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SCIENTIFIC

LECTURES AND ESSAYS

C. K. OGDEN

SCIENTIFIC

LECTURES AND ESSAYS

BY

CHARLES KINGSLEY

LONDON :
MACMILLAN AND CO.

AND NEW YORK

1893

First Edition, 1880.
Reprinted, 1885, 1889, 1893.

U.NIVK7 T~v o~ „ .
/7/ SANTA BAIiBAilA

CONTENTS.

PiGB

TOWN GEOLOGY— PREFACB 3

I. THK SOIL OP THE

II. THE PEBBLES IN THE STREET . . , , . 47

III. THK STONES IN THK WALL , .... 70

IV. THK COAL IN THE FIRE

V. THE LIME IN THE MORTAR , , . 11]

VI. THE SLATES ON THE ROOF , 126

(JN BIO-GEOLOGY 155

THE STUDY OF NATURAL HISTORY . . . .181

vi CONTENTS.

SUPERSTITION ..... .201

SCIENCE 229

THOUGHTS IN A GRAVEL-PIT 261

HOW TO STUDY NATURAL HISTORY .

THE NATURAL THEOLOGY OF THE FUTURE . . 313

TOWN GEOLOGY.

TOWN GEOLOGY.

PREFACE.

THIS little book, including the greater part of this
Preface, has shaped itself out of lectures given to the
young men of the city of Chester. But it does not
deal, in its present form, with the geology of the
neighbourhood of Chester only. I have tried so to
recast it, that any townsman, at least in the manu-
facturing districts of England and Scotland, may learn
from it to judge, roughly perhaps, but on the whole
accurately, of the rocks and soils of his own neighbour-
hood. He will find, it is true, in these pages, little or
nothing about those " Old Red Sandstones/' so
interesting to a Scotchman ; and he will have to bear
in mind, if he belong to the coal districts of Scotland,
that the " stones in the wall'* there belong to much older
rocks than those " New Red Sandstones " of which this
book treats ; and that the coal measures of Scotland,
with the volcanic rocks which have disturbed them,
are often very different in appearance to the English
coal measures. But he will soon learn to distinguish.

4 TOWN GEOLOGY.

the relative age of rocks by the fossils found in them,
which he can now, happily, study in many local
museums ; and he may be certain, for the rest, that all
rocks and soils whatsoever which he may meet have
been laid down by the agents, and according to the
laws, which I have tried to set forth in this book ; and
these only require, for the learning of them, the
exercise of his own observation and common sense.
I have not tried to make this a handbook of geo-
logical facts. Such a guide (and none better) the
young man will find in Sir Charles LyelPs t( Student's
Elements of Geology." I have tried rather to teach
the method of geology, than its facts ; to furnish the
student with a key to all geology, rough indeed and
rudimentary, but sure and sound enough, I trust, to
help him to unlock most geological problems which he
may meet, in any quarter of the globe. But young
men must remember always, that neither this book,
nor all the books in the world, will make them geo-
logists. No amount of book learning will make a man
a scientific man ; nothing but patient observation, and
quiet and fair thought over what he has observed.
He must go out for himself, see for himself, compare
and judge for himself, in the field, the quarry, the
cutting. He must study rocks, ores, fossils, in the
nearest museum ; and thus store his head, not with
words, but with facts. He must verify — as far as he
can — what he reads in books, by his own observation ;
and be slow to believe anything, even on the highest
scientific authority, till he has either seen it, or
something like enough to it to make it seem to him
probable, or at least possible. So, and so only, will he
become a scientific man, and a good geologist ; and

PREFACE. 5

acquire that habit of mind by which, alone he can
judge fairly and wisely of facts of any kind whatsoever.
I say — facts of any kind whatsoever. If any of
ray readers should be inclined to say to themselves :
Geology may be a very pleasant study, but I have no
special fancy for it. I had rather learn something of
botany, astronomy, chemistry, or what not — I shall
answer : By all means. Learn any branch of Natural
Science you will. It matters little to me which you
learn, provided you learn one at least. But bear in
mind, and settle it in your hearts, that you will learn
no branch of science soundly, so as to master it, and
be able to make use of it, unless you acquire that
habit and method of mind which I am trying to teach
you in this book. I have tried to teach it you by
geology, because geology is, perhaps, the simplest and
the easiest of all physical sciences. It appeals more
than any to mere common sense. It requires fewer
difficult experiments, and expensive apparatus. It
requires less previous knowledge of other sciences,
whether pure or mixed ; at least in its rudimentary
stages. It is more free from long and puzzling Greek
and Latin words. It is specially, the poor man's
science. But if you do not like it, study something
else. Only study that as you must study geology ;
proceeding from the known to the unknown by
observation and experiment.

But here some of my readers may ask, as they have
a perfect right to ask, why I wish young men to learn
Natural Science at all? What good will the right
understanding of geology, or of astronomy, or of
chemistry, or of the plants or animals which they
meet — what good, I say, will that do them ?

6 TOWN GEOLOGY.

In the first place, they need, I presume, occupation
after their hours of work. If any of them answer :
" We do not want occupation, we want amusement.
Work is very dull, and we want something which will
excite our fancy, imagination, sense of humour. We
want poetry, fiction, even a good laugh or a game of
play " — I shall most fully agree with them. There is
often no better medicine for a hard- worked body and
mind than a good laugh ; and the man who can play
most heartily when he has a chance of playing is
generally the man who can work most heartily when
he must work. But there is certainly nothing in the
study of physical science to interfere with genial
hilarity ; though, indeed, some solemn persons have been
wont to reprove the members of the British Associa-
tion, and specially that Red Lion Club, where all the
philosophers are expected to lash their tails and roar,
of being somewhat too fond of mere and sheer fun,
after the abstruse papers of the day are read and
discussed. And as for harmless amusement, and still
more for the free exercise of the fancy and the
imagination, I know few studies to compare with
Natural History ; with the search for the most beautiful
and curious productions of Nature amid her loveliest
scenery, and in her freshest atmosphere. I have
known again and again working men who in the midst
of smoky cities have kept their bodies, their minds,
and their hearts healthy and pure by going out into
the country at odd hours, and making collections of
fossils, plants, insects, birds, or some other objects of
natural history ; and I doubt not that such will be the
case with some of my readers.

PEE FACE. 7

Another argument, and a very strong one, in favour
of studying some branch of Natural Science just now
is this — that without it you can hardly keep pace with
the thought of the world around you.

Over and above the solid gain of a scientific habit
of mind, of which I shall speak presently, the gain of
mere facts, the increased knowledge of this planet on
which we live, is very valuable just now; valuable
certainly to all who do not wish their children and
their younger brothers to know more about the
universe than they do.

Natural Science is now occupying a more and more
important place in education. Oxford, Cambridge, the
London University, the public schools, one after another,
are taking up the subject in earnest; so are the middle-
class schools; so I trust will all primary schools through-
out the country; and I hope that my children, at least, if
not I myself, will see the day, when ignorance of the
primary laws and facts of science will be looked on as
a defect, only second to ignorance of the primary laws
of religion and morality.

I speak strongly, but deliberately. It does seem to
me strange, to use the mildest word, that people whose
destiny it is to live, even for a few short years, on this
planet which we call the earth, and who do not at all
intend to live on it as hermits, shutting themselves up
in cells, and looking on death as an escape and a
deliverance, but intend to live as comfortably and
wholesomely as they can, they and their children after
them — it seems strange, I say, that such people should
in general be so careless about the constitution of this
same planet, and of the laws and facts on which depend,

8 TOWN GEOLOGY.

not merely their comfort and their wealth, but their
health and their very lives, and the health and the lives
of their children and descendants.

I know some will say, at least to themselves :
"What need for us to study science? There are plenty
to do that already; and we shall be sure sooner or later
to profit by their discoveries ; and meanwhile it is not
science which is needed to make mankind thrive, but
simple common sense. "

I should reply, that to expect to profit by other
men's discoveries when you do not pay for them — to let
others labour in the hope of entering into their labours,
is not a very noble or generous state of mind — com-
parable somewhat, I should say, to that of the fatting
ox, who willingly allows the farmer to house him, till
for him, feed him, provided only he himself may lounge
in his stall, and eat, and not be thankful. There is one
difference in the two cases, but only one — that while
the farmer can repay himself by eating the ox, the
scientific man cannot repay himself by eating you; and
so never gets paid, in most cases, at all.

But as for mankind thriving by common sense: they
have not thriven by common sense, because they have
not used their common sense according to that regulated
method which is called science. In no age, in no
country, as yet, have the majority of mankind been
guided, I will not say by the love of God, and by the
fear of God, but even by sense and reason. Not sense
and reason, but nonsense and unreason, prejudice and
fancy, greed and haste, have led them to such results
as were to be expected — to superstitions, persecutions,
wars, famines, pestilence, hereditary diseases, poverty,
waste — waste incalculable, and now too often irre-

PREFACE. 9

mediable — waste of life, of labour, of capital, of raw
material, of soil, of manure, of every bounty which God
has bestowed on man, till, as in the eastern Mediter-
ranean, whole countries, some of the finest in the world,
seem ruined for ever : and all because men will not learn
nor obey those physical laws of the universe, which
(whether we be conscious of them or not) are all around
us, like walls of iron and of adamant — say rather, like
some vast machine, ruthless though beneficent, among
the wheels of which if we entangle ourselves in our rash
ignorance, they will not stop to set us free, but crush
us, as they have crushed whole nations and whole races
ere now, to powder. Very terrible, though very calm,
is outraged Nature.

Though the mills of God grind slowly,
Yet they grind exceeding small;

Though He sit, and wait with patience,
With exactness grinds He all.

It is, I believe, one of the most hopeful among the
many hopeful signs of the times, that the civilised
nations of Europe and America are awakening slowly
but surely to this truth. The civilised world is learning,
thank God, more and more of the importance of physical
science; year by year, thank God, it is learning to live
more and more according to those laws of physical
science, which are, as the great Lord Bacon said of old,
none other than "Vox Dei in rebus revelata" — the
Word of God revealed in facts ; and it is gaining by so
doing, year by year, more and more of health and
wealth ; of peaceful and comfortable, even of graceful
and elevating, means of life for fresh millions.

If you want to know what the study of physical

10 TOWN GEOLOGY.

science has done for man, look, as a single instance, at
the science of Sanatory Reform ; the science which does
not merely try to cure disease, and shut the stable-door
after the horse is stolen, but tries to prevent disease ;
and, thank God ! is succeeding beyond our highest
expectations. Or look at the actual fresh amount of
employment, of subsistence, which science has, during
the last century, given to men ; and judge for yourselves
whether the study of it be not one worthy of those who
wish to help themselves, and, in so doing, to help their
fellow-men. Let me quote to you a passage from an
essay urging the institution of schools of physical
science for artisans, which says all I wish to say
and more :

"The discoveries of Voltaic electricity, electro-
magnetism, and magnetic electricity, by Volta, QErsted,
and Faraday, led to the invention of electric telegraphy
by Wheatstone and others, and to the great manufac-
tures of telegraph cables and telegraph wire, and of the
materials required for them. The value of the cargo of
the Great Eastern alone in the recent Bombay telegraph
expedition was calculated at three millions of pounds
sterling. It also led to the employment of thousands
of operators to transmit the telegraphic messages, and
to a great increase of our commerce in nearly all its
branches by the more rapid means of communication.
The discovery of Voltaic electricity further led to the
invention of electro-plating, and to the employment
of a large number of persons in that business.
The numerous experimental researches on specific
heat, latent heat, the tension of vapours, the pro-
perties of water, the mechanical effect of heat, etc.,
resulted in the development of steam-engines, and

PREFACE. 11

railways, and the almost endless employments de-
pending upon their construction and use. About a
quarter of a million of persons are employed on railways
alone in Great Britain. The various original investi-
gations on the chemical effects of light led to the
invention of photography, and have given employment
to thousands of persons who practise that process, or
manufacture and prepare the various material and
articles required in it. The discovery of chlorine by
Scheele led to the invention of the modern processes of
bleaching, and to various improvements in the dyeing
of the textile fabrics, and has given employment to a
very large number of our Lancashire operatives. The
discovery of chlorine has also contributed to the em-
ployment of thousands of printers, by enabling Esparto
grass to be bleached and formed into paper for the use
of our daily press. The numerous experimental inves-
tigations in relation to coal-gas have been the means of
extending the use of that substance, and of increasing
the employment of workmen and others connected with
its manufacture. The discovery of the alkaline metals
by Davy, of cyanide of potassium, of nickel, phosphorus,
the common acids, and a multitude of other substances,
has led to the employment of a whole army of workmen
in the conversion of those substances into articles of
utility. The foregoing examples might be greatly en-
larged upon, and a great many others might be selected
from the sciences of physics and chemistry : but those
mentioned will suffice. There is not a force of Nature,
nor scarcely a material substance that we employ, which
has not been the subject of several, and in some cases
of numerous, original experimental researches, many
of which have resulted, in a greater or less degree,

12 TOWN GEOLOGY.

in increasing the employment for workmen and
others." *

" All this may be very true. But of what practical
use will physical science be to me ? "

Let me ask in return: Are none of you going to
emigrate ? If you have courage and wisdom, emigrate
you will, some of you, instead of stopping here to
scramble over each other's backs for the scraps, like
black-beetles in a kitchen. And if you emigrate, you
will soon find out, if you have eyes and common sense,
that the vegetable wealth of the world is no more ex-
hausted than its mineral wealth. Exhausted ? Not
half of it — I believe not a tenth of it — is yet known.
Could I show you the wealth which I have seen in a
single Tropic island, not sixty miles square — precious
timbers, gums, fruits, what not, enough to give em-
ployment and wealth to thousands and tens of thousands,
wasting for want of being known and worked — then,
you would see what a man who emigrates may do, by
a little sound knowledge of botany alone.

