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It is supposed to be of chemical origin, each spherule being an aggregation of particles round a central nucleus. The oolite system is largely developed in England, France, Westphalia, and Northern Italy; it appears in Northern India and Africa, and patches of it exist in Scotland, and in the vale of the Mississippi. It may of course be yet discovered in many other parts of the world.
Now we have laid in as much fruit as is safe for you, and away we go. Oh, what high hills over the town! And what beautiful stone houses! Even the cottages are built of stone. All that stone comes out of those high hills, into which we are going now. It is called Bath-stone freestone, or oolite; and it lies on the top of the lias, which we have just left. Here it is marked F.
Lias, a set of strata variously composed of limestone, clay, marl, and shale, clay being predominant; 2. Lower oolitic formation, including, besides the great oolite bed of central England, fullers' earth beds, forest marble, and cornbrash; 3. Middle oolitic formation, composed of two sub-groups, the Oxford clay and coral rag, the latter being a mere layer of the works of the coral polype; 4.
The coralline limestone, or "Coral Rag," above described, and the accompanying sandy beds, called "calcareous grits," of the Middle Oolite, rest on a thick bed of clay, called the "Oxford Clay," sometimes not less than 600 feet thick. These were discovered in the cuttings of the Great Western Railway, near Chippenham, in 1841, and have been described by Mr.
The tests indicated that it consisted of shale of the lower oolite, and the works were let accordingly.
The county abounds in ironstone, which is contained in the sandstone beds of the Forest ridge, lying between the chalk and oolite of the district, called by geologists the Hastings sand. The beds run in a north-westerly direction, by Ashburnham and Heathfield, to Crowborough and thereabouts. In early times the region was covered with wood, and was known as the Great Forest of Anderida.
These zoological results are curious and unexpected, since it was imagined that we might look in vain for the carnivorous trachelipods in rocks of such high antiquity as the Great Oolite, and it was a received doctrine that they did not begin to appear in considerable numbers till the Eocene period, when those two great families of cephalopoda, the ammonites and belemnites, and a great number of other representatives of the same class of chambered shells, had become extinct.
Rows of little houses, some of them mere huts, were built against the side of the rock under the shelter of huge masses of oolite or lias projecting like the stories of mediaeval dwellings. People climbed to their habitations, like goats, up very steep paths winding amongst the rocks. The overleaning walls were blackened to a great height by the smoke from the chimneys.
Tertiary. 2. Chalk and Gault. 3. They are also found occupying the same relative position below the chalk in the peninsula of Purbeck, Dorsetshire, where, as we shall see in the sequel, they repose on strata referable to the Upper Oolite.
But these wall cases are mainly devoted to the exhibition of chelonian, or tortoise fossils, which are the highest class of fossil reptiles, except the serpents, and found only in the later or oolite formations of the earth. The regularity with which the various families of reptiles are discovered in the earth's strata, according to their order, is remarkable.
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