course therefore they cannot be Gault. They are probably Rhætic, or passage beds into the Lias.

That they are Rhotic beds is rendered further probable when we take into consideration the dip and the altitude at which they are exposed. The altitude is about 600 feet above sea-level. The dip is the usual slight south-east dip, common to the Trias elsewhere, which, if it gave to the beds an average gradient of one in forty, would make them thereabouts coincide with the strike of the Rhotic beds at sea-level five miles further to the south-east. The whole Liassic series therefore lies between these beds and the Gault, which at Lyme Regis lies horizontally and conformably beneath the Greensand, and of course unconformably upon the Lias.

But though of Gault I found none in the district, my wanderings in search of it brought me face to face with most remarkable evidences of fluviatile erosion. In the valley of the Otter river terraces may be traced tier after tier, and in some places right up to the Greensand. And then the Greensand escarpment itself! I do not know that anyone has noticed the fact before me; but the Greensand escarpment itself is all fluviatile, and the direct result of pluvial denudation. I have long been accustomed to recognize the features of the Devonshire and Dorsetshire Greensand-that peculiar angle by which one can identify it miles away—but I had given very little thought to the cause of this feature. I had been accustomed to the Blackdown plateau, facing miles of Trias and Culm measures, with Haldon in the far distance, and there was nothing in all this to suggest the direct action of running water; but once stand on Combe Raleigh, or Dumpton, or Roundball hills, near Honiton, and it becomes an unanswerable revelation. The eye follows the Otter and its tributaries to their sources, and there we see Greensand escarpments by the dozen in the initial stage of their manufacture. A Greensand escarpment crowns the hills everywhere; but trace these escarpments up the valleys till they narrow to a point like the letter V, and we find the two escarpments meeting; and every winter rain is cutting further and further back the meeting-point of escarpments, now carrying it further to the right, now further to the left. This is plain enough where streams divide the Greensand, making valleys of no great breadth; but it is a little startling when we apply it to isolated escarpments like the western face of Blackdown, or to Haldon. Yet the same agent has evidently been at work to produce the very same feature; nor can we consistently call in a fresh agent simply because we have rounded a

corner.

The feature is uniform and persistent, and speaks of fluviatile erosion uninterrupted by marine or other agencies for an enormous period of time-time long enough to bring about great changes in the whole drainage systein of the district. If, for instance, one looks at the map to see what river erosion could possibly have produced the well-known Blackdown escarpment, it seems to me to be a probable conjecture that the Culm, or its remote progenitor, once flowed along the greater part of it, at a level 500 feet above its present bed, up to a water-parting near the southern end, whence it began to be deflected westward, and south of which water-parting the streams drained as now into the Otter. This ancient river, which for convenience we will call the Culm (though five miles distant from its present bed and 500 feet above it), then left its left bank, and was deflected further and further westward, strewing the ground with the cretaceous and other detritus, which still covers the surface of the Trias, until it reached its present bed in the present day, always working its way westward as it cut its bed deeper.

One thing at least must have struck every one who has ever looked at a geological map of Devonshire, and that is that the boundary of the Greensand everywhere follows the boundary of the Red Marl. This seems to show that where Greensand stood upon an impervious bed, denudation spared it; and where it stood upon the pervious sands and pebbles of the Trias, denudation swept it away. Water cuts its way through the Greensand easily enough; but then if it could not escape from the Marl, it made very slow progress in deepening its bed. Witness the higher reaches of the Otter. But in the case of the Culm, it was able very soon to feel its way to lines of less resistance-viz., the Triassic Upper Sandstones-where it undermined the cretaceous beds, and swept them away wholesale. There was a partial resistance in the middle of the Triassic series, where the harder pebblebeds of Aylesbeare, Colyton, Woodbury, &c., interposed a barrier, and bade the drainage go on the one side or the other of them. And thus the Upper and Lower Sandstones of the Triassic series respectively determined the courses of the lower reaches of the Otter and the Exe, which the pebble-beds separate.

But to return to our more immediate subject. The valley of the Otter affords evidence of continuous fluviatile erosion from the Greensand 800 feet or more above sea-level, to the present river-bed at Honiton, 300 feet above the same.

The river-terraces in the Marl are impersistent and broken. by lateral drainage and other causes, and become, as a rule, more indistinct as we ascend (though the evidences are never lost), until we arrive at the Greensand which caps the hill, and then we have one continuous persistent terrace, uniform, regular, and unbroken. The reason doubtless of the perfect preservation of its outline is its porous and homogeneous composition, so that water soaks through it as through a sieve, and oozes out with tolerable uniformity at its base.

The preservation of the Greensand at all is, in fact, due to more than one fortuitous circumstance. We have seen that an impervious foundation (in the case of the Marl) tends to preserve it; so also does the impervious clay on the top. This is the insoluble residuum of former Chalk and Greensand beds, and is full of flint and chert. It is of no great thickness, so that the rainfall finds its way slowly through it into the Greensand beneath. It is thus a great protection to the Greensand. But for this mackintosh (so to speak) upon the surface, the Devonshire Greensand would probably have been washed out of existence ages ago.

