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Lower Neocomian Lower part of Speeton clay: Part of Wealden beds of Kent, Surrey, Sussex, Hants, and Dorset. In Western France, the Alps, the Carpathians, Northern Italy, and the Apennines, an extensive series of rocks has been described by Continental geologists under the name of Tithonian.
Its limits and its very existence as a separate shire were predetermined for it by the shape and consistence of the mud or sand which gathered at the bottom of the great Wealden lake, or filled up the hollows of the old inland cretaceous sea.
To European reptiles, the American formation adds a gigantic one, styled the saurodon, from the lizard-like character of its teeth. We have seen that footsteps of birds are considered to have been discovered in America, in the new red sandstone. Some similar isolated phenomena occur in the subsequent formations. Mr. Mantell discovered some bones of birds, apparently waders, in the Wealden.
There, too, in another window are the arms of Castile and of Leon, a strange blazon to find in the Weald of Kent. But characteristic as Great Chart, Bethersden and High Halden are of this strange wealden county, they do not express it, sum it up and dominate it as does Tenterden Town, some two or three miles to the south of High Halden.
But by the Wealden period, the English Channel and the Eastern half of England had been considerably elevated above the level of the sea.
But they went on all that day, mile after mile, through wood and thicket, until at last they came to the chalkland, open grass with rare woods of beech, and the birch growing near water, and they saw the Wealden mountains nearer, and groups of horses grazing together. They went circumspectly, keeping always near thicket and cover, for this was a strange region even its ways were strange.
Goudhurst church-tower, finely located on one of the highest hills of the Wealden region, gives a grand view on all sides, especially to the southward over Mr. Beresford Hope's seat at Bedgebury Park. In this old church of St. Mary are buried the Bedgeburys and the Colepeppers.
It had ribs like a chameleon, and the body of a whale: it chiefly inhabited the water; but as the visitor will find the chief types of these extraordinary extinct reptiles in the next room, he may at once, with the comfortable assurance that the Weald of Kent yields nothing in the present day like the wealden lizard, turn to the table cases of the room, in which he-will find further varieties of
Of the vegetation of such islands we have scarcely any indication, but it consisted partly of cycadaceous plants; for a fragment of one of these was found by Captain Ibbetson in the Chalk Marl of the Isle of Wight, and is referred by A. Brongniart to Clathraria Lyellii, Mantell, a species common to the antecedent Wealden period.
The action of fresh water on the gently inclined Wealden district, when upraised, could hardly have been great, but it would somewhat reduce the above estimate.
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