sea.

and it knows neither rest nor pity, the cruel hungry Give it but time enough, and what would it not eat up? It would eat up, in the course of ages, all the dry land of this planet, were it not baffled by another counteracting force, of which I shall speak hereafter.

As you go on beyond the sea-wall, you find what it is eating up. The whole low cliff is going visibly. But whither is it going? To form new soil in the æstuary. Now you will not wonder how old harbours so often become silted up. The sea has washed the land into them. But more, the sea-currents do not allow the sands of the æstuary to escape freely out to sea. They pile it up in shifting sand-banks about the mouth of the æstuary. The prevailing sea-winds, from whatever quarter, catch up the sand, and roll it up into sand-hills. Those sand-hills are again eaten down by the sea, and mixed with the mud of the tide-flats, and so is formed a mingled soil, partly of clayey mud, partly of sand; such a soil as stretches over the greater part of all our lowlands.

Now, why should not that soil, whether in England or in Scotland, have been made by the same means as that of every æstuary.

You find over great tracts of East Scotland, Lancashire, Norfolk, etc., pure loose sand just beneath the surface, which looks as if it was blown sand from a beach. Is it not reasonable to suppose that it is? You find rising out of many lowlands, crags which look exactly like old sea-cliffs eaten by the waves, from the base of which the waters have gone back. Why should not those crags be old sea-cliffs? Why should we not, following our rule of explaining the unknown by the

known, assume that such they are till someone gives us a sound proof that they are not; and say-These great plains of England and Scotland were probably once covered by a shallow sea, and their soils made as the soil of any tide-flat is being made now?

But you may say, and most reasonably, "The tideflats are just at the sea-level. The whole of the lowland is many feet above the sea; it must therefore have been raised out of the sea, according to your theory and what proofs have you of that?”

Well, that is a question both grand and deep, on which I shall not enter yet; but meanwhile, to satisfy you that I wish to play fair with you, I ask you to believe nothing but what you can prove for yourselves. Let me ask you this: suppose that you had proof positive that I had fallen into the river in the morning; would not your meeting me in the evening be also proof positive that somehow or other I had in the course of the day got out of the river? I think you will accept that logic as sound.

Now if I can give you proof positive, proof which you can see with your own eyes, and handle with your own hands, and alas! often feel but too keenly with your own feet, that the whole of the lowlands were once beneath the sea; then will it not be certain that, somehow or other, they must have been raised out of the sea again?

And that I propose to do in my next paper, when I speak of the pebbles in the street.

Meanwhile I wish you to face fairly the truly grand idea, which all I have said tends to prove true—that all the soil we see is made by the destruction of older soils, whether soft as clay, or hard as rock; that rain,

rivers, and seas are perpetually melting and grinding up old land, to compose new land out of it; and that it must have been doing so, as long as rain, rivers, and seas have existed. "But how did the first land of all get made?" I can only reply: A natural question: but we can only answer that, by working from the known to the unknown. While we are finding out how these later lands were made and unmade, we may stumble on some hints as to how the first primeval continents rose out of the bosom of the

sea.

And thus I end this paper. I trust it has not been intolerably dull. But I wanted at starting to show my readers something of the right way of finding out truth on this and perhaps on all subjects; to make some simple appeals to your common sense; and to get you to accept some plain rules founded on common sense, which will be of infinite use to both you and me in my future papers.

I hope, meanwhile, that you will agree with me, that there is plenty of geological matter to be seen and thought over in the neighbourhood of any town.

Be sure, that wherever there is a river, even a drain; and a stone quarry, or even a roadside bank; much more where there is a sea, or a tidal æstuary, there is geology enough to be learnt, to explain the greater part of the making of all the continents on the globe.

II.

THE PEBBLES IN THE STREET.

IF you, dear reader, dwell in any northern town, you will almost certainly see paving courts and alleys, and sometimes to the discomfort of your feet-whole streets, or set up as bournestones at corners, or laid in heaps to be broken up for road-metal, certain round pebbles, usually dark brown or speckled gray, and exceedingly tough and hard. Some of them will be very large-boulders of several feet in diameter. If you move from town to town, from the north of Scotland as far down as Essex on the east, or as far down as Shrewsbury and Wolverhampton (at least) on the west, you will still find these pebbles, but fewer and smaller as you go south. It matters not what the rocks and soils of the country round may be. However much they may differ, these pebbles will be, on the whole, the same everywhere.

But if your town be south of the valley of the Thames, you will find, as far as I am aware, no such pebbles there. The gravels round you will be made up entirely of rolled chalk flints, and bits of beds

immediately above or below the chalk. The blocks of "Sarsden" sandstone-those of which Stonehenge is built and the "plum-pudding stones" which are sometimes found with them, have no kindred with the northern pebbles. They belong to beds above the chalk.

Now if, seeing such pebbles about your town, you inquire, like a sensible person who wishes to understand something of the spot on which he lives, whence they come, you will be shown either a gravel-pit or a clay-pit. In the gravel the pebbles and boulders lie mixed with sand, as they do in the railway cutting just south of Shrewsbury; or in huge mounds of fine sweet earth, as they do in the gorge of the Tay about Dunkeld, and all the way up Strathmore, where they form long grassy mounds-tomauns as they call them in some parts of Scotland-askers as they call them in Ireland. These mounds, with their sweet fresh turf rising out of heather and bog, were tenanted-so Scottish children used to believe-by fairies. He that was lucky might hear inside them fairy music, and the jingling of the fairy horses' trappings. But woe to him if he fell asleep upon the mound, for he would be spirited away into fairyland for seven years, which would seem to him but one day. A strange fancy; yet not so strange as the actual truth as to what these mounds are, and how they came into their places.

Or again, you might find that your town's pebbles and boulders came out of a pit of clay, in which they were stuck, without any order or bedding, like plums and raisins in a pudding. This clay goes usually by the name of boulder-clay. You would see such near any town in Cheshire and Lancashire; or along Leith