76 THE GEOLOGIST. 



Deluge." ''It had been washed up to its present elevation by a 

 flood." *'It had been formed" (this I think was the suggestion of 

 a Keverend Brother) "by sands blown up the hill from the mouth 

 of Poole Harbour" ! ! ! and so forth — some of the theories being 

 not much in advance of that of the country folk, "that the devil 

 had dropped it there" (as he is in the habit of dropping 

 boulders in many counties) " during a nightly excursion for the purpose 

 of blocking up Poole Harbour mouth." I went, and found a noble rock 

 indeed— a cube of some twenty feet— on an isolated heather peak looking 

 far and wide over moor and sea, with an old black-cock washing his 

 steel-blue jacket in the sand at its foot. 



A glance showed me that it was no boulder, but a remnant of partially- 

 removed tertiary strata, probably still in sitUj though it might have 

 sunk to a lower level from the abrasion of softer beds beneath. 



But (and here my ignorance cries for help) I found that its 

 innumerable strata, and the gravel around, were not composed of the 

 same materials as the Bagshot and IS'ew Torest beds, with which I am 

 tolerably acquainted, but of coarse quartz grit, mixed with a dark grit, 

 apparently fragments of trap, 



Now will any kind and wise man tell me (1) How they got there ? 

 (2) "Whether they came from the Dartmoor granites and South Devon 

 traps ? (3) Whether they have any connexion with the vast beds of 

 porcelain clay which are spread over the basin of Poole Harbour, a few 

 miles off ? One could not help fancying that the soluble silicates of 

 alumina from the disintegrated metamorphic rocks laj'- below in the 

 deeper basin, while the coarser grit had been washed on to the shores of 

 the oestuary to be upheaved afterwards on the shoulders of the Corfe 

 chalk ridge : but guesses are useless without investigation ; and I was 

 leaving the place in a day or two, and did not know but that the whole 

 subject had been worked out already by some wiser man. Am I, 

 thrrofore, to be debarred from learning at second hand what I had no 

 means of discovering at first hand ? And how can I more easily learn 

 than through such a " Notes and Queries " department as I recommend 

 to you ? 



Conceive hundreds of people having each a question like mine to ask, 

 nnd a dozen kind-hearted sages who will bear with our ignorance (often 

 .1 fonr with our silliness) and answer, at least, "If you will read such 

 MTul fiuch a book, you will find out all about it." And you will see 



