286 
THE GEOLOGIST. 
boundaries of the ancient lands and seas of that remote geological 
age would display very diiferent dispositions of continents, islands, 
oceans, than now exist. All through the great Tertiary ages, the 
Pleistocene and the historic periods, the sea has been at its ancient 
toil, destroying and renovating, pulling down and levelling. All 
through those vast periods the winds and rain, and frosts and snows 
have been abrading and disintegrating the mountain-rocks, and slowly 
bringing down the detritus to the river-valleys and the sea. All 
through those vast ages — reckonable only by millions of years — the 
earthquake and the volcano, subterranean expansions and contractions 
have contested with the air and the water the dominion of the earth, 
and have maintained the supremacy of the dry land over the storm- 
crested "waste of waters." 
We have been over some twenty miles of ground in our brief and 
rapid notice of the Cliff-section of the Kentish coast ; we have gone 
ages back in our reflections ; we have spoken of the rocks which form 
those clilfs as having been the mud beneath or the sands upon the 
shores of an ancient ocean long since passed away. Let us sit down 
now under the shade of the massive walls of the Eoman castrum 
where first we halted in our meutal ramble, and shortly tell the 
history of these lofty cliffs, "white, blue, and grey," yellow and 
green. 
Fine calcareous matter, stiff mud, siliceous sands, all the produce 
of the salt sea, all once deposited in the depths or on the shores of 
ocean, now two, three, four, and five hundred feet above the waves. 
All once piled nearly flatly over each other like so many books on a 
table, now tilted up edgewise like volumes in an open space on a 
library shelf. If, reader, you are a geologist, you will know some- 
thing of what I am going to tell, for the Wealden district of which 
our section forms a part is too remarkable not to be well known to 
scientific men. If you are not a geologist, then, though I tell an old 
tale, it will be one that will mightily interest you if T tell it well. 
Thei'e was — how many ages since no one can say, no figures ex- 
press ; but it was long, long ago, if even we could reckon by ages — 
an ancient continent spreading over all this region round, not then 
so temperate as now, but hotter and more like the tropic band ; on 
its shores tall trees and a rank luxuriant herbage grew. Gradually 
the forest-covered soil sank down, and gradually the great river that 
drained the continental tract spread wider and wider its mud and 
ooze. There in its swamps gigantic lizards and winged reptiles sought 