And if not. Suppose that any one of you, learn-
ing a little sound Natural History, should abide
here in Britain to your life's end, and observe
nothing but the hedgerow plants, he would find that
there is much more to be seen in those mere hedge-
row plants than he fancies now. The microscope
will reveal to him in the tissues of any wood, of
any seed, wonders which will first amuse him, then
puzzle him, and at last (I hope) awe him, as he
perceives that smallness of size interferes in no way
with perfection of development, and that " Nature/'
as has been well said, "is greatest in that which is
least." And more. Suppose that he went further

* See " Nature," No. XXV. (Macmillan & Co.)

PREFACE. 13

still. Suppose that lie extended his researches some-
what to those minuter vegetable forms, the mosses,
fungi, lichens; suppose that he went a little further
still, and tried what the microscope would show him
in any stagnant pool, whether fresh water or salt, of
Desmidiae, Diatoms, and all those wondrous atomies
which seem as yet to defy our classification into plants
or animals. Suppose he learnt something of this, but
nothing of aught else. Would he have gained no
solid wisdom ? He would be a stupider man than I
have a right to believe any of my readers to be, if he
had not gained thereby somewhat of the most valuable
of treasures — namely, that inductive habit of mind,
that power of judging fairly of facts, without which
no good or lasting work will be done, whether in
physical science, in social science, in politics, in
philosophy, in philology, or in history.

But more : let me urge you to study Natural
Science, on grounds which may be to you new and
unexpected — on social, I had almost said on political,
grounds.

We all know, and I trust we all love, the names of
Liberty, Equality, and Brotherhood. We feel, I trust,
that these words are too beautiful not to represent
true and just ideas ; and that therefore they will come
true, and be fulfilled, sornewheri, somewhere, somehow.
It may be in a shape very different from that which
you, or I, or any man expects ; but still they will be
fulfilled.

But if they are to come true, it is we, the individual
men, who must help them to come true for the whole
world, by practising them ourselves, when and where
we can. And I tell you — that in becoming scientific
men, in studying science and acquiring the scientific

14 TOWN GEOLOGY.

habit of mind, you will find yourselves enjoying a
freedom, an equality, a brotherhood, such as you will
not find elsewhere just now.

Freedom : what do we want freedom for ? For this,
at least ; that we may be each and all able to think
what we choose ; and to say what we choose also, pro-
vided we do not say it rudely or violently, so as to
provoke a breach of the peace. That last was Mr.
Buckle's definition of freedom of speech. That was
the only limit to it which he would allow; and I think
that that is Mr. John Stuart Mill's limit also. It is
mine. And I think we have that kind of freedom in
these islands as perfectly as any men are likely to have
it on this earth.

But what I complain of is, that when men have got
the freedom, three out of four of them will not use it.
What ? — someone will answer — Do you suppose that I
will not say what I choose, and that I dare not speak
my own mind to any man ? Doubtless. But are you
sure first, that you think what you choose, or only what
someone else chooses for you? Are you sure that you
make up your own mind before you speak, or let some-
one else make it up for you? Your speech may be free
enough, my good friend; and Heaven forbid that it
should be anything else : but are your thoughts free
likewise ? Are you sure that, though you may hate
bigotry in others, you are not somewhat of a bigot
yourself ? That you do not look at only one side of a
question, and that the one which pleases you ? That
you do not take up your opinions at second hand, from
some book or some newspaper, which after all only
reflects your own feelings, your own opinions ? You
should ask yourselves that question, seriously and often:

PREFACE. 15

" Are my thoughts really free?" No one values more
highly than I do the advantage of a free press. But
you must remember always that a newspaper editor,
however honest or able, is no more infallible than the
Pope; that he may, just as you may, only see one side
of a question, while any question is sure to have two
sides, or perhaps three or four; and if you only see
the side which suits you, day after day, month after
month, you must needs become bigoted to it. Your
thoughts must needs run in one groove. They cannot
(as Mr. Matthew Arnold would say) "play freely round"
a question; and look it all over, boldly, patiently,
rationally, charitably.

And I tell you that if you, or I, or any man, want
to let our thoughts play freely round questions, and so
escape from the tendency to become bigoted and narrow-
minded which there is in every human being, then we
must acquire something of that inductive habit of mind
which the study of Natural Science gives. It is, after
all, as Professor Huxley says, only common sense well
regulated. But then it is well regulated; and how
precious it is, if you can but get it. The art of seeing,
the art of knowing what you see; the art of comparing,
of perceiving true likenesses and true differences, and
so of classifying and arranging what you see: the art
of connecting facts together in your own mind in
chains of cause and effect, and that accurately, patiently,
calmly, without prejudice, vanity, or temper — this is
what is wanted for true freedom of mind. But ac-
curacy, patience, freedom from prejudice, carelessness
for all except the truth, whatever the truth may be —
are not these the virtues of a truly free spirit? Then,
as I said just now, I know no study so able to give

16 TOWN GEOLOGY.

that free habit of inind as the Study of Natural
Science.

Equality, too: whatever equality may or may not be
just, or possible; this at least, is just, and I hope pos-
sible; that every man, every child, of every rank, should
have an equal chance of education ; an equal chance of
developing all that is in him by nature ; an equal chance
of acquiring a fair knowledge of those facts of the
universe which specially concern him; and of having
his reason trained to judge of them. I say, whatever
equal rights men may or may not have, they have this
right. Let every boy, every girl, have an equal and
sound education. If I had my way, I would give the
same education to the child of the collier and to the
child of a peer. I would see that they were taught the
same things, and by the same method. Let them all
begin alike, say I. They will be handicapped heavily
enough as they go on in life, without our handicapping
them in their first race. Whatever stable they come
out of, whatever promise they show, let them all train
alike, and start fair, and let the best colt win.

Well : but there is a branch of education in which,
even now, the poor man can compete fairly against the
rich ; and that is, Natural Science. In the first place,
the rich, blind to their own interest, have neglected it
hitherto in their schools; so that they have not the start
of the poor man on that subject which they have on
many. In the next place, Natural Science is a subject
which a man cannot learn by paying for teachers. He
must teach it himself, by patient observation, by patient
common sense. And if the poor man is not the rich
man's equal in those qualities, it must be his own fault,
not his purse's. Many shops have I seen about the

PREFACE. 37

world, in which fools could buy articles more or less
helpful to them ; but never saw I yet an observation-
shop, nor a common-sense shop either. And if any
man says, "We must buy books:" I answer, a poor man
now can obtain better scientific books than a duke or a
prince could sixty years ago, simply because then the
books did not exist. When I was a boy I would have
given much, or rather my father would have given much,
if I could have got hold of such scientific books as are
to be found now in any first-class elementary school.
And if more expensive books are needed ; if a micro-
scope or apparatus is needed; can you not get them
by the co-operative method, which has worked so well
in other matters? Can you not form yourselves into a
Natural Science club, for buying such things and
lending them round among your members; and for
discussion also, the reading of scientific papers of your
own writing, the comparing of your observations,
general mutual help and mutual instructions ? Such
societies are becoming numerous now, and gladly
should I see one in every town. For in science, as in
most matters, "As iron sharpeneth iron, so a man
sharpeneth the countenance of his friend."

And Brotherhood : well, if you want that ; if yon
want to mix with men, and men, too, eminently worth
mixing with, on the simple ground that " a man's a
man for a' that ; " if you want to become the acquaint-
ances, and — if you prove worthy — the friends, of men
who will be glad to teach you all they know, and
equally glad to learn from you anything you can teach
them, asking no questions about you, save, first — Is
he an honest student of • Nature for her own sake ?
And next — Is he a man who will not quarrel, or other-
EC, c

IS TOWN GEOLOGY.

wise behave in an unbrotherly fashion to his fellow-
students ? — If you want a ground of brotherhood with
men, not merely in these islands, but in America, on
the Continent — in a word, all over the world — such as
rank, wealth, fashion, or other artificial arrangements
of the world cannot give and cannot take away; if
you want to feel yourself as good as -any man in
theory, because you are as good as any man in
practice, except those who are better than you in
the same line, which is open to any and every man ;
if you wish to have the inspiring and ennobling feeling
of being a brother in a great freemasonry which owns
no difference of rank, of creed, or of nationality — the
only freemasonry, the only International League which
is likely to make mankind (as we all hope they will be
some day) one — then become men of science. Join
the freemasonry in which Hugh Miller, the poor
Cromarty stonemason, in which Michael Faraday, the
poor bookbinder's boy, became the companions and
friends of the noblest and most learned on earth, looked
up to by them not as equals merely but as teachers
and guides, because philosophers and discovei'ers.

Do you wish to be great ? Then be great with
true greatness ; which is, — knowing the facts of
nature, and being able to use them. Do you wish to
be strong ? Then be strong with true strength ;
which is, knowing the facts of nature, and being able
to use them. Do. you wish to be wise ? Then be
wise with true wisdom ; which is, knowing the facts
of nature, and being able to use them. Do you wish
to be free ? Then be free with true freedom ; which
is again, knowing the facts of nature, and being able
to use them.

PREFACE. 19

I dare say some of my readers, especially the
younger ones, will demur to that last speech of mine.
Well, I hope they will not be angry with me for
saying it. I, at least, shall certainly not be angry
with them. For when I was young I was very much
of what I suspect is their opinion. I used to think
one could get perfect freedom, and social reform, and
all that I wanted, by altering the arrangements of
society and legislation ; by constitutions, and Acts of
Parliament; by putting society into some sort of
freedom-mill, and grinding it all down, and regene-
rating it so. And that something can be done by
improved arrangements, something can be done by
Acts of Parliament, I hold still, as every rational man
must hold.

But as I grew older, I began to see that if things
were to be got right, the freedom-mill would do very
little towards grinding them right, however well and
amazingly it was made. I began to see that what
sort of flour came out at one end of the mill, depended
mainly on what sort of grain you had put in at the
other ; and I began to see that the problem was to get
good grain, and then good flour would be turned out,
even by a very clumsy old-fashioned sort of mill.
And what do I mean by good grain ? Good men,
honest men, accurate men, righteous men, patient
men, self- restraining men, fair men, modest men.
Men who are aware of their own vast ignorance com-
pared with the vast amount that there is to be learned
in such a universe as this. Men who are accustomed
to look at both sides of a question ; who, instead of
making up their minds in haste like bigots and fanatics,
wait like wise men, for more facts, and more thought

o 2

20 TOWN GEOLOGY.

about the facts. In one word, men who had acquired
just the habit of mind which the study of Natural
Science can give, and must give ; for without it there
is no use studying Natural Science ; and the man who
has not got that habit of mind, if he meddles with
science, will merely become a. quack and a charlatan,
only fit to get his bread as a spirit-rapper, or an
inventor of infallible pills.

And when I saw that, I said to myself — I will train
myself, by Natural Science, to the truly rational, and
therefore truly able and useful, habit of mind ; and
more, I will, for it is my duty as an Englishman, train
every Englishman over whom I can get influence in
the same scientific habit of mind, that I may, if possible,
make him, too, a rational and an able man.

And, therefore, knowing that most of you, my
readers — probably all of you, as you ought and must
if you are Britons, think much of social and political
questions — therefore, I say, I entreat you to cultivate the
scientific spirit by which alone you can judge justly of
those questions. I ask you to learn how to " conquer
nature by obeying her," as the great Lord Bacon said
two hundred and fifty years ago. For so only will you
in your theories and your movements, draw "bills
which nature will honour" — to use Mr. Carlyle's
famous parable — because they are according to her
unchanging laws, and not have them returned on your
hands, as too many theorists' are, with "no effects"
written across their backs.

