ground in the county. He confessed this sounded to him very doubtful indeed, 

 but it is very difficult to judge accurately of the height of the general svirface 

 in an elevated district, and he trusted Jlr. Isbell, "our own meteorologist,'' 

 ■wotdd be so kind as to ascertain this for us in the course of the summer. 



It is however, unquestionably, very high ground, and yet if you look into 

 those holes, you will see four feet of clay loam, above the drift of stones, and 

 there is no saying how much below them, before you reach the rock. It has 

 something of the character of the cold ungenial clay derived from the decom- 

 position of the primitive rocks — from the felspar of the Trap — not so rich for 

 agricultural purposes by any means as its owner might desire. We work upon 

 the surface like moles to turn it to the best purposes— and by the way, when 

 Mr. Talpa himself does speak out about clay, he does so in such a lively, 

 agreeable, cheerful, scientific, instructive way, that it is a pleasure to hear him. 

 But our obje<** now is to ascertain how it comes upon these hills to enable us 

 to wor*- it at aU. 



One generally considers clay when pure as derived from the complete 

 disintegration of rocks and deposited in tolerably still water. Was all Hereford- 

 shire, once upon a time, one vast inland lake ? And for how many ages must 

 it have continued so to have deposited so much claj', pure and free from stone, 

 as it often is ? If you take your stand on the Malvern HiUs and look on either 

 Bide, at the two counties of Herefordshire and Worcestershire — they seem pretty 

 much on the same level — the Herefordshire side presents a more broken, pictu- 

 resque surface which makes it look higher even than the Worcestershire side, 

 but yet Geology tells us that it is full two miles lower — that is to say, that you 

 would have to dig down more than two miles on the Worcestershire side to 

 arrive at the same Old Red Sandstone which lies on the surface of Hereford- 

 shire. All the Mountain Limestone, the Millstone Grit, all the Coal measures, 

 &c., &c., (not to mention the New Red Sandstone, which may never have been 

 here,) whose thickness taken together amounts, at the very lowest geological 

 computation, to upwards of two miles, has been completely removed from the 

 surface of this county as compared with that of Worcestershire, and yet, after 

 all, it is pretty much on a level with its neighbour. 



Howhiksall this happened? Is it possible that when that great, — that 

 awful distui-bance of the crust of the earth took place, which affected this 

 district so much ; when that great crack was produced, which threw up the 

 Plutonian rocks that form the chain of the Malvern Hills ; is it possible that the 

 whole of those rocks were then broken np and swept away ? swept off so cleanly 

 that not a single particle, not even a single block of IMountain Limestone remains 

 in the district. Sir R. Murchison, in his last edition of his great work, 

 " Siluria '" biings forward the complete and entire denudation of the Woolhope 

 valley of elevation, as an unanswerable proof of the effect of strong currents 

 of water in removing every particle of debris and detritus, as opposed to its 

 gradual removal by the long continued action of existing causes ; and, if this is 



