42 



THE GEOLOGIST. 



Years ago, when a child, I picked up shells and pebbles on 

 the Kentish strands. In school-boy days, with bolder hand and 

 surer foot, oft have I scrambled o'er those white chalk-cliffs, or 

 clambered homewards for six long miles o'er sea-weeded rocks with 

 satchel loaded full of fossils gathered from the sHppery shores of 

 Eastwear Bay, were the dark-blue crumbling Gault daily yields its 

 crop of ghttering fossils to the destructive battering of the salt sea 

 waves. 



As the home almost of my childhood do I still look back to East- 

 wear Bay. On its flat and sanded shores are dotted innumerable 

 earth coils of ever-working worms, o'er the bronzed and unctuous 

 fields of tangle and fucoids, and the barnacle-crusted rocks are 

 spattered myriads of tiny tube-worms (Spirorbes and Serpulse), and 

 thousands of patches of the matted and netted towns of bryozoans 

 (Escharse and Flustrse). The rough waves wash up the almost 

 senseless bristled sea-mouse (Ajohrodita aculeata). Perriwinkles 

 cling to the overlapping algals, and troups of limpets at the recess 

 of the tide march down with solemn step and slow to browse in 

 the fields of the serrated fuci, retiring before its flood to fit 

 themselves fastidiously down again to their perches on the rocks. 

 Lobsters and crabs pass seemingly happy days in holes amongst the 

 bigger stones, while eolids, dorids, and other inhabitants of the deep 

 wade here ashore o'er smooth, or rugged paths to spawn. 



The long line of underclifi!, the Warren, stretches in romantic 

 beauty its chains of hill and dale along beneath the tall white cliffs, 

 that proudly lift their lordly crests five hundred feet above the sing- 

 ing waves below. 



Who is there amongst us with heart so dead as not to admire and 

 delight in such a scene as this ? Wlio, from the fairest of England's 

 daughters to the sunburnt labourer, is dead to those charms of sense 

 and scene which ever- varied Nature ever variedly presents to refresh 

 the heart of the poor mechanic as thoroughly and as truly, as they do 

 the gentler and more exquisite sensibilities of those who have never 

 known a care. 



" Come with me," says Lewes, in one of his beautiful ' Studies,' 

 " come with me and lovingly study Nature, as she breathes, 

 palpitates, and works under myriad forms of Life." Come with me, 



