COAL MEASURES BENEATH ESSEX.
139
the geological series and away from the horizon of the coal measures.
It is true that an earlier boring at Harwich had proved the existence
of Lower Carboniferous strata under that locality, and until the dip
of those strata shall have been proved by another boring not far
from Harwich, any coal measures in that region may be, as likely as
not, found beneath the bed of the German Ocean. There is no
evidence whatever of the extension of any portion of the Carboniferous
strata to the west under North Essex. On the contrary, a boring at
Culford (north of Bury St. Edmunds) executed only so recently as
1891, tell us plainly enough that the Palaeozoic floor, which, as we
have seen, rises with a steady gradient northwards from London,
exists at a still higher level under the country about Bury. These
facts, taken along with the entire absence in all the East Anglian
borings of Jurassic and Triassic Strata (the former of which occupy
a large portion of the Midlands, while the Trias has been proved
beneath them in many borings in Northants, South Notts, and
Leicestershire), point to the conclusion that we are here on a line of
country marked by an axis of elevation during all Triassic and
Jurassic times, representing possibly a faint continuation of the inner
Scandinavian axis of elevation along the line of the Dogger Bank.
There is nothing to show that such an axis does not date back even
to the Carboniferous period, a view to which the occurrence of
crystalline rocks in the boring at Bletchley lends strong support.
Such an axis would bear a relation to the two more pronounced axes
of the west of Britain and of the Ardennes, similar to that which the
axis of elevation of the Appenines bears to the greater and older
axes of elevation of the Alps and of Corsica and Sardinia.
We must not omit reference to the Lower Rhine coalfield, in the
region of Elberfeld and Dortmund, because this has been spoken of
sometimes as a separate and distinct basin from that of Aix and
Liege, as if thrown off by an axis of elevation which points to a
similar axis continued through East Anglia to the north of Harwich.
Such a view would lend support to the conjecture to which Mr.
Harrison has given expression in his map (op. cit.), and the sectional
drawing, which represents the Carboniferous strata (including the
coal measures) as let down into a synclinal flexure between Ware
and Bury, upon which his argument for coal beneath North Essex
entirely rests. A careful examination of so trustworthy a document
as Von Dechen's geological map of Germany leads one to the con-
clusion that there is no such axis, as has been premised by some,