154 ARE SOILS ENRICHED, IMPOVERISHED, pt. irr. 



cretaceous bed of the ocean was upheaved by the fiat of 

 the Ahnighty, and transformed into chalk hill-tops; 

 that is (though such huge spaces of time are as undat- 

 able as eternity), possibly from about the time that the 

 Pyrenees and the Jura began to sprout, and to change 

 from subaqueous, horizontal, alluvial flats into hyp93- 

 thral precipices and mountain-ridges. 



These suppositions are at least as probable as the 

 generality of physiological suppositions, though that is 

 not saying much for them. But 



I'll beHeve both : 

 And what doth else want credit, come to me, 

 And I'll be sworn 't is true \ 



and, believing both historically and physiologically, the 

 ground may be supposed to have been accumulating 

 poison for all vegetation save the holly, for myriads of 

 years previous to the creation of man, instead of the 

 poor centuries and thousands of years which I have 

 mentioned. Yet nothing can be more flourishing than 

 the mixed plantations where the beeches of West wood 

 and Lipping wood stood ; and the self-sown grass 

 grows with extraordinary luxuriance where the beeches 

 have been cut, and even under those which remain 

 standing as far as the light which is let in sideways by 

 the felling of the outside trees permits. So that neither 

 drip nor excretion can have been the deleterious cause 

 here, but simply extreme density of shade. The only 

 larches I know in England more than half a century 

 old, which have never shown a symptom of foxy blight. 