Together with this record of fluviatile denudation, let me recall to your notice what I had the honour of reading to you at Exmouth two years ago, with regard to the valley of the Exe. I then called attention (see Report, &c., 1883, p. 347) to the fact that while the Culm river-gravels, old and present, consist almost exclusively of cretaceous matter, the Exe river-gravels above the point of confluence, whether we speak of the present river-bed, or of old river-gravels eightyfive feet above it, do not contain a vestige of anything cretaceous. We learn therefore that throughout all the time thus represented the two drainage systems were distinct, which they would not have been if the sea had passed over them.

There is also negative evidence in the same direction in the absence of well-rounded pebbles of chert or flint in the superficial deposits of Devonshire. Rivers do not make perfectly-rounded pebbles of chert and flint; the sea does. The utmost that rivers can do is to make them sub-angular, and angular or sub-angular is all the cretaceous gravel in these superficial deposits. If ever the sea had covered the land since the flint and chert beds of the plateaux had been disturbed, we should have expected to find rounded pebbles of the same. We might also expect to find some traces of marine organisms, but we find none.

On referring to Professor Hull's Physical History of the British Isles, I find in Plates xiii. xiv. that South and SouthWestern England are represented by him as an unglaciated land-surface during the Lower Glacial Age. After the Lower Glacial Age came the Great Submergence, when (according to him) Dartmoor and Exmoor were islands, but Blackdown and Haldon were submerged. But in the Upper Glacial or Sub-Glacial Age, which followed the Submergence, Blackdown, and other lands of similar elevation, are represented as having begun to re-emerge. If Professor Hull be rightand my facts quite coincide with his view-Blackdown (including thereby Haldon) was shallow sea-water in the time. of the Great Submergence, when it was planed down to something like its present plateau form; then with the subsequent Sub-Glacial or Upper Glacial Age, or perhaps a little later, it rose to the surface as a chalk down, united over Woodbury Hill with Haldon; and then commenced that work of atmospheric denudation which has been uninterrupted to the present day. The valley of the Exe and other Devonshire valleys then began to be. The land-surface may have since then risen possibly to a much greater elevation than at present; but it has never since then subsided more than forty feet or fifty feet at the most.

Mr. Grant Allen attempted awhile ago (Gentleman's Magazine, November, 1880) a rough estimate in years of geological time; and assuming that 100 million years represented the whole of geological time, from the beginning of the Laurentian age to the present day, he allowed one million years for Tertiary and Post-Tertiary Ages taken together. If we may then assume a quarter of that time to belong to the Post-Tertiary Age, we have some 250,000 years, or thereabouts, to account for the fluviatile phenomena which we can see. But to measure geological time in years is, of course, at best but a very uncertain speculation.

I have, however, I hope, killed two birds with one stone. I have disproved the presence of Gault at Honiton, and I have accounted, to my own satisfaction, and I hope to yours also, for those superficial deposits of re-deposited cretaceous detritus which cover the Triassic plains. We call them "Drift," a term which when analysed is found to mean that we do not know what they are. I have long been puzzled by them; but I am now satisfied that they are fluviatile; i.e. old river-gravels, weathered and partially denuded. And the high-level gravels of the several rivers merge insensibly into this so-called "Drift."

DEVONSHIRE MEN AT THE INNER TEMPLE,

1547-1660.

BY W. K. WILLCOCKS, M. A.

(Read at Seaton, July, 1885.)

THE object of this paper is to set before the Association the names of those men of Devon who, during one of the most interesting periods in the history of our county, were admitted as students at the Inn of the Inner Temple, one of the four greater centres of legal education in England.

The period to which reference is made extends from the year 1547 to the year 1660, and so embraces within its limits the whole of the Elizabethan era, with the glories of which Devonshire and Devonshire men are so closely associated.

Before proceeding, however, to enumerate those members of the Inner Temple who were natives of Devon, it may be well, by way of introduction, to say a few words on the rise of the Inns of Court generally and the status of their members.

The

The modern barrister-at-law would appear to be the representative of the ancient "apprenticius ad legem." apprentices of the law were a well-known class at a comparatively early date in English history, being originally, as their name implies, learners or students rather than practitioners- non eruditi sed studentes-and such in fact continued to be their position at the time of the institution of the Inns.*

It is not until the year 1292 (20 Edw. I.) that the apprentices are first noticed officially as practitioners of the law. In this year an ordinance, entitled "De Attornatis et Apprenticiis," was promulgated, by which the king ordained that the justices of the Common Bench should, as Dugdale † renders *Order of the Coif, by SERJEANT PULLING, pp. 108-9. + Orig. Jurid. p. 141.