ON A PIECE OF CHALK 45 



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. 

 Nevertheless, it covers but an insignificant portion of 

 the whole area occupied by the chalk formation of 

 the globe, which has precisely the same general char- 

 acters as ours, and is found in detached patches, some 

 less, and others more extensive, than the English. 



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 Lon- 

 don basin; it runs through Denmark and Central 

 Europe, and extends southward to North Africa; while 

 eastward, it 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 three thousand miles in long diameter 

 the area of which would be as great as that of Europe, 

 and would many times exceed that of the largest exist- 

 ing inland sea the Mediterranean. 



Thus the chalk is no unimportant element in the 

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

 stamp, varying with the conditions to which it is ex- 

 posed, 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 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 the wary cormorant, 



