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THE GEOLOGIST. 



boundaries of the ancient lands and seas of that remote geological 

 age would display very different dispositions of continents, islands, 

 oceans, than now exist. All through the great Tertiary ages, the 

 Pleistocene and the historic periods, the sea has been at its ancient 

 toil, destroying and renovating, pulling down and levelling. All 

 through those vast periods the winds and rain ? and frosts and snows 

 have been abrading and disintegrating the mountain-rocks, and slowly 

 bringing down the detritus to the river -valleys and the sea. All 

 through those vast ages — reckonable only by millions of years — the 

 earthquake and the volcano, subterranean expansions and contractions 

 have contested with the air and the water the dominion of the earth, 

 and have maintained the supremacy of the dry land over the storm- 

 crested "waste of waters." 



"We have been over some twenty miles of ground in our brief and 

 rapid notice of the Cliff-section of the Kentish coast ; we have gone 

 ages back in our reflections ; we have spoken of the rocks which form 

 those cliffs as having been the mud beneath or the sands upon the 

 shores of an ancient ocean long since passed away. Let us sit down 

 now under the shade of the massive walls of the Roman castrum 

 where first we halted in our mental ramble, and shortly tell the 

 history of these lofty cliffs, "white, blue, and grey," yellow and 

 green. 



Fine calcareous matter, stiff mud, siliceous sands, all the produce 

 of the salt sea, all once deposited in the depths or on the shores of 

 ocean, now two, three, four, and five hundred feet above the waves. 

 All once piled nearly flatly over each other like so many books on a 

 table, now tilted up edgewise like volumes in an open space on a 

 library shelf. If, reader, you are a geologist, you will know some- 

 thing of what I am going to tell, for the Wealden district of which 

 our section forms a part is too remarkable not to be well known to 

 scientific men. If you are not a geologist, then, though I tell an old 

 tale, it will be one that will mightily interest youuf I tell it well. 



There was — how many ages since no one can say, no figures ex- 

 press ; but it was long, long ago, if even we could reckon by ages — 

 an ancient continent spreading over all this region round, not then 

 so temperate as now, but hotter and more like the tropic band ; on 

 its shores tall trees and a rank luxuriant herbage grew. Gradually 

 the forest-covered soil sank down, and gradually the great river that 

 drained the continental tract spread wider and wider its mud and 

 ooze. There in its swamps gigantic lizards and winged reptiles sought 



