146 
NATURE NOTES. 
scenes like these, acquired tastes and laid up knowledge, through 
which he has been enabled to find delight in the most unpoetic 
duties that he might afterwards have had to perform. 
On the eastern side of Chalcombe Cove there stands a noble 
cliff, the very beau ideal of the famous English white cliffs, which 
was examined and reported on by Sir Henry de la Beche, in the 
early years of the Geologic Survey, and of which a fine picture, 
taken mainly from the geologic point of view, hangs in the 
Jermyn Street IMuseum of Geology. This cliff was a little less 
difficult to climb, either up or down, than the headland; and, on 
its extreme eastern slope, what the geologists call a fault had 
uplifted some of the softer marls that elsewhere lay among the 
Jurassic strata lower down ; thus inquisitive boys were able to 
study the abodes of the denizens of these cliffs by closer methods 
than those of the rope and tin kettle. At the Head, the lower 
greensand, which the waves had hardened into compact rock, 
rests immediately on a layer of lias, from which, for ages, the 
fishermen had derived excellent ballast-stones for the boats that 
were used for fishing and, of old, for smuggling. 
The denizens of this cliff were mainly jackdaws, kestrels, 
ravens, and rock-pigeons, though now and then the nest of a gull 
or some other sea-bird might be found among them. Many an 
arduous climb had at last been rewarded by the sight of a gull’s 
nest, a jackdaw’s, a raven’s, or a pigeon’s, and then the difficulty 
would be how to get up or down again. More than once a boy 
has tumbled down from some great height, but, fortunately, his 
light weight fell harmless on soft earth, or marl, or rubble that 
had accumulated at the base of the cliff. 
The cliffs on both sides dip, lovingly as it were, towards the 
little cove, as if they would embrace it from the world in a basin 
of its own ; and along their bases, or on the little contained beach, 
strange objects have been often picked up, mixed with cuttle-fish 
and driftwood, after stormy weather. Large numbers of mers — 
that is to say, of razorbills, guillemots, and the like — mixed, now 
and then, with a rare puffin, or smew, or merganser, have been 
found, cast dead upon the shore ; and one might often have 
wondered why diving birds like these, which swim like fish, should 
have met with such a fate. The fishermen’s view was that, 
owing to the long continued dirty state of the weather and the 
water, the mers had been unable to capture their prey ; and as 
they lived entirely on fish, they had become so weak that they 
had been actually drowned, and so cast ashore. A stormy petrel, 
or IMother Carey’s chicken, has been picked up inland, and as it 
had been observed in storms, disporting itself in erratic course 
among the breakers, while others have been noticed elsewhere 
along the coast, it has been supposed that, in such a likely 
region, a breeding-place existed somewhere, though no nest had 
been found. 
Besides the petrel many another uncommon bird has been 
observed at times about the headland. On the down above it an 
