Further Reliques of Constance Naden

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: GEOLOGY OF THE BIRMINGHAM DISTEICT. Panton Prize Essay at Mason College for 1885. BOTH geographically and geologically, the position of Birmingham is central. It stands nearly in the middle of the Midlands, and close to the line of junction between the highly contorted strata of the west and the more...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: GEOLOGY OF THE BIRMINGHAM DISTEICT. Panton Prize Essay at Mason College for 1885. BOTH geographically and geologically, the position of Birmingham is central. It stands nearly in the middle of the Midlands, and close to the line of junction between the highly contorted strata of the west and the more gently inclined strata of the east. On the one hand lie the older rocks, squeezed and bent and wrinkled by unnumbered ages of alternate upheaval and depression; on the other lie newer rocks, which in some cases have been so little disturbed that they retain the horizontal position in which they were originally laid down. Between the Palaeozoic and Mesozoic deposits there is a great physical and biological break, and both periods are characteristically represented in the immediate neighbourhood of Birmingham. These facts are not only interesting to the geologist; they are of the highest practical importance to the manufacturer, the tradesman, and even to the politician. Though the town is of modern growth, the origin of its present prosperity can be traced back to those ancient times, which produced the gigantic tree-ferns and club-mosses and horsetails of the Carboniferous jungles. It is chiefly to the coal and iron of South Staffordshire that the Midland Metropolis owes its manufactures, its dense population, and its political importance, though some thanks are also due to the inland lakes of Trias times, where those red sands were deposited which now form the agricultural plains of Warwickshire and Worcestershire. For present purposes, the Birmingham district may be defined as the area included in a circle witli the town at its centre, and a radius of about thirty miles. This would comprise nearly the whole of Warwickshire, North Worcestershire, South Staffordshi...