124 



THE GEOLOGIST. 



them with your pick ; break them in their lines of lamination with 

 your hammer ; knock them or cut them to pieces how you will, they 

 are teeming with fossils ; every fresh surface exposed is glittering 

 with the pearly iridescent nacre of crushed or flattened shells : nine- 

 tenths of the fossils, and even more, are in this compressed and 

 distorted state. Never pause in your work of destruction, for what 

 you leave undone in that way the sea and tlie weather will very 

 speedily accomphsh. The elements are certain to destroy all, good, 

 bad, or indifferent, matrix and fossils : you may save some glorious 

 treasures. Go to work, then, stoutly, but mind, only when the 

 gault is damio ; it is of no use cracking and shattering the hard grey 

 lumps dried in the summer's sun. In the arid droughts of that 

 season you may recline on those stony rocky ruins, and listlessly 

 cast pebbles in the sea, for the lustrous nacre of the shells will have 

 dessicated into the whiteness of mere carbonate of lime, and the 

 intractable gault will fracture into hundreds of little dice -like 

 fragments, but the fossils, tight-gripped in the hard and shrunken 

 cla}-, can never be extracted. 



Ligni. 11. — Solarium oniafum. From the Gault, 



h wore glorious work, that work of destruction, if it were only for 

 Iho gratification of the eye alone in the resplendent show of the 

 scores of yellow golden crumpled Inocerami and Ammonites which 

 ever}' frosh broken purple surface exposes ; but there are treasures 

 every now and then to be bagged, or basketed— for I always use a 

 tishonuan\s basket with a square hole in the lid, strapped over my 

 shouUlor. as \hv liaiuliosl object for the purpose, and as the best both 



