81 TOWN GEOLOGY. [HI. 



We are nearing, by whatever rail we approach London, 

 the escarpment of the chalk downs. 



All readers, surely, know the white chalk, the 

 special feature and the special pride of the south of 

 England. All know its softly-rounded downs, its vast 

 beech woods, its short and sweet turf, its snowy cliffs, 

 which have given so some say to the whole island 

 the name of Albion the white land. But all do not, 

 perhaps, know that till we get to the chalk no single 

 plant or animal has been found which is exactly like 

 any plant or animal now known to be living. The 

 plants and animals grow, on the whole, more and more 

 like our living forms as we rise in the series of beds. 

 But only above the chalk (as far as we yet know) do 

 we begin to find species identical with those living 

 now. 



This in itself would prove a vast lapse of time. 

 We shall have a further proof of that vast lapse when 

 we examine the chalk itself. It is composed of this 

 there is now no doubt almost entirely of the shells 

 of minute animalcules ; and animalcules (I use an 

 unscientific word for the sake of unscientific readers) 

 like these, and in some cases identical with them, are 

 now forming a similar deposit of mud, at vast depths, 

 over the greater part of the Atlantic sea-floor. This 

 fact has been put out of doubt by recent deep-sea 

 dredgings. A whole literature has been written on it 

 of late. Any reader who wishes to know it, need only 

 ask the first geologist he meets; and if he has the 

 wholesome instinct of wonder in him, fill his imagina- 

 tion with true wonders, more grand and strange than 

 he is like to find in any fairy tale. All I have to do 

 with the matter here is, to say that, arguing from the 



