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walls of our island home. How came those smoothly rounded 

 hills to be thus suddenly and abruptly cut short ? And what have 

 they to do with the similarly abrupt walls on the opposite coast ? 

 And the mind travels back through the dim and misty ages of the 

 past, questioning as it goes, to days when our island was no island, 

 when it was undoubtedly part and parcel of a continent far larger 

 than Europe is now, and stretching N.W. into the Atlantic no one 

 can guess how far ; when probably past this very spot there rolled 

 a great river on towards the east to join the Ehine, which emptied 

 itself then many miles further to the north than it does at present. 

 And we think of the time when there was free communication to 

 and fro, and the ancestors of our present plants and animals 

 travelled across and gained a footing here. For just as our English 

 nation is a mixture of many peoples from many lands, so must our 

 fauna and flora be looked upon as not in the strictest sense of the 

 word " indigenous," not locally " earth-born," but as having invaded 

 us on many sides. The plants give us at this day in Cornwall and 

 the S.W. of Ireland representatives of a Spanish and Portuguese 

 flora ; Scandinavian types on the mountains of Scotland and Cum- 

 berland, and even Wales ; French types in the S.E., while the 

 basis of all, like that of the people, is Germanic. And a similar 

 remark might be made about the animals, but that the extirpation 

 of species for our own convenience has proceeded at a much more 

 rapid rate with them than with the flowers. 



The question must often have arisen in the minds of those who 

 think — How did all these animals and plants get here ? And the 

 answer to-day is not far to seek. Straight in front of us stretched 

 the broad highway, across which seeds were wafted by primeval 

 winds, and roots wandered year by year, and over which our wild 

 animals found their way in search of food. And not only here to 

 the south but also from the east stretched a great broad prairie land, 

 a plain now submerged through the shrinking of the globe, which, 

 as our late earthquake reminded us, has not even yet ceased ; telling 

 its former history by the fossil wood and elephants' teeth and tusks 

 brought up in the fisherman's net. 



But then we cannot help going back farther still, and asking 

 the history of this pure white limestone that occurs in such 

 enormous masses over so many hundreds of square miles, well nigh 

 unsullied with sand, mud, or earth of any kind. In what beautiful 

 clear water it must have been deposited, some good distance off 

 shore, and far away from the mouth of any mud-laden stream ! 

 "What antiquity there is in it ! How long did it take to lay down 

 1200 feet of this chalk ? slowly, day by day, year by year, century 

 by century, covering up the remains of the creatures that moved in 

 the early waters. As you know it is all marine, full of the petrified 



