18 



a dealer. I saw it had been patched : I soaked it in water, so as to 

 separate the patched-up pieces, and found that the end had been 

 put upside down in the middle, and the middle wrong way upwards 

 at the end ; and these ridiculous blunders had been made, notwith- 

 standing that, when it had been well soaked, and the loose chalk 

 all cleaned away, the pieces fitted exactly together in their right 

 places. Tricks of the same sort will be found in Lias specimens, 

 and those from other formations. 



It will save much labour if specimens are cut down, before pack- 

 ing, to the smallest size. This requires a knack, and is by no means 

 so easy as may seem. The schoolboy thinks that the carpenter's plane 

 works along almost by itself ; be tries his hand, and finds out his 

 mistake. So, to see an experienced hand split a pebble, or chip off 

 a flint, looks very easy indeed. Try it, and the fact is found very 

 different. Description, in a few words, is almost impossible. I 

 will only say that, to chip down a flint, you must use a hammer not 

 too heavy, and must give, with the square end, a short, quick, light 

 blow, — struck rather sloping outwards. If you are handy in this, you 

 will thus get slice after slice with the greatest ease. If your object 

 is only to lighten the mass, it is soon done. If you want to examine 

 the flint, you can thus get chips thin enough to examine with the 

 microscope. 



A vast number of beautiful fossils are found, in many different 

 sorts of rocks, both limestone and sandstone, in the inside of mo- 

 derately sized rounded masses — or pebbles, but not water-vjom — of 

 a more or less oval form. It may be worth making a remark, as to 

 getting to the inside of these, which will be found universally appli- 

 cable as to them, and to be of nearly the same value in flints and 

 fragments of rock. Such masses, whether loose pebbles or in rocks, 

 are formed by that holding together of like to like which you may see 

 every day showing itself more or less strikingly in water, quicksilver, 

 and numberless other forms. The attraction is between the particles 

 of the same material. If uninterfered with, every mass would be 

 round. But if a long leaf gets enclosed in a forming mass, it inter- 

 feres with the attraction of like to like, — and this attraction goes 

 on round the edges of the leaf instead of round the centre; and so 

 the body becomes flattened and oval. Another consequence follows ; 

 namely, that, where the leaf has fallen, the lime- or sand-stone has 



