Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
large brick-works on outcrops of argillaceous formations, had resulted in the
closure of hundreds of small excavations formerly used for geological digs, such as
gravel-pits, chalk-pits and brickyards. Harmer too commented regretfully on the
disappearance of such exposures for geological field studies.
Two outstanding works undertaken by Harmer during the final years of his life,
each entailing an immense amount of research, were, firstly, a detailed map
showing the types of boulder-clay and trails of erratics in England and Wales, and
secondly a two-volume monograph on Pliocene Mollusca published by the Pala-
eontographical Society. This latter work, his magnum opus, was an achievement
which will long earn the gratitude of later investigators and will always remain a
most fitting monument to his memory.
Harmer stated that at the Little Oakley site about 200 tons of material had been
sifted and examined. He added that to prevent disappointment to any persons who
might wish to visit this prolific locality, he should mention that by arrangement
with the owner of the Oakley estate, the excavations were filled up and levelled
down as the work proceeded. Harmer had proposed to offer his collection of fossils
from this site to the Sedgwick Museum in Cambridge (Harmer
1914
-
1919
).
5.1 Volume I
In 1913, writing from his home in Cringleford, near Norwich Harmer included the
following notable comments in his Introduction:
More than sixty years have elapsed since the publication of the classical Monograph on the
Mollusca of the Crag by my old friend, Searles V. Wood, and between thirty to forty years
since that of the Supplements to it. Much fresh material it seems desirable to describe has
been obtained, especially from a new and interesting section at the village of Little
Oakley, near Harwich, midway between Walton-on-Naze and Felixstowe.
Many important works dealing with the Pliocene and Pleistocene, as well as with the
Recent Mollusca of various parts of the northern hemisphere, have appeared, moreover,
during recent years.
The continued study of the Crag beds is not only desirable, but likely to prove of great
interest and importance. Although isolated and fragmentary records of the Pliocene history
occur at Lenham [Kent], St. Erth [Cornwall], in the Cotentin [Normandy], in north-east
Scotland, and probably in the Isle of Man, it is only in the Anglo-Belgian basin and the
little-known Crag of Iceland that we have a more or less connected series of fossiliferous
deposits from which we may ascertain the character of the molluscan fauna of the seas of
north-western Europe [and by inference past climatic conditions] during the period
intervening between the Miocene and Pleistocene epochs. No older Pliocene strata are
known in Scandinavia, any which may once have existed in that region having been
destroyed by the erosion of the great ice sheets.
