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NATURAL HISTORY. 



" The cliffs at Bempton are very much like those at Flamborough : a nearly perpendicular wall of 

 chalk and flint, about three hundred feet high. This great sea wall is fast crumbling away with 

 the action of wind and tide. It looks as if it had been built of flints, with chalk for mortar, and 

 sometimes there seems to be as much mortar as stone, and often there is scarcely any, and, in fact, 

 it then looks like a dry wall. The outline of the coast is very irregular; some parts of the 

 cliff are harder than others, and stand out to sea as promontories, while others are soft, and have 

 apparently been washed away into caves and little fiords. Here and there the cliffs have crackeJ, 

 and then you can look down, and in some places climb down, through the rift to the sea. The 



RINGED GUILLEMOT. 



top of the cliffs is covered with a thick bed of soil, which slopes steep down to the edge of the 

 rock, and is generally grown over with grass cropped short by rabbits. This steep slope to the 

 edge of the cliff is rather dangerous, and it is very rare indeed that you can get a view of the face 

 of the rock except from the opposite promontory. On the ledges of these precipitous cliffs the 

 Guillemots breed in great numbers. Sometimes one may see them in such quantities as to remind 

 one of a swarm of bees. They fly about in all directions, and numbers are constantly arriving and 

 others leaving the ledges, while far away in the sea, down at the bottom of the cliffs, hundreds of 

 birds are swimming about. The whole scene is full of life. 



" A party of ' dimmers ' consists of three, two at the top and one suspended in rnid-air. The 

 latter, in consequence of the greater risk he has to run, takes one-half of the eggs as his share. 

 This adventurous man must have a clear head, or he would become dizzy ; neither must he be too 

 heavy, or he would tire out the two men who have to lower and raise him some two hundred 

 feet or more, twenty times a day ; while, at the same time, he must have a good knowledge of the 

 various ledges and crannies where the birds breed. 



