SCENERY OF ISLE OF WIGHT 67 



attention of the most casual visitor, but he only vaguely 

 marvels at it, until geology tells him that these dark 

 lines mark successive floors of that ancient sea — floors 

 that gathered one over another, as generation after 

 generation of marine creatures left their crumbling 

 remains upon the bottom. But now they are bent 

 up and placed on end, like books on the shelves of a 

 library. And thus we learn that not only has this 

 ancient sea-bed been turned into dry land, but its layers 

 of hardened ooze have been tilted up vertically, and 

 that it is the worn ends of these upturned layers which 

 form the long ridges of the downs. 



But science further makes known to us that beyond 

 the cliffy margin on which we stand, there once 

 stretched an ampler land that has long disappeared. 

 Far over the English Channel the chalk downs once 

 extended with their undulating summits, their smooth 

 grassy slopes, their deep cooms and quiet bournes. 

 That vanished land ran southward, until it ended off 

 in a range of white precipices. The rain that fell on 

 its surface gathered into a river that flowed northward 

 through Freshwater Gap into the Solent. Strange to 

 tell, perched on the top of the present cliffs, to the 

 east of Freshwater, lie fragments of the bed of that 

 ancient stream, consisting of gravel and silt which, as 

 the cliffs are undermined by the waves, tumble to the 

 beach and mingle with the gravel of to-day. In these 

 ancient deposits are found teeth of the long-extinct 

 mammoths which browsed the herbage on slopes that 

 rose southward, where for many a long age the Atlantic 

 has rolled its restless tides and breakers. 



Musing on these records of a dim forgotten past, 



