i INTRODUCTORY $ 



sweet-briar, honey v Its regular 



suggests at a distance aom< landmark a 



road, or fence, or ruined rampart. Yet we see on nearer 

 inspection that it muit U- a natural feature, and we ask 

 ourselves why it should have arisen on the (ace of those 

 green declivities, and why its course on the one side of 

 the valley should lie so exactly repeated on the other. 

 Perchance a prominent mound rises from the general 

 level of a plain, so singularly as to have attracted notice 

 .irlicst tunes, and to have become the origin 

 of a local myth. It seems too Urge to be due to man's 

 operations, even if any intelligible reason could be assigned 

 heaped it together. On the supposition 

 how are we to account for 

 < lifted its materials 

 hem up into that solitary cone? 

 Again, the merest fragment of stone picked up on some 

 everyday ramble may furnish questions, for the due an- 

 swering of whi h many years of profitable study might be 

 needed. A piece of limestone, for example, may show us 

 no abundant fragments of corals and 

 With a little inquiry it may not be difficult to 

 the source of the stone, and to visit the rock 

 there find a thick bed of limestone, 

 crowded throughout with similar organisms, and extending 

 for miles across the country. It would need but a slender 

 mtance with modern science to make us feel assured 

 that :!;.- limestone > sent an old sea-bottom once 



v covered with living things. \\ < might muse on 

 issitudes of nature, wherein the oozy floor 

 of n former ocean has been changed into a land " made 



