The- (ji'iH'ral Geological Character. 



countiy. " One green field is like another green field," cried 

 Johnson. Nothing can be so untrue. No two fields are ever 

 the same. A brook flowing through the one, a narrow strip 

 of chalk intersecting the other, will make them as different 

 as Perthshire from Essex. Even Socrates could say in 

 the Phcedrus, TO. /ntv ovv )(b>pta KOI TO. ^tvSpa ooStv /n tOtXti 

 tSao-/eav' and this arose from the state, or rather absence, 

 of all Natural Science at Athens. Had that been different he 

 would have spoken otherwise. 



The world is another place to the man who knows, and to the 

 man who is ignorant of Natural History. To the one the earth 

 is full of a thousand significations, to the other meaningless. 



First of all, then, for a few words on the geology of the 

 Forest ; for upon this everything depends not only the 

 scenery, but its Flora and Fauna, the growth of its trees and 

 the course of its streams. Throughout it is composed of the 

 Middle-Eocene, the Osborne and Headon Beds capping the 

 central portion, with their fluvio-mariiie formation. The Upper 

 Bagshot develops itself below them, and is succeeded by the 

 Barton Clays, so well exposed on the coast, and finally by the 

 Bracklesham Beds, which crop out in the valley of Cantertou, 

 trending in a south-easterly direction to Dibdeii. 



Here, then, where the New Forest stands, in the Eocene 

 period, rolled an inland sea, whose waves lashed the Wilt- 

 shire chalk hills on the north, moulding, with every stroke of 

 their breakers, its chalk flints into pebbles, dashing them against 

 its cliffs, as the waves do at this very hour those very same 

 pebbles along the Hurst beach. Its south-western boundary- 

 line between Ballard Head and the Needles was rent asunder by 

 volcanic action, and the chalk-flints flung up vertically mark to 

 this day the violence of the disruption. 



II H 2 235 



