Notice of the Hessle Drift, as it appeared in Sections above Forty Years since

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Abstract
T he progress of modern research has brought before us, on a great scale and under various aspects, a subject which, until the series of strata began to be studied by W. Smith, had literally no place in British geology. By that observer, first of all men, the “superficial deposits,” as they were called, were separated from the “regular strata,” and referred to a different and more tumultuous origin. Dr. Buckland popularized this idea, and, under the title of “diluvial” deposits, presented a great number of important observations relating to the final operations on our land of the waters of the sea, followed by river-floods and ordinary atmospheric action*. Modern research has convinced us that, instead of that diluvial accumulation being the work of one transitory and confused disturbance of the level of sea and land, there were successions of drifted deposits, under different conditions, having unequal distributions, and peculiar local directions. We have not merely translated the antique “diluvial” into the modern “drift;” the abnormal cataclysm has become an intelligible series of local sea-actions and limited displacements of land; the crisis has become a period: Preglacial and Postglacial eras are marked in time, and characterized by successive races of animal and vegetable residents. Those who, like myself, had to struggle with the Boulder-clays and northern drift more than forty years ago, without the aid of glaciers and icebergs, and with no clear theory of the changes of level of land or sea, were apt to leave out of our local

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