By the Rev. W. R. Andrews, F.G.S. 267 
the rainfall sinks in, and acts chemically on the chalk. It soon takes 
up from near the swrface its complement of lime, and so reduces the 
hills by removing a thin film from immediately under the vegetation. 
If we followed the downward course of the rainfall, now containing 
in solution a portion of the Chalk, and traced it gradually sinking 
deeper below the surface till it joined the underground reservoir of 
water, lying within and deep down below the hills, we should finally 
see it issuing hundreds of feet below where it fell in the bright clear 
springs which flow from the foot of the downs. And we must 
recollect that the quantity of material thus removed year after year 
and century after century is very great, for each gallon of spring 
water contains about seventeen grains of carbonate of lime in 
solution ; and by calculation it has been found that from each square 
mile of surface upwards of one hundred and forty tons of Chalk are 
in this way dissolved and carried away annually. 
Thus the Vale of Wardour has been eroded, simply by the long- 
continued process of atmospheric agencies. There is no evidence of 
any other agent. It may be a tempting theory to attribute this 
valley with its steep-sided hills to the action of the sea waves— 
and for a long time geologists held that view. Standing somewhere 
with the range of a Chalk escarpment in view, as, for instance, 
within sight of our southern Downs, it is an easy flight of the 
imagination to see in such bold headlands—as Buxbury, for example 
—an ancient promontory, and in the curving bays on either side an 
old coast line; and to fancy how the waves beat furiously against the 
projecting points, or rippled up the sheltered hollows, but this 
pleasing picture must fade away when put to the test of scientific 
investigation, for at the base of our imaginary sea-cliff there is no 
ancient sea-beach, and the ground at the foot, instead of preserving 
the uniform level of a sea-shore, gently rises and falls. 
Again, there is no evidence of ordinary glacial action, although 
it has been thought that the wearing power of ice has scooped out 
such valleys as the Vale of Wardour. Yet here we have none of 
the relics of that mighty tool, which has been so largely used by 
Nature in fashioning the Earth’s surface in more northern parts. 
We have no scratched stones, no moraine mounds, no rocks perched 
