GEOLOGY OF FOLKESTONE — THE GAULT. 
207 
trophe connected with its opening out. Is it impossible that in a 
first or final upbm-st " forty miles wliich erst were land," should " now 
be sea ;" and the similarity of the mammalian deposits in both coun- 
tries proves that the complete severance had not taken place dui'ing at 
least the earlier part of the Pleistocene era, and it is therefore certain 
that the final disruption must have occurred only immediately preced- 
ing, if not actually within, the limits of the hiiman era, as now 
ante-dated by recent discoveries. 
But let us now return again, after this digression, to the Gault, 
and as we are at Lympne, we may as well vary our route, and get 
back to the Folkestone shore through the waving corn-fields and 
" meadows green." On our left the chalk downs rear their grass-clad 
slopes, brown and arid — always with the same parched, hungry look, 
whether the woods and fields below are verdant in the emerald greens 
of spring, painted with the rosy hues of flowery summer, or golden 
in the autumn's brighter tints, when 
" O'er the leaves before they fall 
Such hues hath Natui'e thrown, 
That the woods wear in sunless days 
A sunshine of their own." 
Even in vnnter they change not, and when the snow is on the ground, 
the bare slopes of the chalk- downs stand out brown and arid just the 
same as when the hot air vibrates and flickers in the estive sun- 
beams. 
Every now and then, in the plain below, are pits sunk in the super- 
ficial brick-earth, and as we pass through Cheriton a tall conical 
chimney marks the site of a tile-kiln. The clay for the tiles is dug 
out of the Gault, and round the pug-mill are scattered heaps of little 
black phosphatic nodules and casts of shells and crabs, the refuse of 
the washings. 
(To be continued.) 
