4 2 2 KALM'S ENGLAND. 



one single bed of flint, and not of many piled one on the 

 other. It seemed as if there had been a flat, even, and 

 level plain of bare chalk, whereon someone had spread a 

 stratum of single flints so close together that one touched 

 another, and then laid chalk on it. 



Obs. 2. — The flint which lay in these beds was in some 

 places thicker, up to 6 inches thickness, in other places 

 thinner, even to a thin plate of £-inch thick. Between 

 these strata of flint there seldom appeared any flints in 

 the chalk itself, only some isolated ones here and there. 

 In the chalk, but very seldom, was some little Pebble- 

 stone, sometimes oval, sometimes spherical. 



In the afore-named strata of Flints, the flint is sur- 

 rounded by chalk quite close, as if the chalk had been 

 soft, blot, when the flint came to sink down in the chalk, 

 and afterwards some more soft chalk came to lie thereon. 

 [T. II. p. 69.] These strata or beds of flints among the 

 chalk are peculiar. The flint stones lie here as horizon- 

 tal and as close to one another as if they had been 

 designedly thus arranged by human hands. How did 

 the Flint stone first come there in such an order ? 



The whole hill, backen, near the river Thames 

 west of Gravesend, consisted of bare chalk ; but at its 

 base, even with the water surface when the flood-tide is 

 highest, was such a stratum of flints as just described, 

 which lay in the same way, quite horizontal, as if it had 

 been arranged on the dead level. The pieces of flint 

 lay here entirely in the same plane. This flint stratum 

 could be seen at low water for nearly half an English 

 mile along the river bank. 



The colour of these perpendicular walls in the chalk- 

 pits is, for the most part, snow-white. In other places it 

 had acquired a yellowish tint, viz. : where there was soil 

 and trees above, from which some wet occasionally 

 trickled down and ran over the sides. In the places 



