196 .NATURAL HISTORY 
in their gentle swellings and smooth fungus-like 
protuberances, their fluted sides, and regular hol- 
lows and slopes, that carry at once the air of vege- 
tative dilatation and expansion: or was there ever 
a time when these immense masses of calcareous 
matter were thrown into fermentation by some ad- 
ventitious moisture, were raised and leavened into 
such shapes by some plastic power, and so made to 
swell and heave their broad backs into the sky, so 
much above the less animated clay of the wild 
below ? 
By what I can guess from the admeasurements 
of the hills that have been taken round my house, 
I should suppose that these hills surmount the wild, 
on an average, at about the rate of five hundred 
feet. 
One thing is very remarkable as to the sheep: 
from the westward till you get to the river Adur, 
all the flocks have horns, and smooth white faces 
and white legs; and a hornless sheep is rarely to 
be seen. But as soon as you pass that river east- 
ward, and mount Beeding Hill, all the flocks at once 
become hornless, or, as they call them, poll-sheep ; 
and have, moreover, black faces, with a white tuft 
of wool on their foreheads, and speckled and spot- 
ted legs; so that you would think that the flocks of 
Laban were pasturing on one side of the stream, 
and the variegated breed of his son-in-law Jacob 
were cantoned along on the other. And this di- 
versity holds good respectively on each side, from 
the valley of Bramber and Beeding to the eastward, 
and westward all the whole length of the Downs. 
If you talk with the shepherds on this subject, they 
tell you that the case has been so from time imme- 
