56 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST 



true poet and naturalist must do he fell in love with 

 it, and spent hours in filling his pockets with strange- 

 looking pebbles of all kinds until he was brought into 

 the house to dinner by main force, when he spread his 

 collection on the table, and demanded an explanation 

 of " what, whence, and why " in regard to each pebble. 

 Our companions a great lawyer, a military hero, a 

 politician, and two " learned men " regarded him as 

 eccentric, not to say childish. But I entirely sym- 

 pathized with him, and when next day we sailed down 

 to Orford and stood in front of the old Norman fortress, 

 he further established himself in my regard by deeply 

 sighing and exclaiming, " So that is a real English 

 castle ! " whilst several large tears quietly streamed 

 down his undisturbed countenance. 



To give an idea of what various rocks from far- 

 distant localities may be brought together on an East 

 Coast beach, take that of Felixstowe as an example. 

 What is true of the East Coast is to some extent also 

 true of the South Coast, and, indeed, wherever the sea 

 makes the pebbles of a modern beach from the materials 

 furnished by the breaking up of old deposits, which were 

 in their day brought by ice-flows or torrential currents 

 from remote regions. The most abundant kind of 

 pebbles on the Felixstowe beach are small, rounded, 

 somewhat flat pieces of flint, derived not directly from 

 the chalk which .is the " stratum " or " bed " in which 

 flint is originally formed, but from the Red Crag capping 

 the clay cliffs (London clay or early Eocene), and also 

 from surface washings and " gravels " (of later age than 

 the crag) farther north, whence they have travelled south- 

 ward with many other constituents of the beach. All 

 these flints are stained ruddy brown or yellow by iron 

 a process they underwent when lying in the gravels or 



