LITTLE GADDESDEN. 



339 



and that the surface soil, dfversta skarpan, was full of 

 flints, often in such multitudes that the ground, marken, 

 could scarcely be seen for them. Here we noted that 

 the most flints lay on the surface, but commonly the 

 deeper they were in a chalk pit the less the number of 

 fragments that occurred. I saw many chalk-pits, on 

 whose sides there scarcely appeared a single flint, while 

 notwithstanding that, the ploughed fields and the soil 

 above were quite full of them. 



[Here omit 7J- lines to bottom of page 335, and 

 6£ lines on page 336, recording the superstition of Mr. 

 Ellis and other farmers, that lumps of chalk exposed to 

 the sun and rain hardened into flint.] I made the sug- 

 gestion that the flint might lie in the middle of the lumps 

 of chalk, and that no one had seen it before it came out 

 on the field, when the air, rain and sun, reduced the 

 chalk itself to a fine meal [which is clearly the true ex- 

 planation of the appearance of angular flints ' in places 

 where they knew that no flints had been before and 

 which afterwards, when the chalk had lain some time 

 were found full of flints.'] But they answered that then 

 they would meet with a large number of flints in those 

 chalk pits where the chalk is dug or hewn loose for ma- 

 nuring the fields, but they had not found such, or only very 

 few. It is not every kind of chalk that undergoes this 

 change, but it must be a particular sort, because when 

 chalk is carried on to the fields for manure the greatest 

 part of it goes to pieces to a fine meal or mould after it 

 has lain some time on the field in the open air ; but only 

 certain pieces of it are left to lie and harden, without thus 

 going to dust, but what kind of chalk this is I cannot say.* 



* There is no foundation whatever for this story of the farmers beyond 

 that on clayey parts of the fields on to which they therefore carried chalk, 

 flints afterwards appeared in the manner suggested above by Kalm. [J. L.] 



Z 2 



