120 TOWN GEOLOGY. [v. 



the limestone Mils of Great Britain; and I did not 

 speak at random when I said that I was not leading 

 you away as far as you fancied by several thousand 

 miles. 



Examine any average limestone quarry from Bristol 

 to Berwick, and you will see there all that I have been 

 describing ; that is, all of it which is not soft animal 

 matter, certain to decay. You will see the lime-mud 

 hardened into rock beds ; you will see the shells em- 

 bedded in it ; you will see the corals in every 

 stage of destruction ; you will see whole layers made 

 up of innumerable fragments of Crinoids no wonder 

 they are innumerable, for, it has been calculated, there 

 are in a single animal of some of the species 140,000 

 joints 140,000 bits of lime to fall apart when its soft 

 parts decay. But is it not all there ? And why 

 should it not have got there by the same process by 

 which similar old coral beds get up the mountain 

 sides in the West Indies and elsewhere ; namely, by 

 the upheaving force of earthquakes ? When you see 

 similar effects, you have a right to presume similar 

 causes. If you see a man fall off a house here, and 

 break his neck ; and some years after, in London or 

 New York, or anywhere else, find another man lying 

 at the foot of another house, with his neck broken in 

 the same way, is it not a very fair presumption that he 

 has fallen off a house likewise ? 



You may be wrong. He may have come to his end 

 by a dozen other means : but you must have proof of 

 that. You will have a full right, in science and in 

 common sense, to say That man fell off the house, 

 till some one proves to you that he did not. 



In fact, there is nothing which you see in the lime- 



