On a Piece of Chalk 75 



Sussex, it enters into the very foundation of all the 

 south-eastern counties. 



Attaining, as it does in some places, a thickness of 

 more than a thousand feet, the English chalk must be 

 admitted to be a mass of considerable magnitude. Never- 5 

 theless, it covers but an insignificant portion of the 

 whole area occupied by the chalk formation of the globe, 

 which has precisely the same general characters as ours, 

 and is found in detached patches, some less, and others 

 more extensive, than the English. 10 



Chalk occurs in north-west Ireland; it stretches over 

 a large part of France, the chalk which underlies Paris 

 being, in fact, a continuation of that of the London 

 basin; it runs through Denmark and Central Europe, and 

 extends southward to North Africa; while eastward, it 15 

 appears in the Crimea and in Syria, and may be traced 

 as far as the shores of the Sea of Aral, in Central Asia. 



If all the points at which true chalk occurs were 

 circumscribed, they would lie within an irregular oval 

 about 3,000 miles in long diameter the area of which 20 

 would be as great as that of Europe, and would many 

 times exceed that of the largest existing inland sea the 

 Mediterranean. 



Thus the chalk is no unimportant element in the 

 masonry of the earth's crust, and it impresses a peculiar 25 

 stamp, varying with the conditions to which it is exposed, 

 on the scenery of the districts in which it occurs. The 

 undulating downs and rounded coombs, covered with 

 sweet-grassed turf, of our inland chalk country, have a 

 peacefully domestic and mutton-suggesting prettiness, but 30 

 can hardly be called either grand or beautiful. But on 

 our southern coasts, the wall-sided cliffs, many hundred 

 feet high, with vast needles and pinnacles standing out in 

 the sea, sharp and solitary enough to serve as perches for 



