64 LOCAL OCCURRENCES IN NATURAL HISTORY. 
must have been free to the action of the water long before the hard nidus lit 
which they are now confined was agglutinated and consolidated. Such pebbles 
in their fresh state we now only see along the beds and borders of rapid rivers, 
or chafed harshly by the boiling surge along the margin of the mighty ocean* 
Yet upon the Diluvial Gravel above mentioned a great part of the city of 
Worcester is built; orchards and harvests now wave upon the older pebbles 
generally called Conglomerate; though they incontestably prove their former 
subjection to the powerful trituration of moving water. We are thus led to infer 
that a change has come upon the things we view, and that it is impossible but 
that some earth-shaking power has at a distant period so moulded and modified 
the face of the country, as to give scope to the agents of vitality to impress upon 
its outline features entirely distinct from its pristine appearance. 
When I say a distant period, I speak by the measurement of human annals, 
A century is a mere iota of numeration in the eternity of the past—a speck of 
which a cluster would be but as a grain of sand when compared with the 
universe—and yet to Man it is an important period. By it he measures the 
courses of his planet’s revolution about the sun-—within its boundary the term of 
all his joys and sorrows is, except in very rare cases, comprised—empires rise 
and fall, and cities, once eminent for splendour, are extinguished for ever all 
within its narrow compass. But when we attempt to apply this admeasurement 
to the operations of Nature, it is found wholly unavailable. For if we call upon 
the rivers to supply some tangible evidence as to the momentum of their streams 
in eroding their banks and laying bare their cliffs, so slow appears to be their 
excavating power, that the limits of memory are unable to supply any satisfactory 
data, and if w r e appeal to the hills, they only show on their indented acclivities 
trenches and fosses respecting whose date, although the works of Man, in the dim 
obscurity of ages, even the antiquary is uncertain. But it is apparent that the 
enormous masses of Gravel that gird :as with an external rind the formations 
beneath, can be due to no exertion of the agents, whether of air or water, now 
exercising their influences upon the face of the country; their puny efforts may 
cause devastation among the creations of Man—may overwhelm his crops, inun¬ 
date his fields, or sweep away his bridges—but the features of Nature remain 
undisturbed as previous to the partial oscillations of the storms and floods. Even 
traditional records are here at least silent as to any general perturbation of the 
land that could have been productive of effects so wide-spreading, and a few 
local landslips, such as that of a portion of Bredon Hill in the last century, or the 
celebrated movement of Marclay Hill in Herefordshire, is all that history records 
on the subject. Yet mankind are not forgetful to record those extraordinary 
calamities that bring trial and bereavement about the domestic hearth—we 
