52 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR, 



more earnest about their religion, think very little about 

 ghosts and spectres : their faith in the realities of the unseen 

 world seems to have banished from their minds much of their 

 old belief in its phantoms. " 



In the rude fences that separate from each other the little 

 farms in this plain, we find frequent fragments of the oyster- 

 bed, hardened into a tolerably compact limestone. It is seen 

 to most advantage, however, in some of the deeper cuttings 

 in the fields, where the surrounding matrix exists merely as 

 an incoherent shale ; and the shells may be picked out as en- 

 tire as when they lay, ages before, in the mud, which we still 

 see retaining around them its original colour. They are small, 

 thin, triangular, much resembling in form some specimens of 

 the Ostrea deltoidea, but greatly less in size. The nearest 

 resembling shell in Sowerby is the Ostrea acuminata, an 

 oyster of the clay that underlies the great Oolite of Bath. 

 Few of the shells exceed an inch and half in length, and the 

 majority fall short of an inch. What they lack in bulk, how- 

 ever, they make up in number. They are massed as thickly 

 together, to the depth of several feet, as shells on the heap 

 at the door of a Newhaven fisherman, and extend over many 

 acres. Where they lie open we can still detect the triangular 

 disc of the hinge, with the single impression of the adductor 

 muscle ; and the foliaceous character of the shell remains in 

 most instances as distinct as if it had undergone no mineral 

 change. I have seen nowhere in Scotland, among the second- 

 ary formations, so unequivocal an oyster-bed ; nor do such 

 beds seem to be at all common in formations older than the 

 Tertiary in England, though the oyster itself is sufficiently 

 so. We find Mantell stating, in his recent work (" Medals of 

 Creation"), after first describing an immense oyster-bed of the 

 London Basin, that underlies the city (for what is now Lon- 

 don was once an oyster-bed), that in the chalk below, though 

 it contains several species of Ostrea, the shells are diffused 



