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 Reverend Brother) "by sands blown up the hiU 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 situ, 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 New Forest 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 olf ? One could not help fancying that the soluble silicates of 
alumina from the disintegrated metamorphic rocks lay below in the 
deeper basin, while the coarser grit had been washed on to the shores of 
the sestuary 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 abeady by some wiser man. Am I, 
therefore, 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 Uueries " department as I recommend 
to you ? 
Conceive hundreds of people having each a question like mine to ask, 
and a dozen kind-hearted sages who will bear with our ignorance (often 
I fear with our silliness) and answer, at least, " If you will read such 
and Buch a book, you will find out all about it." And you will see 