Take my advice for yourselves, dear readers, and
for your children after you ; for, believe me, I am
showing you the way to true and useful, and, therefore,
to just and deserved power. I am showing you the

PREFACE. 21

way to become members of what I trust will be — what
I am certain ought to be — the aristocracy of the
future.

I say it deliberately, as a student of society and of
history. Power will pass more and more, if all goes
healthily and well, into the hands of scientific men ;
into the hands of those who have made due use of that
great heirloom which the philosophers of the seven-
teenth century left for the use of future generations,
and specially of the Teutonic race.

For the rest, events seem but too likely to repeat
themselves again and again all over the world, in the
same hopeless circle. Aristocracies of mere birth
decay and die, and give place to aristocracies of
mere wealth ; and they again to " aristocracies of
genius," which are really aristocracies of the noisiest,
of mere scribblers and spouters, such as France is
writhing under at this moment. And when these last
have blown off their steam, with mighty roar, but
without moving the engine a single yard, then they
are but too likely to give place to the worst of all
aristocracies, the aristocracy of mere " order," which
means organised brute force and military despotism.
And, after that, what can come, save anarchy, and
decay, and social death ?

What else ? — unless there be left in the nation, in
the society, as the salt of the land, to keep it all from
rotting, a sufficient number of wise men to form a true
working aristocracy, an aristocracy of sound and rational
science ? If they be strong enough (and they are
growing stronger day by day over the civilised world),
on them will the future of that world mainly depend.
They will rule, and they will act — cautiously, we may

22 TOWN GEOLOGY.

hope, and modestly and charitably, because in learning
true knowledge they will have learnt also their
own ignorance, and the vastness, the complexity, the
mystery of nature. But they will be able to rule, they
will be able to act, because they have taken the
trouble to learn the facts and the laws of nature. They
will rule ; and their rule, if they are true to themselves,
will be one of health and wealth, and peace, of
prudence and of justice. For they alone will be able
to wield for the benefit of man the brute forces of
nature ; because they alone will have stooped to
" conquer nature by obeying her/'

So runs my dream. I ask my young readers to
help towards making that dream a fact, by becoming
(as many of them as feel the justice of my words)
honest and earnest students of Natural Science.

But now : why should I, as a clergyman, interest
myself specially in the spread of Natural Science ?
Am I not going out of my proper sphere to meddle
with secular matters ? Am I not, indeed, going into
a sphere out of which I had better keep myself, and
all over whom I may have influence ? For is not
science antagonistic to religion ? and, if so, what has
a clergyman to do, save to warn the young against it,
instead of attracting them towards it ?

First, as to meddling with secular matters. I
grudge that epithet of " secular" to any matter what-
soever. But I do more ; I deny it to anything which
God has made, even to the tiniest of insects, the most
insignificant atom of dust. To those who believe in
God, and try to see all things in God, the most minute
natural phenomenon cannot be secular. It must be
divine ; I say, deliberately, divine ; and I can use no

PREFACE. 23

less lofty word. The grain of dust is a thought of
God ; God's power made it ; God's wisdom gave it
whatsoever properties or qualities it may possess;
God's providence has put it in the place where it is
now, and has ordained that it should be in that place
at that moment, by a train of causes and effects which
reaches back to the very creation of the universe. The
grain of dust can no more go from God's presence, or
flee from God's Spirit, than you or I can. If it go up to
the physical heaven, and float (as it actually often does)
far above the clouds, in those higher strata of the atmo-
sphere which the aeronaut has never visited, whither
the Alpine snow-peaks do not rise, even there it will
be -obeying physical laws which we term hastily laws of
Nature, but which are really the laws of God : and if it
go down into the physical abyss ; if it be buried fathoms,
miles., below the surface, and become an atom of some
rock still in the process of consolidation, has it escaped
from God, even in the bowels of the earth ? Is it not
there still obeying physical laws, of pressure, heat,
crystallisation, and so forth, which are laws of God —
the will and mind of God concerning particles of matter?
Only look at all created things in this light — look at
them as what they are, the expressions of God's mind
and will concerning this universe in which we live —
"the Word of God," as Bacon says, "revealed in facts"
— and then you will not fear physical science ; for you
will be sure that, the more you know of physical science,
the more you will know of the works and of the will of
God. At least, you will be in harmony with the
teaching of the Psalmist : " The heavens," says he,
"declare the glory of God; and the firmament showeth
His handiwork. There is neither speech nor language

24, TOWN GEOLOGY.

where their voices are not heard among them." So held
the Psalmist concerning astronomy, the knowledge of
the heavenly bodies; and what he says of sun and stars
is true likewise of the flowers around our feet, of which
the greatest Christian poet of modern times has said —

To me the meanest flower that grows may give
Thoughts that do lie too deep for tears.

So, again, you will be in harmony with the teaching
of St. Paul, who told the Eomans " that the invisible
things of God are clearly seen from the creation of the
world, being understood by the things that are made,
even His eternal power and Godhead ;" and who told
the savages of Lycaonia that "God had not left Himself
without witness, in that He did good and sent men rain
from heaven, and fruitful seasons, filling men's hearts
with food and gladness. " Eain and fruitful seasons
witnessed to all men of a Father in heaven. And he
who wishes to know how truly St. Paul spoke, let him
study the laws which produce and regulate rain and
fruitful seasons, what we now call climatology,
meteorology, geography of land and water. Let him
read that truly noble Christian work, Maury's "Physical
Geography of the Sea; " and see, if he be a truly rational
man, how advanced science, instead of disproving, has
only corroborated St. Paul's assertion, and how the ocean
and the rain-cloud, like the sun and stars, declare the
glory of God. And if anyone undervalues the sciences
which teachus concerning stones and plants and animals,
or thinks that nothing can be learnt from them con-
cerning God — allow one who has been from childhood
only a humble, though he trusts a diligent student of
these sciences — allow him, I say, to ask in all reverence,

PREFACE. 25

but in all frankness, who it was who said, " Consider
the lilies of the field, how they grow." " Consider the
birds of the air — and how your Heavenly Father f eedeth
them."

Consider them. If He has bid you do so, can you
do so too much ?

I know, of course, the special application which our
Lord made of these words. But I know, too, from
experience, that the more you study nature, in all her
forms the more you will find that the special
application itself is deeper, wider, more literally true,
more wonderful, more tender, and if I dare use such
a word, more poetic, than the unscientific man can

But let me ask you further — do you think that our
Lord in that instance, and in those many instances in
which He drew his parables and lessons from natural
objects, was leading men's minds on to dangerous
ground, and pointing out to them a subject of contem-
plation in the laws and processes of the natural world,
and their analogy with those of the spiritual world,
the kingdom of God — a subject of contemplation, I
say, which it was not safe to contemplate too much ?

I appeal to your common sense. If He who spoke
these words were (as I believe) none other than the
Creator of the universe, by whom all things were
made, and without whom nothing was made that is
made, do you suppose that He would have bid you to
consider His universe, had it been dangerous for you
to do so ?

Do you suppose, moreover, that the universe,
which He, the Truth, the Light, the Love, has made,
can be otherwise than infinitely worthy to be con-

26 TOWN GEOLOGY.

sidered ? or that the careful, accurate, and patient
consideration of it, even to its minutest details, can be
otherwise than useful to man, and can bear witness of
aught, save the mind and character of Him who made
it ? And if so, can it be a work unfit for, unworthy
of, a clergyman — whose duty is to preach Him to
all, and in all ways, — to call on men to consider that
physical world which, like the spiritual world, consists,
holds together, by Him, and lives and moves and has
its being in Him ?

And here I must pause to answer an objection
which I have heard in my youth from many pious and
virtuous people — better people in God's sight, than I,
I fear, can pretend to be.

They used to say, " This would be all very true if
there were not a curse upon the earth." And then
they seemed to deduce, from the fact of that curse, a
vague notion (for it was little more) that this world
was the devil's world, and that therefore physical
facts could not be trusted, because they were dis-
ordered, and deceptive, and what not.

Now, in justice to the Bible, and in justice to the
Church of England, I am bound to say that such a
statement, or anything like it, is contrary to the
doctrines of both. It is contrary to Scripture.
According to it, the earth is not cursed. For it is
said in Gen. viii. 21, "And the Lord said, I will not
again curse the ground any more for man's sake.
While the earth remaineth, seed-time and harvest,
cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night
shall not cease." According to Scripture, again,
physical facts are not disordered. The Psalmist says,
" They continue this day according to their ordinance;

PREFACE. 27

for all things serve Thee." And again, " Thou hast
made them fast for ever and ever. Thou hast given
them a law which cannot be broken."

So does the Bible (not to quote over again the
passages which I have already given you from St.
Paul, and One greater than St. Paul) declare the per-
manence of natural laws, and the trustworthiness of
natural phenomena as obedient to God. And so does
the Church of England. For she has incorporated
into her services that magnificent hymn, which our
forefathers called the Song of the Three Children;
which is, as it were, the very flower and crown of the
Old Testament ; the summing up of all that is true
and eternal in the old Jewish faith ; as true for us as
for them : as true millions of years hence as it is now
— which cries to all heaven and earth, from the skies
above our heads to the green herb beneath our feet,
" 0 all ye works of the Lord, bless ye the Lord; praise
Him and magnify Him for ever." On that one hymn
I take my stand. That is my charter as a student of
Natural Science. As long as that is sang in an
English church, I have a right to investigate Nature
boldly without stint or stay, and to call on all who
have the will, to investigate her boldly likewise, and
with Socrates of old, to follow the Logos whitherso-
ever it leads.

The Logos. I must pause on that word. It meant
at first, no doubt, simply speech, argument, reason.
In the mind of Socrates it had a deeper meaning, at
which he only dimly guessed ; which was seen more
clearly by Philo and the Alexandrian Jews ; which
was revealed in all its fulness to the beloved Apostle
St. John, till he gathered speech to tell men of a

28 TOWN GEOLOGY.

Logos, a "Word, who was in the beginning with God,
and was God ; by whom all things were made, and
without Him was not anything made that was made ;
and how in Him was Life, and the Life was the light
of men ; and that He was none other than Jesus Christ
our Lord.

Yes, that is the truth. And to that truth no man
can add, and from it no man can take away. And as
long as we believe that — as long as we believe that in
His light alone can we see light — as long as we believe
that the light around us, whether physical or spiritual,
is given by Him without whom nothing is made — so
long we shall not fear to meet Light, so long we shall
not fear to investigate Life ; for we shall know, how-
ever strange or novel, beautiful or awful, the dis-
coveries we make may be, we are only following the
Word whithersoever He may lead us; and that He
can never lead us amiss.

I.
THE SOIL OF THE FIELD.*

MY dear readers, let me, before touching on the special
subject of this paper, say a few words on that of the
whole series.

It is geology: that is, the science which explains to
us the rind of the earth ; of what it is made ; how it
has been made. It tells us nothing of the mass of the
earth. That is, properly speaking, an astronomical
question. If I may be allowed to liken this earth to a
fruit, then astronomy will tell us — when it knows — how
the fruit grew, and what is inside the fruit. Geology
can only tell us at most how its rind, its outer covering,
grew, and of what it is composed ; a very small part,
doubtless, of all that is to be known about this planet.

But as it happens, the mere rind of this earth-fruit
which has, countless ages since, dropped, as it were,
from the Bosom of God, the Eternal Fount of Life —
the mere rind of this earth-fruit, I say, is so beautiful
and so complex, that it is well worth our awful and
reverent study. It has been well said, indeed, that the
history of it, which we call geology, would be a mag-

* These Lectures were delivered to the members of the Natural
Science Class at Chester in 1871.

30 TOWN GEOLOGY. [i.

nificent epic poem, were there only any human interest
in it; did it deal with creatures more like ourselves than
stones, and bones, and the dead relics of plants and
beasts. Whether there be no human interest in
geology; whether man did not exist on the earth
during ages which have seen enormous geological
changes, is becoming more and more an open question.

But meanwhile all must agree that there is matter
enough for interest — nay, room enough for the free use
of the imagination, in a science which tells of the
growth and decay of whole mountain-ranges, continents,
oceans, whole tribes and worlds of plants and animals.

And yet it is not so much for the vastness and
grandeur of those scenes of the distant past, to which
the science of geology introduces us, that I value it as a
study, and wish earnestly to awaken you to its beauty
and importance. It is because it is the science from
which you will learn most easily a sound scientific
habit of thought. I say most easily; and for these
reasons. The most important facts of geology do
not require, to discover them, any knowledge of mathe-
matics or of chemical analysis; they may be studied in
every bank, every grot, every quarry, every railway-
cutting, by anyone who has eyes and common sense,
and who chooses to copy the late illustrious Hugh
Miller, who made himself a great geologist out of a
poor stonemason. Next, its most important theories
are not, or need not be, wrapped up in obscure Latin
and Greek terms. They may be expressed in the
simplest English, because they are discovered by
simple common sense. And thus geology is (or ought
to be), in popular parlance, the people's science — the
science by studying which, the man ignorant of Latin,

,.] THE SOIL OF THE FIELD. 31

Greek, mathematics, scientific chemistry, can yet
become — as far as his brain enables him — a truly
scientific man.

