ON A CHALK HILL 219 



before us almost as if it were of marble. Its resistance 

 to weathering may be largely due to its porosity. All 

 the rainfall is sucked in, and there is little or no surface- 

 flow. A bed of clay on the contrary admits no water, 

 and all the rainfall upon its surface contributes towards 

 its waste. 



I do not know how those people feel who have been 

 bred in a country of soft tertiary rocks, where the hills 

 are mounds, and the streams slow and muddy. Those 

 who are native to a sterner tract cannot easily be happy 

 long together without gazing upon hills which have a 

 structure of their own, a structure which is brought out 

 and not effaced by weathering. They like their streams 

 to be rapid and clear, untinged by the bed over which 

 they flow. I once spent a holiday in Holstein, a land 

 of gentle hills, lakes and beechwoods, with here and 

 there an old chateau. The country was pleasant enough 

 at first sight, and furnished plenty of occupation to the 

 naturalist, but its charm did not last. Not even the 

 buckets of crayfishes, which with salad furnish the chief 

 holiday diversion of the Holsteiners, could allay the im- 

 patience with which my companion and I came to long 

 for a land of firm rocks. Such rocks do not abound in 

 the neighbourhood of the Baltic, but we made our way 

 to the little island of Moen, and there found sea cliffs of 

 hard chalk, rising in places to 400 feet above the beach. 

 The complicated folding and contortion of the chalk and 

 its overlying beds, the pinnacles, the sheer faces looking 

 seaward, and the wooded ravines satisfied the longing 

 which Holstein had been unable to appease. 



Gilbert White found something " peculiar, sweet and 

 amusing in the shapely figured aspect of chalk hills." 

 His favourite forest-tree, the beech, thrives best on these 

 same hills, and the chalk-downs of Hampshire with their 

 hanging woods of beech are among the chief delights of 

 Selborne. Box, juniper and yew are other chalk-loving 

 trees. Nowhere is the turf closer, or the thyme more 



