340 KALM'S ENGLAND. 



It cannot be the harder kind of chalk which is here 

 called Hurlock, because we observed near Ivinghoe that 

 there occur scarcely any flint fragments where an abun- 

 dance of the Hurlock lay on the fields [Omit 



nearly 2 lines] . . . Fields situated on the north side 

 of a hill were commonly less full of flints than those on the 

 south side [Omit 3J lines to bottom of p. 336, and 9 

 lines on p. 337, where Kalm adverts to the possibility of 

 flints being carried on to the fields with the chalk manure, 

 and to the practice of picking flints off the fields and lay- 

 ing them in heaps.] 



[T. I. p. 337.] When ordinary chalk comes to lie 

 exposed to the weather or becomes wet, it sometimes 

 hardens so that no one can write with it. Besides 

 what has just been advanced, it seems to be tolerably 

 clear that both the chalk and flints behaved so, for we 

 found in some places on the fields large pieces of chalk, 

 which were quite hard, and when we broke them to pieces, 

 they consisted of chalk all through. Others of them had 

 at the centre a flint the size of a pea, or of a bean, others 

 as large as a hazel-nut, and others still larger ; but all 

 that which was outside this flint was a hard and half- 

 petrified chalk. This went by degrees, so that from a 

 flint the size of a pea at the centre, and all the rest a 

 hard chalk around it, it went to a flint the size of a closed 

 fist, and still larger, in the middle, so that at last there 

 was only an outer crust of this hard chalk of some £ inch 

 thick. . . . [Omit 2 lines.] We saw and collected 

 several pieces in which we could plainly perceive, to all 

 appearance, the whole process from a black fully developed 

 flint at the centre to a loose chalk at the outer surface, 

 and all grades of hardness between these two points, ripe 

 flint and [T. I. p. 338] loose chalk. A great number of 

 flints on the fields had a white chalk-crust, Krit-skarpa, 

 round them. Several flints were entire and of the same 