But how shall we learn science by mere common
sense ?

First. Always try to explain the unknown by the
known. If you meet something which you have not
seen before, then think of the thing most like it which
you have seen before ; and try if that which you know
explains the one will not explain the other also.
Sometimes it will; sometimes it will not. But if ifc
will, no one has a right to ask you to try any other
explanation.

Suppose, for instance, that you found a dead bird
on the top of a cathedral tower, and were asked how
you thought it had got there. You would say, " Of
course, it died up here." But if a friend said, " Not
so ; it dropped from a balloon, or from the clouds ; "
and told you the prettiest tale of how the bird came to
so strange an end, you would answer, "No, no; I must
reason from what I know. I know that birds haunt
the cathedral tower; I know that birds die; and
therefore, let your story be as pretty as it may, my
common sense bids me take the simplest explanation,
and say — it died here." In saying that, you would be
talking scientifically. You would have made a fair and
sufficient induction (as it is called) from the facts about
birds' habits and birds' deaths which you know.

But suppose that when you took the bird up you
found that it was neither a jackdaw, nor a sparrow, nor
a swallow, as you expected, but a humming-bird.
Then you would be adrift again. The fact of it being
a humming-bird would be a new fact which you had

32 TOWN GEOLOGY. [i.

not taken into account, and for which your old explan-
ation was not sufficient ; and you would have to try a
new induction — to use your common sense afresh —
saying, "I have not to explain merely how a dead bird
got here, but how a dead humming-bird."

And now, if your imaginative friend chimed in
triumphantly with : " Do you not see that I was right
after all ? Do you not see that it fell from the clouds ?
that it was swept away hither, all the way from South
America, by some south-westerly storm, and wearied
out at last, dropped here to find rest, as in a sacred
place ? " what would you answer ? " My friend, that
is a beautiful imagination ; but I must treat it only as
such, as long as I can explain the mystery more simply
by facts which I do know. I do not know that
humming-birds can be blown across the Atlantic
alive. I do know they are actually brought across the
Atlantic dead ; are stuck in ladies' hats. I know that
ladies visit the cathedral ; and odd as the accident is,
I prefer to believe, till I get a better explanation, that
the humming-bird has simply dropped out of a lady's
hat." There, again, you would be speaking common
sense ; and using, too, sound inductive method ; trying
to explain what you do not know from what you do
know already.

Now, I ask of you to employ the same common
sense when you read and think of Geology.

It is very necessary to do so. For in past times
men have tried to explain the making of the world
around them, its oceans, rivers, mountains, and con-
tinents, by I know not what of fancied cataclysms and
convulsions of nature; explaining the unknown by
the still more unknown, till some of their geological

r.] THE SOIL OF THE FIELD. S3

theories were no more rational, because no more
founded on known facts, than that of the New Zealand
Maories, who hold that some god, when fishing, fished
up their islands out of the bottom of the ocean. But
a sounder and wiser school of geologists now reigns ;
the father of whom, in England at least, is the
venerable Sir Charles Lyell. He was almost the first
of Englishmen who taught us to see — what common
sense tells us — that the laws which we see at work
around us now have been most probably at work since
the creation of the world ; and that whatever changes
may seem to have taken place in past ages, and in
ancient rocks, should be explained, if possible, by the
changes which are taking place now in the most recent
deposits — in the soil of the field.

And in the last forty years — since that great and
sound idea has become rooted in the minds of students,
and especially of English students, geology has thriven
and developed, perhaps more than any other science;
and has led men on to discoveries far more really
astonishing and awful than all fancied convulsions
and cataclysms.

I have planned this series of papers, therefore, on
Sir Charles Lyell's method. I have begun by trying
to teach a little about the part of the earth's crust
which lies nearest us, which we see most often;
namely, the soil; intending, if my readers do me the
honour to read the papers which follow, to lead them
downward, as it were, into the earth ; deeper and
deeper in each paper, to rocks and minerals which are
probably less known to them than the soil in the
fields. Thus you will find I shall lead you, or try
to lead you on, throughout the series, from the
so. D

31 TOWN GEOLOGY. [i.

known to the unknown, and show you how to
explain the latter by the former. Sir Charles Lyell
has, I see, in the new edition of his " Student's
Elements of Geology," begun his book with the
uppermost, that is, newest, strata, or layers ; and has
gone regularly downwards in the course of the book to
the lowest or earliest strata; and I shall follow his
plan.

I must ask you meanwhile to remember one law or
rule, which seems to me founded on common sense;
namely, that the uppermost strata are really almost
always the newest; that when two or more layers,
whether of rock or earth — or indeed two stones in the
street, or two sheets on a bed, or two books on a table
— any two or more lifeless things, in fact, lie one on
the other, then the lower one was most probably put
there first, and the upper one laid down on the lower.
Does that seem to you a truism ? Do I seem almost
impertinent in asking you to remember it ? So much
the better. I shall be saved unnecessary trouble
hereafter.

But some one may say, and will have a right to
say, " Stop — the lower thing may have been thrust
under the upper one." Quite true : and therefore I
said only that the lower one was most probably put
there first. And I said " most probably," because it
is most probable that in nature we should find things
done by the method which costs least force, just as
you do them. I will warrant that when you want to
hide a thing, you lay something down on it ten times
for once that you thrust it under something else. You
may say, " What ? When I want to hide a paper,
say, under the sofa-cover, do I not thrust it under ? "

I.] THE SOIL OF THE FIELD. 35

No, you lift up the cover, and slip the paper in, and let
the cover fall on it again. And so, even in that case,
the paper has got into its place first.

Now why is this ? Simply because in laying one
thing on another you only move weight. In thrusting
one thing under another, you have not only to move
weight, but to overcome friction. That is why you
do it, though you are hardly aware of it : simply
because so you employ less force, and take less trouble.

And so do clays and sands and stones. They are
laid down on each other, and not thrust under each
other, because thus less force is expended in getting
them into place.

There are exceptions. There are cases in which
nature does try to thrust one rock under another. But
to do that she requires a force so enormous, compared
with what is employed in laying one rock on another,
that (so to speak) she continually fails ; and instead of
producing a volcanic eruption, produces only an earth-
quake. Of that I may speak hereafter, and may tell
you, in good time, how to distinguish rocks which have
been thrust in from beneath, from rocks which have
been laid down from above, as every rock between
London and Birmingham or Exeter has been laid down.
That I only assert now. But I do not wish you to take
it on trust from me. I wish to prove it to you as I go
on, or to do what is far better for you : to put you in
the way of proving it for yourself, by using your
common sense.

At the risk of seeming prolix, I must say a few more
words on this matter. I have special reasons for it.
Until I can get you to " let your thoughts play freely "
round this question of the superposition of soils and

D 2

36 TOWN GEOLOGY. [L

rocks, there will be no use in my going on with these
papers.

Suppose then (to argue from the known to the
unknown) that you were watching men cleaning out a
pond. Atop, perhaps, they would come to a layer of
soft mud, and under that to a layer of sand. Would
not common sense tell you that the sand was there
first, and that the water had laid down the mud on the
top of it ? Then, perhaps, they might come to a layer
of dead leaves. Would not common sense tell you
that the leaves were there before the sand above them?
Then, perhaps, to a layer of mud again. Would not
common sense tell you that the mud was there before
the leaves ? And so on down to the bottom of the
pond, where, lastly, I think common sense would tell
you that the bottom of the pond was there already,
before all the layers which were laid down on it. Is
not that simple common sense ?

Then apply that reasoning to the soils and rocks in
any spot on earth. If you made a deep boring, and
found, as you would in many parts of this kingdom,
that the boring, after passing through the soil of the
field, entered clays or loose sands, you would say the
clays were there before the soil. If it then went down
into sandstone, you would say — would you not ? — that
sandstone must have been here before the clay ; and
however thick — even thousands of feet — it might be,
that would make no difference to your judgment. If
next the boring came into quite different rocks ; into
a different sort of sandstone and shales, and among
them beds of coal, would you not say — These coal-beds
must have been here before the sandstones? And if
you found in those coal-beds dead leaves and stems of

I.] THE SOIL OF THE FIELD. 37

plants, would you. not say — Those plants must have
been laid down here before the layers above them, just
as the dead leaves in the pond were?

If you then came to a layer of limestone, would you
not say the same ? And if you found that limestone
full of shells and corals, dead, but many of them quite
perfect, some of the corals plainly in the very place in
which they grew, would you not say — These creatures
must have lived down here before the coal was laid on
top of them ? And if, lastly, below the limestone you
came to a bottom rock quite different again, would you
not say — The bottom rock must have been here before
the rocks on the top of it ?

And if that bottom rock rose up a few miles off,
two thousand feet, or any other height, into hills, what
would you say then ? Would you say : " Oh, but the
rock is not bottom rock ; is not under the limestone
here, but higher than it. So perhaps in this part it
has made a shift, and the highlands are younger than
the lowlands ; for see, they rise so much higher ? "
Would not that be as wise as to say that the bottom of
the pond was not there before the pond mud, because
the banks round the pond rose higher than the
mud?

Now for the soil of the field.

If we can understand a little about it, what it is
made of, and how it got there, we shall perhaps be on
the right road toward understanding what all England
— and, indeed, the crust of this whole planet — is made
of ; and how its rocks and soils got there.

But we shall best understand how the soil in the
field was made, by reasoning, as I have said, from the
known to the unknown. What do I mean ? This.

38 TOWN GEOLOGY. [i.

On the uplands are fields in which the soil is already
made. You do not know how ? Then look for a field
in which the soil is still being made. There are plenty
in every lowland. Learn how it is being made there;
apply the knowledge which you learn from them to the
upland fields which are already made.

If there is, as there usually is, a river-meadow, or
still better, an asstuary, near your town, you have
every advantage for seeing soil made. Thousands of
square feet of fresh-made soil spread between your
town and the sea ; thousands more are in process of
being made.

You will see now why I have begun with the soil
in the field ; because it is the uppermost, and therefore
latest, of all the layers ; and also for this reason, that,
if Sir Charles Lyell's theory be true — as it is — then the
soils and rocks below the soil of the field may have
been made in the very same way in which the soil of
the field is made. If so, it is well worth our while to
examine it.

You all know from whence the soil comes which
has filled up, in the course of ages, the great sestuaries
below London, Stirling, Chester, or Cambridge.

It is river mud and sand. The river, helped by
tributary brooks right and left, has brought down
from the inland that enormous mass. You know that.
You know that every flood and freshet brings a fresh
load, either of fine mud or of fine sand, or possibly
some of it peaty matter out of distant hills. Here is
one indisputable fact from which to start. Let us look
for another.

How does the mud get into the river ? The rain
carries it thither.

I.] THE SOIL OF THE FIELD. 39

If you wish to learn the first elements of geology
by direct experiment, do this : The next rainy day —
the harder it rains the better — instead of sitting at
home over the fire, and reading a book about geology,
put on a macintosh and thick boots, and get away, I
care not whither, provided you can find there running
water. If you have not time to get away to a hilly
country, then go to the nearest bit of turnpike road,
or the nearest sloping field, and see in little how
whole continents are made, and unmade again.
Watch the rain raking and sifting with its million
delicate fingers, separating the finer particles from
the coarser, dropping the latter as soon as it can,
and carrying the former downward with it toward the
sea. Follow the nearest roadside drain where it runs
into a pond, and see how it drops the pebbles the
moment it enters the pond, and then the sand in a
fan-shaped heap at the nearest end; but carries the
fine mud on, and holds it suspended, to be gradually-
deposited at the bottom in the still water ; and say to
yourself : Perhaps the sands which cover so many
inland tracts were dropped by water, very near the
shore of a lake or sea, and by rapid currents. Perhaps,
again, the brick clays, which are often mingled with
these sands, were dropped, like the mud in the pond,
in deeper water farther from the shore, and certainly
in still water. But more. Suppose once more, then,
that looking and watching a pond being cleared out,
under the lowest layer of mud, you found — as you
would find in any of those magnificent reservoirs so
common in the Lancashire hills — a layer of vegetable
soil, with grass and brushwood rooted in it. What
would you say but : The pond has not been always

40 TOWN GEOLOGY. [i.

full. It has at some time or other been dry enough
to let a whole copse grow up inside it ?

