40 THE BOOK OF THE OPEN AIR 



the Greek spirit of inquiry which was overlaying seabed. Hidden, some 

 arrested for at least a thousand years, in outcrops here and there, by more 

 It is to the immortal renown of the recent layers, are the chalk deposits 

 Ionian sages that they " left off telling that stretch from our eastern coast to 

 tales " to search into causes. They Salisbury Plain ; deposits laid aeons 

 shared the belief that the earth was a before Britain " arose from out the 

 flat circle, encompassed by an ocean azure main," when the water covered 

 whence flowed the seas and rivers, the Continent, and when parts of what 

 Observation of its universality and are now France, Spain and Italy were 

 states have prompted the guess islands in a central sea. Then come 

 Thales was its author that water changes as mighty as they are obscure, 

 was the primal element of which all for too often, Nature, like the Cumaean 

 things are made. There was potential Sibyl, has destroyed her records ; and 

 truth therein, for without this astound- all that is known is that the chalk 

 ing compound of invisible, tasteless became overlaid with sands and clays, 

 gases, life could not have been, and, most noticeable among these, the so- 

 in the face of the proved fundamental called London clay, because the Metro- 

 relationship between the organic and polis stands upon it. Teeth of sharks, 

 the inorganic, where can we say that carapaces of turtles, scutes of croco- 

 life begins or ends ? Strange, that diles, and other fossils found therein, 

 what is the solvent of plant and animal witness to warm climates in these 

 is the stay of their existence ; the northern zones. Upon these clays rest 

 mobile sustaining the relatively immo- the loose sands and gravels locally 

 bile. To it the moulding of the globe's known as " Crag," laid in shallow 

 surface is mainly due, and if, as Ruskin waters yielding enormous numbers of 

 says, " in considering ideas of beauty, shells, and also bones of the mastodon 

 colour, even as a source of pleasure, is and tapir, and other remains. Colder 

 feeble compared with form," great is grew the temperature, with shrinking of 

 man's debt to rain and river, sea and the waters, till where now the shallow 

 ocean. North Sea rolls six hundred feet at 

 Here, in these islands, travel where the deepest there spread a valley 

 we will, our tread is on the bottom of through which flowed a river whose 

 ancient waters, indeed, upon seabed descendant is the Rhine. Researches 



(To be continued.) 



