside border is formed with tesseræ of rather larger size of a sage green limestone.
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