And if you found — as you will actually find along
some English shores — under the sand hills, perhaps a
bed of earth with shells and bones ; under that a bed
of peat; under that one of blue silt; under that a
buried forest, with the trees upright and rooted ; under
that another layer of blue silt full of roots and
vegetable fibre; perhaps under that again another
old land surface with trees again growing in it ; and
under all the main bottom clay of the district — what
would common sense tell you ? I leave you to discover
for yourselves. It certainly would not tell you that
those trees were thrust in there by a violent con-
vulsion, or that all those layers were deposited there
in a few days, or even a few years ; and you might
safely indulge in speculations about the antiquity of
the sestuary, and the changes which it has undergone,
with which I will not frighten you at present.

It will be fair reasoning to argue thus. You may
not be always right in your conclusion, but still you
will be trying fairly to explain the unknown by the
known.

But have Rain and Rivers alone made the soil?

How very much they have done toward making it
you will be able to judge for yourselves, if you will
read the sixth chapter of Sir Charles Lyell's new
"Elements of Geology," or the first hundred pages
of that admirable book, De la Beche's " Geological
Observer ; " and last, but not least, a very clever
little book called "Rain and Rivers," by Colonel
George Greenwood.

But though rain, like rivers, is a carrier of soil, it

I.] THE SOIL OP THE FIELD. 41

is more. It is a maker of soil, likewise; and by it
mainly the soil of an upland field is made, whether it
be carried down to the sea or not.

If you will look into any quarry you will see that
however compact the rock may be a few feet below
the surface, it becomes, in almost every case, rotten
and broken up as it nears the upper soil, till you often
cannot tell where the rock ends and the soil begins.

Now this change has been produced by rain.
First, mechanically, by rain in the shape of ice.
The winter rain gets into the ground, and does by
the rock what it has done by the stones of many an
old building. It sinks into the porous stone, freezes
there, expands in freezing, and splits and peels the
stone with a force which is slowly but surely crumbling
the whole of Northern Europe and America to powder.

Do you doubt me ? I say nothing but what you
can judge of yourselves. The next time you go up
any mountain, look at the loose broken stones with
which the top is coated, just underneath the turf.
What has broken them up but frost ? Look again, as
stronger proof, at the talus of broken stones — screes,
as they call them in Scotland ; rattles, as we call them
in Devon — which lie along the base of many mountain
cliffs. What has brought them down but frost ? If
you ask the country folk they will tell you whether I
am right or not. If you go thither, not in the summer,
but just after the winter's frost, you will see for your-
selves, by the fresh frost-crop of newly-broken bits,
that I am right. Possibly you may find me to be
even more right than is desirable, by having a few
angular stones, from the size of your head to that of
your body, hurled at you by the frost-giants up above.

42 TOWN GEOLOGY. [i.

If you go to the Alps at certain seasons, and hear the
thunder of the falling rocks, and see their long lines —
moraines, as they are called — sliding slowly down upon
the surface of the glacier, then you will be ready to
believe the geologist who tells you that frost, and
probably frost alone, has hewn out such a peak as the
Matterhorn from some vast tableland ; and is hewing
it down still, winter after winter, till some day, where
the snow Alps now stand, there shall be rolling uplands
of rich cultivable soil.

So much for the mechanical action of rain, in the
shape of ice. Now a few words on its chemical action.

Rain water is seldom pure. It carries in it carbonic
acid ; and that acid, beating in shower after shower
against the face of a cliff — especially if it be a lime-
stone cliff — weathers the rock chemically; changing
(in case of limestone) the insoluble carbonate of lime
into a soluble bicarbonate, and carrying that away in
water, which, however clear, is still hard. Hard water
is usually water which has invisible lime in it ; there
are from ten to fifteen grains and more of lime in
every gallon of limestone water. I leave you to
calculate the enormous weight of lime which must be
so carried down to the sea every year by a single lime-
stone or chalk brook. You can calculate it, if you
like, by ascertaining the weight of lime in each gallon,
and the average quantity of water which comes down
the stream in a day ; and when your sum is done, you
will be astonished to find it one not of many pounds,
but probably of many tons, of solid lime, which you
never suspected or missed from the hills around.
Again, by the time the rain has sunk through the soil,
it is still less pure. It carries with it not only carbonic

I.] THE SOIL OP THE FIELD. 43

acid, but acids produced by decaying vegetables — by
the roots of the grasses and trees which grow above ;
and they dissolve the cement of the rock by chemical
action, especially if the cement be lime or iron. You
may see this for yourselves, again and again. You
may see how the root of a tree, penetrating the earth,
discolours the soil with which it is in contact. You
may see how the whole rock, just below the soil, has
often changed in colour from the compact rock below,
if the soil be covered with a dense layer of peat or
growing vegetables.

But there is another force at work, and quite as
powerful as rain and rivers, making the soil of alluvial
flats. Perhaps it has helped, likewise, to make the
soil of all the lowlands in these isles — and that is, the
waves of the sea.

If you ever go to Parkgate, in Cheshire, try if you
cannot learn there a little geology.

Walk beyond the town. You find the shore pro-
tected for a long way by a sea-wall, lest it should be
eaten away by the waves. What the force of those
waves can be, even on that sheltered coast, you may
judge — at least you could have judged this time last
year — by the masses of masonry torn from their iron
clampings during the gale of three winters since.
Look steadily at those rolled blocks, those twisted
stanchions, if they are there still ; and then ask your-
selves— it will be fair reasoning from the known to the
unknown — What effect must such wave-power as that
have had beating and breaking for thousands of years
along the western coasts of England, Scotland, Ireland?
It must have eaten up thousands of acres — whole
shires, may be, ere now. Its teeth are strong enough,

44 TOWN GEOLOGY. [l.

and it knows neither rest nor pity, the cruel hungry
sea. Give it but time enough, and what would it not
eat up ? It would eat up, in the course of ages, all
the dry land of this planet, were it not baffled by
another counteracting force, of which I shall speak
hereafter.

As you go on beyond the sea-wall, you find what
it is eating up. The whole low cliff is going visibly.
But whither is it going ? To form new soil in the
sestuary. Now you will not wonder how old harbours
so often become silted up. The sea has washed the
land into them. But more, the sea-currents do not
allow the sands of the asstuary to escape freely out to
sea. They pile it up in shifting sand-banks about the
mouth of the sestuary. The prevailing sea-winds, from
whatever quarter, catch up the sand, and roll it up into
sand-hills. Those sand-hills are again eaten down by
the sea, and mixed with the mud of the tide-flats, and
so is formed a mingled soil, partly of clayey mud,
partly of sand ; such a soil as stretches over the greater
part of all our lowlands.

Now, why should not that soil, whether in England
or in Scotland, have been made by the same means as
that of every sastuary.

You find over great tracts of East Scotland,
Lancashire, Norfolk, etc., pure loose sand just beneath
the surface, which looks as if it was blown sand from
a beach. Is it not reasonable to suppose that it is ?
You find rising out of many lowlands, crags which look
exactly like old sea-cliffs eaten by the waves, from the
base of which the waters have gone back. Why should
not those crags be old sea-cliffs? Why should we not,
following our rule of explaining the unknown by the

,.] THE SOIL OF THE FIELD. 45

known, assume that such they are till someone gives
us a sound proof that they are not ; and say — These
great plains of England and Scotland were probably
once covered by a shallow sea, and their soils made as
the soil of any tide-flat is being made now ?

But you may say, and most reasonably, "The tide-
flats are just at the sea-level. The whole of the lowland
is many feet above the sea; it must therefore have been
raised out of the sea, according to your theory : and
what proofs have you of that ? "

Well, that is a question both grand and deep, on
which I shall not enter yet ; but meanwhile, to satisfy
you that I wish to play fair with you, I ask you to
believe nothing but what you can prove for yourselves.
Let me ask you this : suppose that you had proof
positive that I had fallen into the river in the morning;
would not your meeting me in the evening be also
proof positive that somehow or other I had in the
course of the day got out of the river ? I think you
will accept that logic as sound.

Now if I can give you proof positive, proof which
you can see with your own eyes, and handle with your
own hands, and alas ! often feel but too keenly with
your own feet, that the whole of the lowlands were once
beneath the sea; then will it not be certain that, some-
how or other, they must have been raised out of the sea
again ?

And that I propose to do in my next paper, when
I speak of the pebbles in the street.

Meanwhile I wish you to face fairly the truly grand
idea, which all I have said tends to prove true — that
all the soil we see is made by the destruction of older
soils, whether soft as clay, or hard as rock ; that rain,

46 TOWN GEOLOGY. [i.

rivers, and seas are perpetually melting and grinding
up old land, to compose new land out of it ; and
that it must have been doing so, as long as rain,
rivers, and seas have existed. " But how did the first
land of all get made ? " I can only reply : A natural
question : but we can only answer that, by working
from the known to the unknown. While we are
finding out how these later lands were made and
unmade, we may stumble on some hints as to how the
first primeval continents rose out of the bosom of the
sea.

And thus I end this paper. I trust it has not been
intolerably dull. But I wanted at starting to show my
readers something of the right way of finding out truth
on this and perhaps on all subjects; to make some
simple appeals to your common sense ; and to get you
to accept some plain rules founded on common sense,
which will be of infinite use to both you and me in my
future papers.

I hope, meanwhile, that you will agree with me,
that there is plenty of geological matter to be seen and
thought over in the neighbourhood of any town.

Be sure, that wherever there is a river, even a
drain ; and a stone quarry, or even a roadside bank ;
much more where there is a sea, or a tidal gestuary,
there is geology enough to be learnt, to explain the
greater part of the making of all the continents on the
globe.

II.
THE PEBBLES IN THE STREET.

IF you, dear reader, dwell in any northern town, you
will almost certainly see paving courts and alleys, and
sometimes — to the discomfort of your feet — whole
streets, or set up as bournestones at corners, or laid in
heaps to be broken up for road-metal, certain round
pebbles, usually dark brown or speckled gray, and ex-
ceedingly tough and hard. Some of them will be very
large — boulders of several feet in diameter. If you
move from town to town, from the north of Scotland
as far down as Essex on the east, or as far down as
Shrewsbury and Wolverhampton (at least) on the west,
you will still find these pebbles, but fewer and smaller
as you go south. It matters not what the rocks and
soils of the country round may be. However much
they may differ, these pebbles will be, on the whole,
the same everywhere.

But if your town be south of the valley of the
Thames, you will find, as far as I am aware, no such
pebbles there. The gravels round you will be made
up entirely of rolled chalk flints, and bits of beds

48 TOWN GEOLOGY. [n.

immediately above or below the chalk. The blocks of
0 Sarsden " sandstone — those of which Stonehenge is
built — and the " plum-pudding stones " which are
sometimes found with them, have no kindred with the
northern pebbles. They belong to beds above the
chalk.

Now if, seeing such pebbles about your town, you
inquire, like a sensible person who wishes to under-
stand something of the spot on which he lives, whence
they come, you will be shown either a gravel-pit or a
clay-pit. In the gravel the pebbles and boulders lie
mixed with sand, as they do in the railway cutting
just south of Shrewsbury ; or in huge mounds of fine
sweet earth, as they do in the gorge of the Tay about
Dunkeld, and all the way up Strathmore, where they
form long grassy mounds — tomauns as they call them
in some parts of Scotland — askers as they call them in
Ireland. These mounds, with their sweet fresh turf
rising out of heather and bog, were tenanted — so
Scottish children used to believe — by fairies. He that
was lucky might hear inside them fairy music, and
the jingling of the fairy horses' trappings. But woe
to him if he fell asleep upon the mound, for he would
be spirited away into fairyland for seven years, which
would seem to him but one day. A strange fancy ;
yet not so strange as the actual truth as to what these
mounds are, and how they came into their places.

Or again, you might find that your town's pebbles
and boulders came out of a pit of clay, in which they
were stuck, without any order or bedding, like plums
and raisins in a pudding. This clay goes usually by
the name of boulder-clay. You would see such near
any town in Cheshire and Lancashire ; or along Leith

n.] THE PEBBLES IN THE STEEET. 49

shore, near Edinburgh ; or, to give one more instance
out of hundreds, along the coast at Scarborough. If
you walk along the shore southward of that town, you
will see, in the gullies of the cliff, great beds of sticky
clay, stuffed full of bits of every rock between the
Lake mountains and Scarborough, from rounded
pebbles of most ancient rock down to great angular
fragments of ironstone and coal. There, as elsewhere,
the great majority of the pebbles have nothing to do
with the rock on which the clay happens to lie, but
have come, some of them, from places many miles
away.

Now if we find spread over a low land pebbles
composed of rocks which are only found in certain
high lands, is it not an act of common sense to say —
These pebbles have come from the highlands ? And
if the pebbles are rounded, while the rocks like them
in the highlands always break off in angular shapes, is
it not, again, an act of mere common sense to say —
These pebbles were once angular, and have been
rubbed round, either in getting hither or before they
started hither ?

