56 J. G. WALLER ON SAND. 



Oar eastern counties have beaches of chalk shingle, and sand, 

 and the cliffs are mainly a tertiary deposit, consisting of clays, 

 sands, and flint gravel. These counties are devoid of building stone, 

 so all their ancient churches are built of flint, and much ingenious 

 workmanship is therein shown. Little stone is seen but that which 

 belongs to the upper greensand, locally known as " clunch," some- 

 times oolite in small quantities, which must have been brought 

 round by sea, and occasionally sandstone, which, belonging to the 

 Wealden system, could not have been obtained nearer than Hastings. 

 Consequently there is no material whatever on the coast capable of 

 furnishing any quartz sand. Still one must always remember that 

 the operations of nature are large, and our views of them small. 

 The visitor to Yarmouth must remark the deep sand deposits on its 

 shore. Let us cross to the other side of the German Ocean, and 

 large dunes or hills of sand are found all around the coasts of Bel- 

 gium, leading into France as far as Boulogne. Does it come from 

 chalk flint ? 



I have examined sand from Lowestoft, and I find it all to be of 

 quartz ; in a slide made from its sand only one piece of chalk flint is 

 seen. Dr. Matthews gave me some sand from Aberdovey, Wales ; it 

 is mostly of quartz, with some intrusions of other substances, but none, 

 of course, of chalk flint. Indeed, no one could discover any difference 

 between the two, although one is on the eastern side of our island, 

 amid nothing but chalk debris, whilst the other is on the western 

 side, in the Irish Channel, where no chalk or chalk flint exists at all. 

 Let us travel higher up our eastern coasts as far as Yorkshire, and 

 at Bridlington the sand is again quartz ; in a slide made of it the 

 few intrusions of flint are about three or four. 



Let us now come back to our southern coast, and one of the facts 

 that first attracted me in relation to this subject was that organisms 

 using sand for building purposes always choose quartz. It is so 

 with that curious sponge Dysidea fragilis ; it is so also with the 

 ovisacs of one of the mollusca, which at first look so much like a 

 sponge. These are completely built up of quartz sand, and although 

 other fragments are sometimes used, and even foraminifera, yet it is 

 rare to find anything of chalk flint. Dysidea is common at 

 Brighton, where the shingle is of chalk flint, and one might think 

 sand also ; but it is quartz that is used. 



What then becomes of the flint sand ? We see the rounded 

 pebbles : abrasion must produce powder, i.e., sand. What then can 



