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walls of our island home. How came those smoothly rounded 
hills to be thus suddenly and abruptly cut short 2 And what have 
they to do with the similarly abrupt walls on the opposite coast ? 
And the mind travels back through the dim and misty ages of the 
past, questioning as it goes, to days when our island was no island, 
when it was undoubtedly part and parcel of a continent far larger 
than Europe is now, and stretching N.W. into the Atlantic no one 
can guess how far; when probably past this very spot there rolled 
a great river on towards the east to join the Rhine, which emptied 
itself then many miles further to the north than it does at present. 
And we think of the time when there was free communication to 
and fro,-and the ancestors of our present plants and animals 
travelled across and gained a footing here. For just as our English 
nation is a mixture of many peoples from many lands, so must our 
fauna and flora be looked upon as not in the strictest sense of the 
word ‘‘ indigenous,”’ not locally ‘‘ earth-born,” but as having invaded 
us on many sides. The plants give us at this day in Cornwall and 
the 8.W. of Ireland representatives of a Spanish and Portuguese 
flora; Scandinavian types on the mountains of Scotland and Cum- 
berland, and even Wales; French types in the S.E., while the . 
basis of all, like that of the people, is Germanic. And a similar 
remark might be made about the animals, but that the extirpation 
of species for our own convenience has proceeded at a much more 
rapid rate with them than with the flowers. 
The question must often have arisen in the minds of those who 
think—How did all these animals and plants get here? And the 
answer to-day is not far to seek. Straight in frontof us stretched 
the broad highway, across which seeds were wafted by primeval 
winds, and roots wandered year by year, and over which our wild 
animals found their way in search of food. And not only here to 
the south but also from the east stretched a great broad prairie land, 
a plain now submerged through the shrinking of the globe, which, 
as our late earthquake reminded us, has not even yet ceased ; telling 
its former history by the fossil wood and elephants’ teeth and tusks 
brought up in the fisherman’s net. 
But then we cannot help going back farther still, and asking 
the history of this pure white limestone that occurs in such 
enormous masses over so many hundreds of square miles, well nigh 
unsullied with sand, mud, or earth of any kind. In what beautiful 
clear water it must have been deposited, some good distance off 
shore, and far away from the mouth of any mud-laden stream ! 
What antiquity there is init! How long did it take to lay down 
1200 feet of this chalk? slowly, day by day, year by year, century 
by century, covering up the remains of the creatures that moved in 
the early waters. As you know it is all marine, full of the petrified 