Does all this seem to you mere truism, my dear
reader ? If so, I am sincerely glad to hear it. It was
not so very long ago that such arguments would have
been considered, not only no truisms, but not even
common sense.

But to return, let us take, as an example, a sample
of these boulder clay pebbles from the neighbourhood
of Liverpool and Birkenhead, made by Mr. De Ranee,
the government geological surveyor :

Granite, greenstone, felspar porphyry, felstone,
quartz rock (all igneous rocks, that is, either formed

60 TOWN GEOLOGY. [n.

by, or altered by volcanic heat,, and almost all found in
the Lake mountains), 37 per cent.

Silurian grits (the common stones of the Lake
mountains deposited by water), 43 per cent.

Ironstone, 1 per cent.

Carboniferous limestone, 5 per cent.

Permian or Triassic sandstones, i.e. rocks imme-
diately round Liverpool, 12 per cent.

Now, does not this sample show, as far as human
common sense can be depended on, that the great
majority of these stones come from the Lake
mountains, sixty or seventy miles north of Liverpool ?
I think your common sense will tell you that these
pebbles are not mere concretions ; that is, formed out
of the substance of the clay after it was deposited.
The least knowledge of mineralogy would prove that.
But, even if you are no mineralogist, common sense
will tell you, that if they were all concreted out of the
same clay, it is most likely that they would be all of
the same kind, and not of a dozen or more different
kinds. Common sense will tell you, also, that if they
were all concreted out of the same clay, it is a most
extraordinary coincidence, indeed one too strange to be
believed, if any less strange explanation can be found
— that they should have taken the composition of
different rocks which are found all together in one
group of mountains to the northward. You will surely
say — If this be granite, it has most probably come
from a granite mountain ; if this be grit, from a grit-
stone mountain, and so on with the whole list. Why
are we to go out of our way to seek improbable
explanations, when there is a probable one staring us
in the face ?

ii.] THE PEBBLES IN THE STREET. 61

Next — and this is well worth, your notice — if you
will examine the pebbles carefully, especially the larger
ones, you will find that they are not only more or less
rounded, but often scratched; and often, too, in more
than one direction, two or even three sets of scratches
crossing each other; marked, as a cat marks an elder
stem when she sharpens her claws upon it ; and that
these scratches have not been made by the quarrymen's
tools, but are old marks which exist — as you may
easily prove for yourself — while the stone is still lying
in its bed of clay. Would it not be an act of mere
common sense to say — These -scratches have been made
by the sharp points of other stones which have rubbed
against the pebbles somewhere, and somewhen, with
great force ?

So far so good. The next question is — How did
these stones get into the clay ? If we can discover
that, we may also discover how they were rounded and
scratched. We must find a theory which will answer
our question ; and one which, as Professor Huxley
would say, " will go on all-fours," that is, will explain
all the facts of the case, and not only a few of them.

What, then, brought the stones ?

We cannot, I think, answer that question, as some
have tried to answer it, by saying that they were
brought by Noah's flood. For it is clear, that very
violent currents of water would be needed to carry
boulders, some of them weighing many tons, for many
miles. Now Scripture says nothing of any such violent
currents ; and we have no right to put currents, or any
other imagined facts, into Scripture out of our own
heads, and then argue from them as if not we, but the
text of Sciipture, had asserted their existence.

E 2

62 TOWN GEOLOGY. [n.

But still, they may have been rolled hither by
water. That theory certainly would explain their
being rounded; though not their being scratched.
But it will not explain their being found in the clay.

Eecollect what I said in my first paper : that water
drops its pebbles and coarser particles first, while it
carries the fine clayey mud onward in solution, and
only drops it when the water becomes still. Now
currents of such tremendous violence as to carry these
boulder stones onward, would have carried the mud
for many miles farther still ; and we should find the
boulders, not in clay, but lying loose together, pro-
bably on a hard rock bottom, scoured clean by the
current. That is what we find in the beds of streams ;
that is just what we do not find in this case.

But the boulders may have been brought by a
current, and then the water may have become still, and
the clay settled quietly round them. What ? Under
them as well as over them ? On that theory also we
should find them only at the bottom of the clay. As
it is, we find them scattered anywhere and everywhere
through it, from top to bottom. So that theory will
not do. Indeed, no theory will do which supposes
them to have been brought by water alone.

Try yourself, dear reader, and make experiments,
with running water, pebbles, and mud. If you try for
seven years, I believe, you will never contrive to make
your pebbles lie about in your mud, as they lie about
in every pit in the boulder clay.

Well then, there we are at fault, it seems. We
have no explanation drawn from known facts which
will do — unless we are to suppose, which I don't think
you will do, that stones, clay, and all were blown

ii.] THE PEBBLES IN THE STREET. 53

hither along the surface of the ground, by primeval
hurricanes, ten times worse than those of the West
Indies, which certainly will roll a cannon a few yards,
but cannot, surely, roll a boulder stone a hundred
miles.

Now, suppose that there was a force, an agent,
known — luckily for you, not to you — but known too
well to sailors and travellers ; a force which is at work
over the vast sheets of land at both the north and
south poles ; at work, too, on every high mountain
range in the world, and therefore a very common
natural force ; and suppose that this force would
explain all the facts, namely —

How the stones got here ;

How they were scratched and rounded ;

How they were imbedded in clay ;
because it is notoriously, and before men's eyes now,
carrying great stones hundreds of miles, and scratching
and rounding them also; carrying vast deposits of
mud, too, and mixing up mud and stones just as we
see them in the brick-pits, — Would not our common
sense have a right to try that explanation ? — to suspect
that this force, which we do not see at work in Britain
now, may have been at work here ages since ? That
would at least be reasoning from the known to the
unknown. What state of things, then, do we find
among the highest mountains ; and over whole
countries which, though not lofty, lie far enough
north or south to be permanently covered with ice ?

We find, first, an ice-cap or ice-sheet, fed by the
winter's snows, stretching over the higher land, and
crawling downward and outward by its own weight,
along the valleys, as glaciers.

64 TOWN GEOLOGY. [«.

We find underneath the glaciers, first a moraine
profonde, consisting of the boulders and gravel, and
earth, which the glacier has ground off the hillsides,
and is carrying down with it.

These stones, of course, grind, scratch, and polish
each other ; and in like wise grind, scratch, and polish
the rock over which they pass, under the enormous
weight of the superincumbent ice.

We find also, issuing from under each glacier a
stream, carrying the finest mud, the result of the
grinding of the boulders against each other and the
glacier.

We find, moreover, on the surface of the glaciers,
moraines superieures — long lines of stones and dirt
which had fallen from neighbouring cliffs, and are
now travelling downward with the glaciers.

Their fate, if the glacier ends on land, is what was
to be expected. The stones from above the glacier
fall over the ice-cliff at its end, to mingle with those
thrown out from underneath the glacier, and form
huge banks of boulders, called terminal moraines,
while the mud runs off, as all who have seen glaciers
know, in a turbid torrent.

Their fate, again, is what was to be expected if the
glacier ends, as it commonly does in Arctic regions, in
the sea. The ice grows out to sea- ward for more than
a mile sometimes, about one-eighth of it being above
water, and seven-eighths below, so that an ice-cliff one
hundred feet high may project into water eight
hundred feet deep. At last, when it gets out of its
depth, the buoyancy of the water breaks it off in ice-
bergs, which float away, at the mercy of tides and
currents, often grounding again in shallower water,

a.] THE PEBBLES IN THE STREET. 55

and ploughing the sea-bottom as they drag along it.
These bergs carry stones and dirt, often in large
quantities ; so that, whenever a berg melts or capsizes,
it strews its burden confusedly about the sea-floor.

Meanwhile the fine mud which is flowing out from
under the ice goes out to sea likewise, colouring the
water far out, and then subsiding as a soft tenacious
ooze, in which the stones brought out by the ice are
imbedded. And this ooze — so those who have
examined it assert — cannot be distinguished from the
brick-clay, or fossiliferous boulder-clay, so common in
the North. A very illustrious Scandinavian explorer,
visiting Edinburgh, declared, as soon as he saw the
sections of boulder-clay exhibited near that city, that
this was the very substance which he saw forming in
the Spitzbergen ice-fiords.*

I have put these facts as simply and baldly as I can,
in order that the reader may look steadily at them,
without having his attention drawn off, or his fancy
excited, by their real poetry and grandeur. Indeed,
it would have been an impertinence to have done
otherwise ; for I have never seen a live glacier, by land
or sea, though I have seen many a dead one. And
the public has had the opportunity, lately, of reading
so many delightful books about "peaks, passes, and
glaciers," that I am bound to suppose that many of my
readers know as much, or more, about them than I do.

* See a most charming paper on " The Physics of Arctic Ice,"
by Dr. Robert Brown of Campster, published in the Quarterly Journal
of the Geological Society, June, 1870. This article is so remarkable,
not only for its sound scientific matter, but for the vividness and
poetic beauty of its descriptions, that I must express a hope that the
learned author will some day enlarge it, and publish it in a separata
form.

66 TOWN GEOLOGY. [u.

But let us go a step farther; and, bearing in our
minds what live glaciers are like, let us imagine what
a dead glacier would be like ; a glacier, that is, which
had melted, and left nothing but its skeleton of stones
and dirt.

We should find the faces of the rock scored and
polished, generally in lines pointing down the valleys,
or at least outward from the centre of the highlands,
and polished and scored most in their upland or
weather sides. We should find blocks of rock left
behind, and perched about on other rocks of a different
kind. We should find in the valleys the old moraines
left as vast deposits of boulder and shingle, which
would be in time sawn through and sorted over by the
rivers. And if the sea-bottom outside were upheaved,
and became dry land, we should find on it the remains
of the mud from under the glacier, stuck full of stones
and boulders iceberg-dropped. This mud would be
often very irregularly bedded; for it would have been
disturbed by the ploughing of the icebergs, and
mixed here and there with dirt which had fallen from
them. Moreover, as the sea became shallower and
the mud-beds got awash one after the other, they
would be torn about, re-sifted, and re-shaped by
currents and by tides, and mixed with shore- sand
ground out of shingle-beach, thus making confusion
worse confounded. A few shells, of an Arctic or
northern type, would be found in it here and there.
Some would have lived near those later beaches, some
in deeper water in the ancient ooze, wherever the ice-
berg had left it in peace long enough for sea-animals
to colonise and breed in it. But the general appear-

ii.] THE PEBBLES IN THE STREET. 57

ance of the dried sea-bottom would be a dreary and
lifeless waste of sands, gravels, loose boulders, and
boulder-bearing clays ; and wherever a boss of bare
rock still stood up, it would be found ground down,
and probably polished and scored by the ponderous
icebergs which had lumbered over it in their passage
out to sea.

In a word, it would look exactly as vast tracts of
the English, Scotch, and Irish lowlands must have
looked before returning vegetation coated their dreary
sands and clays with a layer of brown vegetable soil.

Thus, and I believe thus only, can we explain the
facts connected with these boulder pebbles. No
agent known on earth can have stuck them in the
clay, save ice, which is known to do so still elsewhere.

No known agent can have scratched them as they
are scratched, save ice, which is known to do so still
elsewhere.

No known agent — certainly not, in my opinion,
the existing rivers — can have accumulated the vast
beds of boulders which lie along the course of certain
northern rivers ; notably along the Dee about Aboyne
— save ice bearing them slowly down from the distant
summits of the Grampians.

No known agent, save ice, can have produced those
rounded, and polished, and scored, and fluted rockers
moutonnes — "sheep-backed rocks" — so common in the
Lake district; so common, too, in Snowdon, especially
between the two lakes of Llanberis; common in Kerry;
to be seen anywhere, as far as I have ascertained,
around the Scotch Highlands, where the turf is
cleared away from an unweathered surface of the

58 TOWN GEOLOGY. [11.

rock, in the direction in which a glacier would have
pressed against it had one been there. Where these
polishings and scorings are found in narrow glens, it
is, no doubt, an open question whether some of them
may not be the work of water. But nothing but the
action of ice can have produced what I have seen in
land-locked and quiet fiords in Kerry — ice-flutings in
polished rocks below high-water mark, so large that
I could lie down in one of them. Nothing but the
action of ice could produce what may be seen in any
of our mountains — whole sheets of rock ground down
into rounded flats, irrespective of the lie of the beds,
not in valleys, but on the brows and summits of
mountains, often ending abruptly at the edge of some
sudden cliff, where the true work of water, in the
shape of rain and frost, is actually destroying the
previous work of ice, and fulfilling the rule laid down
(I think by Professor Geikie in his delightful book on
Scotch scenery as influenced by its geology), that ice
planes down into flats, while water saws out into crags
and gullies ; and that the rain and frost are even now
restoring Scotch scenery to something of that rugged-
ness and picturesqueness which it must have lost when
it lay, like Greenland, under the indiscriminating
grinding of a heavy sheet of ice.

