A Day's Elephant Hunting in Essex. 35 



As no excavations are proceeding to-day (for the workmen 

 are enjoying their Saturday half-hoHday), any fossils that 

 we may obtain must be got from the walls of tlie pit, or the 

 floor beneath us. These relics will not perhaps be of a 

 rare and startling character ; but they will, nevertheless, 

 be genuine. Here are some to begin with. Projecting 

 from the wall of ferruginous, finely-laminated, bright- 

 coloured sand is a layer of shells. We all swarm to the 

 spot, ladies included. Hammers, chisels, and ''jemmies" 

 are suddenly produced from even the most harmless-looking 

 members of our party, and we are speedily at work as if 

 prising open one of Nature's strong boxes to the tune of — 



Hail to tlie hammer of science profound ! 



Flint-stone and rock 



Quail at its shock, 

 And their fragments fly as the sparks around. 



The fossil dead that so long have slept. 

 And seen world after world into ruin swept,* 



Start at the sound 



Of its fearful rebound. 



The fossils before us need but little force to compel them 

 to quit their sandy matrix. They prove to be the shells of 

 the little bivalve Gyrena fluminalis. They are very brittle, 

 and perhaps to some eyes they may appear somewhat in- 

 significant as trophies of the celebrated elephant bed at 

 Ilford. But they are genuine relics of the ancient zoology of 

 the old Thames Valley — as genuine as the British pachy- 



* Alas 1 for the good old cataclysmic geology, so regnant once in 



the spectral kingdom of Diluvia and Nightmare, and even in the 



verses of the period. (See Dr. Daubeny's excellent collection of 



"Fugitive Poems," Parker & Co., 1869.) It is curious in these more 



degenerate and pitiful days to see how complacently the catastrophists 



looked upon the pre-Adamite earth as a periodic slaughter-house on a 



grand scale. How ruthlessly were successive creations put an end to 



under that malefic theodicy ! Direness was once as familiar to the 



slaughterous thoughts of the British geologist as it still seems to be to 



our Continental brethren. And yet every virtuous catastrophist would 



see m a familiar quotation from Horace at once a prophecy and a 



rule of conduct in case such a crash should come in his own time : 



" Si fracti^s illabatixr urbis 



Impavidum feiieut ruiute." 



