THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE, Wes a 
Though I have now travelled the Sussex Downs upwards of 
thirty years, yet I still investigate that chain of majestic moun- 
tains with fresh admiration year by year; and I think I see 
new beauties every time I traverse it. This range, which runs 
from Chichester eastward as far as Eastbourne, is about sixty 
miles in length, and is called the South Downs, properly speak- 
ing, only round Lewes. As you pass along you command 
a noble view of the wild, or weald, on one hand, and the broad 
downs and sea on the other. Mr. Ray used to visit a family 
just at the foot of these hills, and was so ravished with the 
prospect from Plumpton Plain, near Lewes, that he mentions 
those ’scapes in-his Wisdom of God in the Works of the Creation 
with the utmost satisfaction, and thinks them equal to anything 
he had seen in the finest parts of Europe. 
For my own part, I think there is somewhat peculiarly sweet 
and -amusing in the shapely-figured aspect of chalk-hills in 
preference to those of stone, which are rugged, broken, abrupt, 
and shapeless. 
Perhaps I may be singular in my opinion, and not so happy 
as to convey to you the same idea; but I never contemplate 
these mountains without thinking I perceive somewhat anal- 
ogous to growth in their gentle swellings and smooth fungus- 
like protuberances, their fluted sides, and regular hollows and 
slopes, that carry at once the air of vegetative dilation and 
expansion. Or was there ever a time when these immense 
masses of calcareous matter were thrown into fermentation by 
some adventitious moisture; were raised and leavened into 
such shapes by some plastic power; and so made to swell and 
heaye their broad backs into the sky so much above the less 
animated clay of the wild below? 
By what I can guess from the admeasurements of the hills 
that have been taken round my house, I should suppose that 
these hills surmount the wild at an average of about the rate 
of five hundred feet. 
