lie kept so well. //>, fvoni the same site, l.'ok down, iinmeasure- 

 ubly further back, over "the great dragon land," and picture 

 again, in thought, the teeming life of the old Liassic sea. 



AND now, having completed the building of the land 

 between Ciainsborough and Lincoln, I will, as briefly as possible, 

 try to show how it attained its present shape. 



To understand tliis, we must first glance a little further 

 to the «^t; where, after passing over the limestones and clays 

 of the liigher Jurassic seas, we reach the chalk wolds. 



In these cretaceous strata, we have the remains of beds 

 which mirst have been laid down in great ocean depths; for 

 there only are similar deposits being formed in our own day. 



The Atlantic ooze, the modern equivalent of the chalk, 

 is not deposited at a less depth than about looo feet, and 

 usually, much deeper ; and, as this ooze is laid down, accordmg 

 to the "Challenger" calcidations, at the rate of a foot in a 

 century at the most, the chalk, which is now some 1,300 feet 

 thick,— and had, at one time, another 1,000 feet at the top of 

 it, which has since been swept away,— the time occupied in the 

 fo'rmation of these chalk beds must liave been enormous. At 

 the above rate of a foot of sediment in a century, the lost i.n o 

 feet alone would have taken 100,000 years to form. 



Now, that the neighbourhood of such an ocean as this, 

 which reached from Ireland, over Europe, to the Crimea, should 

 have greatly affected the area we are considering, is not to he 

 wondered at. 



For a long period, during the existence of the Oolite and 

 higher Jurassic seas, — when the land to the east of Lincoln, 

 between it and the chalk wolds, was being formed, — the Triassic, 

 Rhoetic and Lias beds on the west had become dry land; but, 



