52 Wild Life in a Southern County 



reckoned by their short spans eternity upon eternity has 

 gone by. To me the greatest marvel is the countless, the 

 infinite number of the organisms that have existed, each 

 with its senses and feelings, whose bodies now help to build 

 up the solid crust of the earth. These tiny shells have 

 had millions of ancestors : Nature seems never weary of 

 repeating the same model. 



In the osier-bed the brook-sparrow chatters ; there, 

 too, the first pollard willow stands, or rather leans, hollow 

 and aged, across the water. This tree is the outpost of a 

 thousand others that line the banks of the stream for mile 

 after mile yonder down in the valley. How quickly this 

 little fountain grows into a streamlet and then to a consi- 

 derable brook ! — without apparently receiving the waters 

 of any feeders. In the first half-mile it swells sufficiently, 

 if bayed up properly, to drive a mill — as, indeed, many 

 of the springs issuing from these coombes do just below 

 the mouth. In little more than a mile, measuring by its 

 windings, it becomes broad enough to require some effort 

 to leap it, and then deepens into a fair-sized brook. 



The rapidity of the increase is accounted for by the 

 fact that every field it passes whose surface inclines towards 

 it is a watershed from which an unseen but considerable 

 drainage takes place. When no brook passes through the 

 fields the water stands and soaks downwards, or evaporates 

 slowly : directly a ditch is opened it fills, and the effect of 

 a stream is not only to collect water till then unseen, but 

 to preserve it from evaporation or disappearance into the 

 subsoil. Probably, if it were possible to start an artificial 

 stream in many places, after a while it would almost keep 

 itself going at times, provided, of course, that the bottom 

 was not porous. Below the mouth of the coombe the water 

 has worn itself a channel quite sis feet deep in the chalk 



