64 TOILERS IN THE SEA. 



Professor Baily remarks that Charleston is built 

 upon a bed of several hundred feet in thickness, 

 every cubic inch of which is filled with myriads of 

 perfectly preserved shells of Foraminifera. 



The most prolific beds of defunct Foraminifera are 

 those of the chalk, which have a considerable extent 

 in the south of England. Accurate measurements of 

 the thickness of the chalk have not been made, but 

 Sir Henry de la Beche estimates the average thick- 

 ness at 700 feet The average thickness of the chalk 

 on the Sussex coast is estimated at 800 feet. The 

 flinty chalk at Dover is 350 feet in thickness. At 

 Diss, in Norfolk, the thickness was ascertained by 

 boring to be 5 10 feet. The number of square miles of 

 chalk in England must be very considerable, not to 

 mention its continuation in Northern France (fig. 13), 

 and other deposits in different parts of the continent. 

 No human calculation could embrace the myriads of 

 shells of Foraminifera which these deposits contain, 

 and yet they are only a few of the most important 

 accumulations of these remains. We must leave 

 imagination to fill in the details, on the basis of these 

 suggestions. 



Apart from their natural position, whether living 

 at the bottom of sea, or dead and buried in the 

 various deposits, of which they form so important a 

 part, it is remarkable how we are always accompanied 

 through life by these fossilised remains, distributed 