Lastly; no known agent, save ice, will explain
those perched boulders, composed of ancient hard
rocks, which may be seen in so many parts of these
islands and of the Continent. No water power could
have lifted those stones, and tossed them up high
and dry on mountain ridges and promontories, upon
rocks of a totally different kind. Some of my readers
surely recollect Wordsworth's noble lines about these

ii.] THE PEBBLES IN THE STREET. 59

mysterious wanderers, of which he had seen many a
one about his native hills :

As a huge stone is sometimes seen to lie
Couched on the bald top of an eminence,
Wonder to all \vho do the same espy
By what means it could thither come, and whence;
So that it seems a thing endued with sense :
Like a sea-beast crawled forth, that on a shelf
Of rock or sand reposeth, there to sun itself.

Yes ; but the next time you see such a stone, believe
that the wonder has been solved, and found to be, like
most wonders in Nature, more wonderful than we
guessed it to be. It is not a sea-beast which has
crawled forth, but an ice-beast which has been left
behind ; lifted up thither by the ice, as surely as the
famous Pierre-a-bot, forty feet in diameter, and
hundreds of boulders more, almost as large as cottages,
have been carried by ice from the distant Alps right
across the lake of Neufchatel, and stranded on the
slopes of the Jura, nine hundred feet above the lake.*

Thus, I think, we have accounted for facts enough
to make it probable that Britain was once covered
partly by an ice-sheet, as Greenland is now, and partly,
perhaps, by an icy sea. But, to make assurance more
sure, let us look for new facts, and try whether our
ice-dream will account for them also. Let us investigate
our case as a good medical man does, by " verifying
his first induction."

He says : At the first glance, I can see symptoms

a, b, c. It is therefore probable that my patient has

got complaint A. But if he has he ought to have

symptom d also. If I find that, my guess will be yet

* See Lyell, "Antiquity of Man," p. 294 et seq.

60 TOWN GEOLOGY. [:i.

more probable. He ought also to have symptom e, and
so forth ; and as I find successively each of these
symptoms which are proper to A, my first guess will
become more and more probable, till it reaches practical
certainty.

Now let us do the same, and say — If this strange
dream be true, and the lowlands of the North were
once under an icy sea, ought we not to find sea-shells
in their sands and clays ? Not abundantly, of course.
We can understand that the sea-animals would be too
rapidly covered up in mud, and too much disturbed by
icebergs and boulders, to be very abundant. But still,
some should surely be found here and there.

Doubtless; and if my northern-town readers will
search the boulder-clay pits near them, they will most
probably find a few shells, if not in the clay itself, yet
in sand-beds mixed with them, and probably underlying
them. And this is a notable fact, that the more species
of shells they find, the more they will find — if they work
out their names from any good book of conchology — of
a northern type ; of shells which notoriously, at this
day, inhabit the colder seas.

It is impossible for me here to enter at length on a
subject on which a whole literature has been already
written. Those who wish to study it may find all that
they need know, and more, in Lyell's " Student's
Elements of Geology," and in chapter xii. of his
"Antiquity of Man." They will find that if the
evidence of scientific conchologists be worth anything,
the period can be pointed out in the strata, though not
of course in time, at which these seas began to grow
colder, and southern and Mediterranean shells to dis-
appear, their places being taken by shells of a temperate,

u.] THE PEBBLES IN THE STEEET. 61

and at last of an Arctic climate ; which last have since
retreated either toward their native North, or into cold
water at great depths. From Essex across to Wales,
from Wales to the asstuary of the Clyde, this fact has
been verified again and again. And in the search for
these shells, a fresh fact, and a most startling one, was
discovered. They are to be found not only in the clay
of the lowlands, but at considerable heights up the hills,
showing that, at some time or other, these hills have
been submerged beneath the sea.

Let me give one example, which any tourist into
Wales may see for himself. Moel Tryfaen is a
mountain over Carnarvon. Now perched on the side
of that mountain, fourteen hundred feet above the
present sea-level, is an ancient sea-beach, five-and-
thirty feet thick, lying on great ice-scratched boulders,
which again lie on the mountain slates. It was dis-
covered by the late Mr. Trimmer, now, alas ! lost to
Geology. Out of that beach fifty-seven different
species of shells have been taken ; eleven of them are
now exclusively Arctic, and not found in our seas;
four of them are still common to the Arctic seas and
to our own ; and almost all the rest are northern
shells.

Fourteen hundred feet above the present sea : and
that, it must be understood, is not the greatest height
at which such shells may be found hereafter. For,
according to Professor Eamsay, drift of the same kind
as that on Moel Tryfaen is found at a height of two
thousand three hundred feet.

Now I ask my readers to use their common sense
over this astounding fact— which, after all, is only one
among hundreds; to let (as Mr. Matthew Arnold

62 TOWN GEOLOGY. [u.

would well say) their " thought play freely " about it ;
and consider for themselves what those shells must
mean. I say not may, but must, unless we are to
believe in a " Deus quidam deceptor," in a God who
puts shells upon mountain- sides only to befool honest
human beings, and gives men intellects which are
worthless for even the simplest work. Those shells
must mean that that mountain, and therefore the
mountains round it, must have been once fourteen
hundred feet at least lower than they are now. That
the sea in which they were sunk was far colder than
now. That icebergs brought and dropped boulders
round their flanks. That upon those boulders a sea-
beach formed, and that dead shells were beaten into it
from a sea-bottom close by. That, and no less, Moel
Tryfaen must mean.

But it must mean, also, a length of time which has
been well called "appalling." A length of time
sufficient to let the mountain sink into the sea. Then
length of time enough to enable those Arctic shells to
crawl down from the northward, settle, and propagate
themselves generation after generation ; then length
of time enough to uplift their dead remains, and the
beach, and the boulders, and all Snowdonia, fourteen
hundred feet into the air. And if anyone should
object that the last upheaval may have been effected
suddenly by a few tremendous earthquakes, we must
answer — We have no proof of it. Earthquakes up-
heave lands now only by slight and intermittent
upward pulses; nay, some lands we know to rise
without any earthquake pulses, but by simple, slow,
upward swelling of a few feet in a century ; and we
have no reason, and therefore no right, to suppose that

ii.] THE PEBBLES IN THE STREET. G3

Snowdonia was upheaved by any means or at any rate
which we do not witness now ; and therefore we are
bound to allow, not only that there was a past " age of
ice," but that that age was one of altogether enormous
duration.

But meanwhile some of you, I presume, will be ready
to cry — Stop ! It may be our own weakness ; but you
are really going on too fast and too far for our small
imaginations. Have you not played with us, as well
as argued with us, till you have inveigled us step by
step into a conclusion which we cannot and will not
believe ? That all this land should have been sunk
beneath an icy sea ? That Britain should have been
as Greenland is now ? We can't believe it, and we
won't.

If you say so, like stout common-sense Britons,
who have a wholesome dread of being taken in with
fine words and wild speculations, I assure you I shall
not laugh at you even in private. On the contrary, I
shall say — what I am sure every scientific man will
say — So much the better. That is the sort of audience
which we want, if we are teaching natural science.
We do not want haste, enthusiasm, gobe-moucherie,
as the French call it, which is agape to snap up any
new and vast fancy, just because it is new and vast.
We want our readers to be slow, suspicious, conserva-
tive, ready to " gib," as we say of a horse, and refuse
the collar up a steep place, saying — I must stop and
think. I don't like the look of the path ahead of me.
It seems an ugly place to get up. I don't know this
road, and I shall not hurry over it. I must go back
a few steps, and make sure. I must see whether it is
the right road ; whether there are not other roads, a

6i TOWN GEOLOGY. [H.

dozen of them perhaps, which would do as well and
better than this.

This is the temper which finds out truth, slowly,
but once and for all ; and I shall be glad, not sorry,
to see it in my readers.

And I am bound to say that it has been by that
temper that this theory has been worked out, and the
existence of this past age of ice, or glacial epoch, has
been discovered, through many mistakes, many correc-
tions, and many changes of opinion about details, for
nearly forty years of hard work, by many men, in.
many lands.

As a very humble student of this subject, I may
say that I have been looking these facts in the face
earnestly enough for more than twenty years, and that
I am about as certain that they can only be explained
by ice, as I am that my having got home by rail can-
only be explained by steam.

But I think I know what startles you. It is the-
being asked to believe in such an enormous change in
climate, and in the height of the land above the sea*
Well — it is very astonishing, appalling — all but in-
credible, if we had not the facts to prove it. But of
the facts there can be no doubt. There can be no
doubt that the climate of this northern hemisphere
has changed enormously more than once. There can
be no doubt that the distribution of land and water,,
the shape and size of its continents and seas, have
changed again and again. There can be no doubt
that, for instance, long before the age of ice, the whole-
North of Europe was much warmer than it is now.

Take Greenland, for instance. Disco Island lies in
Baffin's Bay, off the west coast of Greenland, in lati-

ii.] THE PEBBLES IN THE STREET. 65

tude 70°, far within the Arctic circle. Now there
certain strata of rock, older than the ice, have not been
destroyed by the grinding of the ice-cap ; and they
are full of fossil plants. But of what kind of plants ?
Of the same families as now grow in the warmer parts
of the United States. Even a tulip-tree has been
found among them. Now how is this to be explained ?

Either we must say that the climate of Greenland
was then so much warmer than now, that it had sum-
mers probably as hot as those of New York ; or we
must say that these leaves and stems were floated
thither from the United States. But if we say the
latter, we must allow a change in the shape of the
land which is enormous. For nothing now can float
northward from the United States into Baffin's Bay.
The polar current sets out of Baffin's Bay southward,
bringing icebergs down, not leaves up, through Davis's
Straits. And in any case we must allow that the hills
of Disco Island were then the bottom of a sea : or
how would the leaves have been deposited in them
at all ?

So much for the change of climate and land which
can be proved to have gone on in Greenland. It has
become colder. Why should it not some day become
warmer again ?

Now for England. It can be proved, as far as
common sense can prove anything, that England was,
before the age of ice, much warmer than it is now,
and grew gradually cooler and cooler, just as, while
the age of ice was dying out, it grew warmer again.

Now what proof is there of that ?

This. Underneath London — as, I dare say, many
of you know — there lies four or five hundred feet of
sc. F

66 TOWN GEOLOGY. [u.

clay. But not ice-clay. Anything but that, as you
will see. It belongs to a formation late (geologically
speaking), but somewhat older than those Disco Island
beds.

And what sort of fossils do we find in it ?

In the first place, the shells, which are abundant,
are tropical — Nautili, Cones, and such like. And more,
fruits and seeds are found in it, especially at the Isle
of Sheppey. And what are they ? Fruits of Nipa
palms, a form only found now at river-mouths in
Eastern India and the Indian islands ; Anona-seeds ;
gourd-seeds ; Acacia fruits — all tropical again ; and
Proteaceous plants too — of an Australian type. Surely
your common sense would hint to you, that this London
clay must be mud laid down off the mouth of a tropical
river. But your common sense would be all but
certain of that, when you found, as you would find,
the teeth and bones of crocodiles and turtles, who
come to land, remember, to lay their eggs ; the bones,
too, of large mammals, allied to the tapir of India and
South America, and the water-hog of the Cape. If
all this does not mean that there was once a tropic
climate and a tropic river running into some sea or
other where London now stands, I must give up
common sense and reason as deceitful and useless
faculties ; and believe nothing, not even the evidence
of my own senses.

And now, have I, or have I not, fulfilled the
promise which I made — rashly, I dare say some of you
thought — in my first paper ? Have I, or have I not,
made you prove to yourself, by your own common
sense, that the lowlands of Britain were underneath
the sea in the days in which these pebbles and boulders

ii.] THE PEBBLES IN THE STREET. 67

were laid down over your plains ? Nay, have we not
proved more ? Have we not found that that old sea
was an icy sea ? Have we not wandered on, step by
step, into a whole true fairyland of wonders ? to a
time when all England, Scotland, and Ireland were as
G reenland is now ? when mud streams have rushed
down from under glaciers on to a cold sea-bottom,
when "ice, mast high, came floating by, as green
as emerald ? " when Snowdon was sunk for at least
fourteen hundred feet of its height ? when (as I could
prove to you, had I time) the peaks of the highest
Cumberland and Scotch mountains alone stood out, as
islets in a frozen sea ?

We want to get an answer to one strange question,
and we have found a group of questions stranger still,
and got them answered too. But so it is always in
science. We know not what we shall discover. But
this, at least, we know, that it will be far more won-
derful than we had dreamed. The scientific explorer
is always like Saul of old, who set out simply to find
his father's asses, and found them — and a kingdom
besides.

