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Updated: May 12, 2025
Why the sandstone, which is really the bottom layer, should appear higher than the clay in these places, we shall see a little later. After the deposition of the gritty or muddy Wealden beds in the lake and embouchure of the old continental river, there came a second period of considerable depression, during which the whole of south-eastern England was once more covered by a shallow sea.
And as the structure of the limbs of several of the gigantic Ornithoscelida, such as Iguandon, leads to the conclusion that they also may have constantly, or occasionally, assumed the same attitude, a peculiar interest attaches to the fact that, in the Wealden strata of England, there are to be found gigantic footsteps, arranged in order like those of the Brontozoum, and which there can be no reasonable doubt were made by some of the Ornithoscelida, the remains of which are found in the same rocks.
You must take all this, of course, as truth from me to-night; but you may go and examine for yourselves; and see how far your own common sense and observations agree with those of learned geologists. The history of this great Wealden island to the south-east of us is obscure enough; but a few general facts, which bear upon our gravel- pit, I can give you.
Nevertheless, the view has been put forward and ably maintained by the same Professor, as also by Professor Cope in the United States, that the line of descent from reptiles to birds has not been from ordinary reptiles, through pterodactyle-like forms, to ordinary birds, but to the struthious ones from certain extinct reptiles termed Dinosauria; one of the most familiarly known of which is the Iguanodon of the Wealden formation.
I recognised them at once as the palatal teeth of a fossil fish called "Lepidotus," common in our own oolitic and wealden strata, and in rocks of that age all over the world. They were white and colourless in life, but are stained of various colours according to the nature of the rock in which they were embedded.
From the scattered way in which remains of the larger terrestrial animals occur in the Wealden, and the intermixture of pebbles of the special appearance of those worn in rivers, it is also inferred that the estuary which once covered the south-east part of England was the mouth of a river of that far-descending class of which the Mississippi and Amazon are examples.
Sure enough, smaller tracks of the same general form were running parallel to the large ones. "But what do you make of this?" cried Professor Summerlee, triumphantly, pointing to what looked like the huge print of a five-fingered human hand appearing among the three-toed marks. "Wealden!" cried Challenger, in an ecstasy. "I've seen them in the Wealden clay.
Leonards, where the Weald sandstone runs down to the sea. The difference between the rounded Downs and saucer-shaped combes of the chalk, and the deep glens traversing the soft friable strata of the Wealden, is well seen in passing from Beachy Head to Ecclesbourne and Fairlight. Shoreham is kept half alive by the Brighton coal trade: Newhaven struggles on as a port for Dieppe.
Gault: 0. Wealden: 0. Upper Purbeck Oolite : 0. Middle Purbeck Oolite : 14 Swanage. Lower Purbeck Oolite: 0. Portland Oolite: 0. Kimmeridge Clay: 0. Coral Rag: 0. Oxford Clay: 0. Great Oolite: 4 Stonesfield. Inferior Oolite: 0. Lias: 0. Upper Trias: 4 Wurtemberg, Somersetshire. N. Carolina. Middle Trias: 0. Lower Trias: 0. Permian: 0. Carboniferous : 0. Devonian: 0. Silurian: 0. Cambrian: 0.
They came only in small bodies thus far, each herd, a stallion and two or three mares and a foal or so, having its own stretch of country, and they went again when the chestnut-trees were yellow and the wolves came down the Wealden mountains. It was their custom to graze right out in the open, going into cover only in the heat of the day.
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