Abstract Among Wealden towns Tunbridge Wells is comparatively new. Before the Civil Wars of the 1640s there was no village here, nor any name on a map. Chance finding of chalybeate springs a few miles south of Tunbridge (now Tonbridge ) attracted attention at Court, and even gynaecological interest. Curiously, this provides explanations both for the supposed virtues of the waters and the founding of a summer resort. By repute, the springs were discovered in 1606, though this story was already 160 years old before it first appeared in print. Verifiable facts indicate that Thomas Neale, FRS, (1641–1699) was the main agent in organizing the nascent resort’s amenities, beginning in 1676 with plans to construct a chapel or assembly room. The springs themselves issue from Lower Cretaceous Wealden beds, a few feet above the Wadhurst Clay, in a shallow valley formed by the headwaters of the River Grom. Siderite (iron carbonate or chalybite) abounds in these formations.

Abstract That order should govern the nature of the world is an idea not confined to England, though the history of science in this country demonstrates again and again that a conception of Divine Order lay at its heart. To people of earlier days, want of order implied confusion, displacement, derangement, time out of joint, even the presence of malevolent power – ‘when the planets in evil mixture to disorder wander’. The divine scheme revealed by scripture was a frame and support for Earth science. It told an indisputable story of an ordered beginning, a diluvial reordering, and a future end in dissolution. It was a story backed by secular law, and no thinking person could have been unaware of it. Yet ‘when’ and ‘how’ were legitimate questions, answered in detail by hexaemeron writers. It is an educational curiosity in England that a particular Biblical chronology drawn up in 1650 accompanied scriptures printed for use in schools until 1885 – a matter of consequence to the history of all geological thought in this country.

Abstract In addition to the obvious advantages of high sensitivity and fast response times of SQUID magne-tometers, the generation of a DC persistent current by the sample in such magnetometers permits a wide range of measurements to be made with them that are not possible with conventional spinner and vibration magnetometers. Examples of such measurements are described in this paper, including the measurement of the NRM of long cores, the determination of stress and thermal effects on magnetization. * Department of Geological and Geophysical Sciences, Princeton University, Princeton, N.J. 08544 U.S.A.