42 
■rili; GEOJiOlilST. 
Years ago, when a child, I picked up shells and pebbles on 
tlio Kentish strands. In school-boy days, with bolder hand and 
siu'er foot, oft have I scrambled o'er those white chalk-cliffs, oi' 
clambered homewards for six long miles o'er sea-weeded rocks with 
satchel loaded full of fossils gathered from the slippery shores of 
Eastwear Bay, were the dark-blue crvimbling Gault daily yields its 
crop of glittering fossils to the destructive batteinng 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 wornis, 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 Serpulffi), and 
thousands of patches of the matted and netted towns of bryozoans 
(Escharoe and Flustra!). The rough waves wash up the almost 
senseless bristled sea-mouse {Aphrodita 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 undercliff, 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 hundi'ed feet above the sing- 
ing waves below. 
Who is there amongst us with lieai-t 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 Natirre, as she breathes, 
palpitates, and works under myriad forms of Life." Come with mc. 
