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 the weather will very 
speedily accomplish. 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 damp ; it is of no use cracking and shattering the hard grey 
lumps di'ied 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 
clay, can never be extracted. 
It were glorious work, that work of destruction, if it were only for 
the gratification of the eye alone in the resplendent show of the 
scores of yellow golden crumpled Inocerami and Ammonites which 
every fresh broken purple surface exposes ; but there are treasures 
every now and then to be bagged, or basketed — for I always use a 
fisherman's basket, with a square hole in the lid, strapped over my 
shoulder, as the handiest object for the purpose, and as the best both 
Lign. \-i.~Solariim oriiatam. From the Gault. 
