The Natural History of Selborne 223 



fluted sides, and regular hollows and slopes, that carry at once the 

 air of vegetative dilatation and expansion. . . . 



... Or was there ever a time when these immense masses of 

 calcareous matter were thrown into fermentation by some adven- 

 titious moisture ; were raised and leavened into such shapes by some 

 plastic power ; and so made to swell and heave their broad backs 

 into the sky so much above the less animated clay of the wild 

 [weald] below P 1 



By what I can guess from the admeasurements of the hills that 

 have been taken round my house, I should suppose that these 

 hills surmount the wild at an average of about the rate of five 

 hundred feet. 



One thing is very remarkable as to the sheep : from the westward 

 till you get to the river Adur all the flocks have horns, and smooth 

 white faces, and white legs, and a hornless sheep is rarely to be 

 seen ; but as soon as you pass that river eastward, and mount 

 Beeding Hill, all the flocks at once become hornless, or as they call 

 them, poll-sheep ; and have, moreover, black faces with a white tuft 

 of wool on their foreheads, and speckled and spotted legs, so that 

 you would think that the flocks of Laban were pasturing on one side 

 of the stream, and the variegated breed of his son-in-law Jacob were 

 cantoned along on the other. And this diversity holds good respec- 

 tively on each side from the valley of Bramber and Beeding to the 

 eastward, and westward all the whole length of the downs. If you 

 talk with the shepherds on this subject, they tell you that the case 

 has been so from time immemorial ; and smile at your simplicity if 

 you ask them whether the situation of these two different breeds 

 might not be reversed ? However, an intelligent friend of mine 

 near Chichester is determined to try the experiment ; and has this 

 autumn, at the hazard of being laughed at, introduced a parcel of 



1 We now know that these shapes are due to the slow denuding action of 

 rain-water, which gradually melts away the surface of the chalk beneath the thin 

 layer of turf which covers it. The weald clay underlies the chalk, a thick mass 

 of which once spread over it from North Downs to South Downs. The central 

 portion of this sheet of chalk has long since been removed by denudation ; the 

 harder mass to the north and south still overlies the clay, but is itself in process of 

 receding slowly. ED. 



