RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 303 



as they ascend, till they terminate in the uplands in mere 

 drains, such as a ditcher might excavate at the rate of a shil- 

 ling or two per yard, are eminently picturesque. On those 

 gentler slopes where the vegetable mould has had time and 

 space to accumulate, we find not a few of the finest and tallest 

 trees of the district There is a bosky luxuriance in their 

 more sheltered hollows, well known to the schoolboy what 

 time the fern begins to pale its fronds, for their store of hips, 

 sloes, and brambles ; and red over the foliage we may see, 

 ever and anon as we wend upwards, the abrupt frontage of 

 some precipitous scaur, suited to remind the geologist, from 

 its square form and flat breadth of surface, of the clifis of the 

 chalk. When viewed from the sea, at the distance of a few 

 miles, these ravines seem to divide the sloping tracts in which 

 they occur into large irregular fields, laid out considerably 

 more in accordance with the principles of the landscape gar- 

 dener than the stiffly squared rectilinear fields of the agricul- 

 turist They are ha-has of Nature's digging ; and their bot- 

 tom and sides in this part of the country we still find occu- 

 pied in a few cases though in many more they have been 

 ravaged by the wasteful axe by noble forest-feezes, tall 

 enough to overtop, in at least their middle reaches, the tracts 

 of table-land which they divide. 



I passed, a little farther on, the quarry of Old Red Sand- 

 stone, with a huge bank of boulder-clay resting over it, in 

 which I first experienced the evils of hard labour, and first 

 set myself to lessen their weight by becoming an observer of 

 geological phenomena. It had been deserted apparently for 

 many years ; and the debris of the clay partially covered up, 

 in a sloping talus, the frontage of rock beneath. Old Ited 

 Sandstone and boulder-clay, a broad bar of each ! such was 

 the compound problem which the excavation propounded to 

 me when I first plied the tool in it, a problem equally dark 

 at the time in both its parts. I have since got on a very 



