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I 



"TRUTH AT THJ; BOTTOM OF A" MARL-PIT. 73 



What on earth or rather under the earth was to 

 be done with them? Favored occupiers of the val- 

 leys and meadow-lands of our Island, you hardly 

 know what I mean ! Lend me your attention then for 

 a moment, while I read a short chapter from that 

 Geological Economy which experience and the clays 

 have taught me. 



Among the manifold varieties which Mature offers 

 to the mind and gratitude of man, not the least 

 beneficent and beautiful is the Undulation of the 

 earth's surface. How little do we value gifts and 

 blessings that are quite familiar! Imagine for a 

 moment a flat earth with no variety no inclination 

 of outline ; no hills, no dales, no uplands or meadows, 

 no running streams or rivers, no tufted knolls or 

 winding dells, no "gradients" but one vast unruf- 

 fled surface, like the dead sea in a dead calm, or the 

 Great Desert itself: and then imagine one thing 

 more, a thing which you are in the conventional 

 habit of considering one of the greatest agricultural 

 blessings a free percolating subsoil, underneath 

 this vast monotony of surface, sucking down every 

 drop of rain as it falls, and preserving not only the 

 value of an egg-shell of liquid for man or beast to 

 slake his thirst withal. What would you have given, 

 under such a state of things, for Two Hundred and 



