To the westward of the Birmingham plateau lies the district of the “_Black Country_,” of which the town of Dudley is the natural centre. Compared with the Birmingham plateau, it is a lowland district of wild confusion--a maze of mines, chimneys, factories, and straggling villages and towns, shrouded in a canopy of smoke and steam. The natural soil is generally hidden from sight by heaps of mining spoil, and mounds of rubbish, cut through in all directions by lines of railway and broad canals. The beautiful wooded hill of Dudley, crowned with its grey keep, and the neighbouring oak-clad ridges of the Wren’s Nest and Sedgley, rise like islands of verdure out of the dark sea of mining ground around, and look strangely out of place amid their gloomy surroundings. To the east of the Birmingham plateau lies the broad plain of Tamworth and Nuneaton, watered by the sluggish stream of the Tame. The plain is continued far to the southward through the richly wooded district of Warwick, Alcester, and the old Forest of Arden, and thence down the valley of Shakespeare’s Avon, to the terrace of the Edge Hills and the northern slopes of the Cotswolds. GEOLOGY. (BIRMINGHAM DISTRICT). Paleozoic Rocks. BY PROF. C. LAPWORTH, LL.D., F.G.S. INTRODUCTION. The Birmingham district, or that area of which Birmingham constitutes the natural capital and commercial centre, extends from Stafford on the north to Tewkesbury on the south, and from Wellington on the west to Leicester on the east, forming an area about 60 miles in length by 50 in breadth. In no single district in Britain is the relation of the physiography of the country seen to be more strikingly dependent upon its geological structure than within the limits of the Birmingham district. Every hill, ridge, plain, and valley of any importance is a mere reflex of the underground geology. The local distribution and physical peculiarities of its rock formations afford a natural and complete explanation of all its special scenic peculiarities. The dominant geological formation of this Midland area is the great Mesozoic formation of the _Triassic_ or New Red Sandstone, which stretches through Southern Britain in a continuous band from Hartlepool to Exeter, and divides the broken and contorted Paleozoic rocks of the west from the flat-lying Neozoics of the east. This great band of New Red Sandstone attains its widest extension in the north of the Birmingham district, between Eccleshall and Charnwood Forest, where its transverse diameter is about 50 miles. Within the limits of the Birmingham district, however, its diameter rapidly decreases, until in the extreme south, in the neighbourhood of Worcester and the Malverns, its breadth is reduced to about 10 miles.