178 
ARE SOILS ENRICHED, IMPOVERISHED, [Part III. 
venly Host: and the ancestors of these trees, 
again, have probably held this ground ever since 
the cretaceous bed of the ocean was upheaved 
by the fiat of the Almighty, and transformed 
into chalk hill-tops; that is (though such huge 
spaces of time are as undatable as eternity), pos¬ 
sibly from about the time that the Pyrenees and 
the Jura began to sprout, and to change from 
subaqueous, horizontal, alluvial flats into hy- 
psethral precipices and mountain-ridges. 
These suppositions are at least as probable 
as the generality of physiological suppositions , 
though that is not saying much for them. But 
“ I ’ll believe both: 
And what doth else want credit, come to me, 
And I’ll be sworn ’tis true 
and, believing both historically and physiologi¬ 
cally, the ground may be supposed to have been 
accumulating poison for all vegetation save the 
holly, for myriads of years previous to the crea¬ 
tion of man, instead of the poor centuries and 
thousands of years which I have mentioned. 
Yet nothing can be more flourishing than the 
mixed plantations where the beeches of West 
wood and Lipping wood stood ; and the self- 
sown grass grows with extraordinary luxuriance 
where the beeches have been cut, but not a 
