HARDWICKE'S SCIENCE-GOSSIP. 



117 



recommend itself to any of their modern views of 

 classification, and thus the genial topic of an after- 

 noon's visit found no niche in that temple of fame 

 now blazoned with the name of Sir Charles Lyell ; for 

 nature had not yet fled her chosen haunt at Blooms- 

 bury. The marvellous flint which for other reasons I 

 retained, has preserved kindly recollections of the 

 donor, and it has always appeared invested with a 

 certain interest, not indeed as reviving the afore- 

 mentioned rationalistic views of Omar el Aalem or as 

 recalling the dreamy echoes of Ovid and tales of the 

 Caliphs, glittering with a fond notion of the repopu- 

 lation of the globe from vivified flints, an idea not so 

 wholly idle as put by the Kaffir boy, since dust and 

 shadow are we all, but as simply recording how such 

 blameless things as Echinoderms have become thus 

 wondrously metamorphosed. To the generality of 

 minds, evidently this hard flint was once soft and 

 plastic, and the sea-urchin, so to speak, had stuck 

 into it, as a sea-shell sticks into a lump of mud ; 

 the flinty matter permeated it, and eventually 

 hardened it precisely as fruit is candied in syrup. 

 Had the urchin afterwards become detached from 

 the mass, as is commonly the case, we should have 

 seen the result of nature's handiwork and not 

 the process, and our minds would have become 

 prepossessed with vague notions of the marvellous. 

 Sometimes it may be, we unwittingly pass by the 

 cast away article from the great world laboratory 

 driven by the sun, retaining the'impress of the pro- 

 cess, and rendering not wholly vain the notion of 

 those who have fancied that fossils were imperfect 

 models employed at the creation, considering like- 

 wise that creation to be in progress. On the Downs 

 it is the precedent to mend_ the roads with flint, 

 although there can be little question that a few cart- 

 loads of sea sand as tending to form a concrete with 

 the chalk would be preferable, as economising both 

 money and labour. The other day, walking out on 

 the Ramsgate and Margate road, I observed a heap of 

 shingle, newly thrown down as the navvies quaintly 

 say for road metal, and my eye fell upon a flint with 

 a pecten or scallop adhering to it, which deserves to 

 be depicted as it tells so plainly the story of its fate ; 

 geology being a great book of earthly leaves record- 

 ing births, marriages, and deaths, a glance at it tells 

 its history, so that no recording angel could be at 

 fault. Once at the decease of its occupant 

 it chanced to repose upon a mass of soft and 

 yielding flint lying at the bottom of the channel 

 of those days. Flints are naturally moist and brittle 

 when new from the quarry, but then they must have 

 had the nature of putty, for the chalky mud as it 

 accumulated above pressed it into the future stone, 

 and finally with its weight broke the shell into four 

 as if impatient to destroy the die. The shell 

 remains filled with the chalk, the flint projects over 

 the edges, and a spray of flint globules resembling 

 crystallised sugar are squirted over its surface ; the 



simple but complicated result of squeezing. Time 

 has effected the rest, and hardened what was mud 

 to chalk and stone, but the white rind on which 

 the shell is cushioned shows plainly that it was not 

 covered by the soft flint, but that it reposes on it as it 

 fell, beautiful in death. How it comes about that 

 our cliffs are scored with lines of irony flints it is easy 

 to surmise and difficult to prove ; silica and iron 

 are ejected in mineral springs, and they enter into 

 the microscopic shells that strew the sea-bed ; 

 a broken flint no less than the chalk is composed 

 of minute layers of granules, presumably either 

 the said diatom paste or globigerina ooze, which 

 Sir Wyville Thomson described when brought up 

 by the Challenger dredge as a cream or red-brown 

 powder. Possibly red and white were then the virgin 

 hues of the chalk cliffs, and if this be so, black and 

 white is but their pale shade. When the black flints 

 of Dover on Blanc Nez are pounded by the surges 

 into red sand, the things that were return ; Margate 

 flints however are naturally rust-coated, red-brown, 

 or suffused with red coralline mesh work, more or less 

 resembling a mineral I have labelled as jasper ; not 

 however the Cyprian jasper, " di color verde sprozato 

 di sangue," for this poetical substance, that has been 

 considered more precious than life .and eloquent than 

 words, is probably common blood-stone. The pure 

 white rind of the flint on which the scallop reposes is 

 also powdered with ochreous red, but this truly is 

 sand such as scallops love, the earliest sands of Peg- 

 well Bay dear to the shrimps. What is its kin and 

 lineage, Plagiostoma or Pecten, I will then leave to 

 the curious, for to my mind the broken shell recalls 

 that all-impressive idea of the poet : — " Shall man 

 be sealed within the iron hills, or blown about the 

 desert sand," and dead it speaketh. — A. H. Swintou. 



Boulders in the Carboniferous Limestone 

 of Dublin. — At a recent meeting of the Geological 

 Society a paper was read by Professor Ball on this 

 subject. He said that angular fragments of granite 

 and of schist, quartzite, and vein-quartz, such as 

 might have been derived from the metamorphosed 

 rocks which rest on the granite near Dublin, have 

 been discovered in beds of carboniferous limestone, 

 which often contain fragments of fossils, especially 

 Encrinites. They have been previously noticed by 

 several geologists. While Professor Jukes refers 

 their transportation to the agency of land-plants, Mr. 

 Croll quotes their occurrence in support of his argu- 

 ment as to the existence of glacial conditions during 

 the carboniferous period. Professor Bail observed 

 that the specimens exhibited none of the indications 

 of the existence of glacial conditions, whether we 

 regard the characters of the boulders or the nature of 

 the rock in which they are imbedded, which con- 

 tains no such silt as that occurring in the boulder-bed 

 of the talchir formation. Whilst rejecting the view 

 that they were transported by ice, he pointed out 