I should have liked to have told you more about
this bygone age of ice. I should have liked to say
something to you on the curious question — which is
still an open one — whether there were not two ages of
ice ; whether the climate here did not, after perhaps
thousands of years of Arctic cold, soften somewhat for
a while — a few thousand years, perhaps — and then
harden again into a second age of ice, somewhat less
severe, probably, than the first. I should have liked
to have hinted at the probable causes of this change
— indeed, of the age of ice altogether — whether it was

F 2

63 TOWN GEOLOGY. [11.

caused by a change in the distribution of land and
water, or by change in the height and size of these
islands, which made them large enough, and high
enough, to carry a sheet of eternal snow inland ; or
whether, finally, the age of ice was caused by an actual
change in the position of the whole planet with regard
to its orbit round the sun — shifting at once the poles
and the tropics ; a deep question that latter, on which
astronomers, whose business it is, are still at work,
and on which, ere young folk are old, they will have
discovered, I expect, some startling facts. On that last
question, I, being no astronomer, cannot speak. But
I should have liked to have said somewhat on matters
on which I have knowledge enough, at least, to teach
you how much there is to be learnt. I should have
liked to tell the student of sea-animals — how the ice-
age helps to explain, and is again explained by, the
remarkable discoveries which Dr. Carpenter and Mr.
Wyville Thompson have just made, in the deep-sea
dredgings in the North Atlantic. I should have liked
to tell the botanist somewhat of the pre-glacial flora —
the plants which lived here before the ice, and lasted,
some of them at least, through all those ages of fearful
cold, and linger still on the summits of Snowdon, and
the highest peaks of Cumberland and Scotland. I
should have liked to have told the lovers of zoology
about the animals which lived before the ice — of the
mammoth, or woolly elephant ; the woolly rhinoceros,
the cave lion and bear, the reindeer, the musk oxen,
the lemmings and the marmots which inhabited Britain
till the ice drove them out southward, even into the
South of France ; and how as the ice retreated, and
the climate became tolerable once more, some of them

n.J THE PEBBLES IN THE STREET. 69

— the mammoth and rhinoceros, the bison, the lion,
and many another mighty beast reoccupied our low-
lands, at a time when the hippopotamus, at least in
summer, ranged freely from Africa and Spain across
what was then dry land between France and England,
and fed by the side of animals which have long since
retreated to Norway and to Canada. I should have
liked to tell the archaeologist of the human beings —
probably from their weapons and their habits — of the
same race as the present Laplanders, who passed
northward as the ice went back, following the wild
reindeer herds from the South of France into our
islands, which were no islands then, to be in their turn
driven northward by stronger races from the east and
south. But space presses, and I fear that I have
written too much already.

At least, I have turned over for you a few grand
and strange pages in the book of nature, and taught
you, I hope, a key by which to decipher their hiero-
glyphics. At least, I have, I trust, taught you to
look, as I do, with something of interest, even of awe,
upon the pebbles in the street.

III.
THE STONES IN THE WALL.

THIS is a large subject. For in the different towns
of these islands, the walls are built of stones of almost
every age, from the earliest to the latest ; and the
town-geologist may find a quite different problem to
solve in the nearest wall, on moving from one town to
another twenty miles off. All I can do, therefore, is
to take one set of towns, in the walls of which one
sort of stones is commonly found, and talk of them ;
taking care, of course, to choose a stone which is
widely distributed. And such, I think, we can find in
the so-called New Eed sandstone, which, with its
attendant marls, covers a vast tract — and that a rich
and busy one — of England. From Hartlepool and the
mouth of the Tees, down through Yorkshire and
Nottinghamshire ; over the manufacturing districts of
central England ; down the valley of the Severn ; past
Bristol and the Somersetshire flats to Torquay in
South Devon ; up north-westward through Shrop-
shire and Cheshire ; past Liverpool and northward
through Lancashire ; reappearing again, north of the

in.] THE STONES IN THE WALL. 71

Lake mountains, about Carlisle and the Scotch side
of the Solway Frith, stretches the New Eed sandstone
plain, from under which everywhere the coal-bearing
rocks rise as from a sea. It contains, in many places,
excellent quarries of building-stone ; the most famous
of which, perhaps, are the well-known Runcorn
quarries, near Liverpool, from which the old Eomans
brought the materkl for the walls and temples of
ancient Chester, and from which the stone for the
restoration of Chester Cathedral is being taken at this
day. In some quarters, especially in the north-west of
England, its soil is poor, because it is masked by that
very boulder-clay of which I spoke in my last paper.
But its rich red marls, wherever they come to the
surface, are one of God's most precious gifts to this
favoured land. On them, one finds oneself at once in
a garden ; amid the noblest of timber, wheat, roots,
grass which is green through the driest summers, and,
in the western counties, cider-orchards laden with red
and golden fruit. I know, throughout northern
Europe, no such charming scenery, for quiet beauty
and solid wealth, as that of the New Eed marls ; and
if I wished to show a foreigner what England was, I
should take hirn along them, from Yorkshire to South
Devon, and say — There. Is not that a country worth
living for, — and worth dying for if need be ?

Another reason which I have for dealing with the
New Eed sandstone is this — that (as I said just now)
over great tracts of England, especially about the
manufacturing districts, the town-geologist will find it
covered immediately by the boulder clay.

The townsman, finding this, would have a fair right
to suppose that the clay was laid down immediately, or

72 TOWN GEOLOGY. [nr.

at least soon after, the sandstones or marls on which it
lies ; that as soon as the one had settled at the bottom
of some old sea, the other settled on the top of it, in
the same sea.

A fair and reasonable guess, which would in many
cases, indeed in most, be quite true. But in this case
it would be a mistake. The sandstone and marls are
immensely older than the boulder-clay. They are,
humanly speaking, some four or five worlds older.

What do I mean? This — that between the time
when the one, and the time when the other, was made,
the British Islands, and probably the whole continent
of Europe, have changed four or five times ; in shape;
in height above the sea, or depth below it ; in climate ;
in the kinds of plants and animals which have dwelt on
them, or on their sea-bottoms. And surely it is not
too strong a metaphor, to call such changes a change
from an old world to a new one.

Mind. I do not say that these changes were sudden
or violent. It is far more probable that they are only
part and parcel of that vast but slow change which is
going on everywhere over our whole globe. I think
that will appear probable in the course of this paper.
But that these changes have taken place, is my main
thesis. The fact I assert ; and I am bound to try and
prove it. And in trying to do so, I shall no longer
treat my readers, as I did in the first two papers, like
children. I shall take for granted that they now
understand something of the method by which geolo-
gical problems are worked out ; and can trust it, and
me ; and shall state boldly the conclusions of geolo-
gists, only giving proof where proof is specially needed.

Now you must understand that in England there

in.] THE STONES IN THE WALL. 73

are two great divisions of these New Bed sandstones,
' ' Trias," as geologists call them. An upper, called in
Germany Keuper, which consists, atop, of the rich red
marl, below them, of sandstones, and of those vast
deposits of rock-salt, which have been long worked,
and worked to such good purpose, that a vast subsi-
dence of land has just taken place near Nantwich in
Cheshire; and serious fears are entertained lest the
town itself may subside, to fill up the caverns below,
from whence the salt has been quarried. Underneath
these beds again are those which carry the building-
stone of Runcorn. Now these beds altogether, in
Cheshire, at least, are about 3,400 feet thick; and
were not laid down in a year, or in a century either.

Below them lies a thousand feet of sandstones,
known in Germany by the name of " Bunter," from
its mottled and spotted appearance. What lies under
them again, does not concern us just now.

I said that the geologists called these beds the
Trias ; that is, the triple group. But as yet we have
heard of only two parts of it. Where is the third ?

Not here, but in Germany. There, between the
Keuper above and the Bunter below, lies a great series
of limestone beds, which, from the abundance of fossils
which they contain, go by the name of Muschelkalk.
A long epoch must therefore have intervened between
the laying down of the Bunter and of the Keuper.
And we have a trace of that long epoch, even in
England. The Keuper lies, certainly, immediately on
the Bunter; but not always "conformably" on it.
That is, the beds are not exactly parallel. The Bunter
had been slightly tilted, and slightly waterworn, before
the Keuper was laid on it.

74 TOWN GEOLOGY. [m.

It is reasonable, therefore, to suppose, that the
Bunter in England was dry land, and therefore safe
from fresh deposit, through ages during which it was
deep enough beneath the sea in Germany, to have the
Muschelkalk laid down on it. Here again, then, as
everywhere, we have evidence of time — time, not only
beyond all counting, but beyond all imagining.

And now, perhaps, the reader will ask — If I am to-
believe that all new land is made out of old land, and
that all rocks and soils are derived from the wear and
tear of still older rocks, off what land came this enor-
mous heap of sands more than 5,000 feet thick in places,
stretching across England and into Germany ?

It is difficult to answer. The shape and distribu-
tion of land in those days were so different from what
they are now, that the rocks which furnished a great
deal of our sandstone may be now, for aught I know, a
mile beneath the sea.

But over the land which still stands out of the sea
near us there has been wear and tear enough to account
for any quantity of sand deposit. As a single instance
— It is a provable and proven fact — as you may see
from Mr. Ramsay's survey of North Wales — that over
a large tract to the south of Snowdon, between Port
Madoc and Barmouth, there has been ground off and
carried away a mass of solid rock 20,000 feet thick ;
thick enough, in fact, if it were there still, to make a
range of mountains as high as the Andes. It is a
provable and proven fact that vast tracts of the centre
of poor old Ireland were once covered with coal-
measures, which have been scraped off in likewise,
deprived of inestimable mineral wealth. The destruc-
tion of rocks — " denudation " as it is called — in the

in.] THE STONES IN THE WALL. 75

district round Malvern, is, I am told, provably enor-
mous. Indeed, it is so overall Wales, North England,
and West and North Scotland. So there is enough of
rubbish to be accounted for to make our New Bed
sands. The round pebbles in it being, I believe, pieces
of Old Red sandstone, may have come from the great
Old Red sandstone region of South East Wales and
Herefordshire. Some of the rubbish, too, may have
come from what is now the Isle of Anglesey.

For you find in the beds, from the top to the
bottom (at least in Cheshire), particles of mica. Now
this mica could not have been formed in the sand. It
is a definite crystalline mineral, whose composition is
well known. It is only found in rocks which have
been subjected to immense pressure, and probably to
heat. The granites and mica-slates of Anglesey are
full of it ; and from Anglesey — as likely as from any-
where else — these thin scales of mica came. And that
is about all that I can say on the matter. But it is
certain that most of these sands were deposited in a
very shallow water, and very near to land. Sand
and pebbles, as I said in my first paper, could not be
carried far out to sea ; and some of the beds of the
Bunter are full of rounded pebbles. Nay, it is certain
that their surface was often out of water. Of that you
may see very pretty proofs. You find these sands
ripple-marked, as you do shore-sands now. You find
cracks where the marl mud has dried in the sun : and,
more, you find the little pits made by rain. Of that I
have no doubt. I have seen specimens, in which you
could not only see at a glance that the marks had been
made by the large drops of a shower, but see also from
what direction the shower had come. These delicate

76 TOWN GEOLOGY. [in.

markings must have been covered up immediately with,
a fresh layer of mud or sand. How long since ? How
long since that flag had seen the light of the sun, when
it saw it once again, restored to the upper air by the
pick of the quarryman ? Who can answer that ?
Not I.

Fossils are very rare in these sands ; it is not easy
to say why. It may be that the red oxide of iron in
them has destroyed them. Few or none are ever
found in beds in which it abounds. It is curious, too,
that the Keuper, which is all but barren of fossils in
England, is full of them in Wiirtemberg, reptiles, fish,
and remains of plants being common. But what will
interest the reader are the footprints of a strange
beast, found alike in England and in Germany — the
Cheirotherium, as it was first named, from its hand-
like feet; the Labyrinthodon, as it is now named, from
the extraordinary structure of its teeth. There is little
doubt now, among anatomists, that the bones and
teeth of the so-called Labyrinthodon belong to the
animal which made the footprints. If so, the creature
must have been a right loathly monster. Some think
him to have been akin to lizards ; but the usual
opinion is that he was a cousin of frogs and toads.
Looking at his hands and other remains, one pictures
him to oneself as a short, squat brute, as big as a fat
hog, with a head very much the shape of a baboon,
very large hands behind and small ones in front,
waddling about on the tide flats of a sandy sea, and
dragging after him, seemingly, a short tail, which has
left its mark on the sand. What his colour was,
whether he was smooth or warty, what he ate, and in
general how he got his living, we know not. But

in.] THE STONES IN THE WALL. 77

there must have been something there for him to eat ;
and I dare say that he was about as happy and about
as intellectual as the toad is now. Remember always
that there is nothing alive now exactly like him, or,
indeed, like any animal found in these sandstones.
The whole animal world of this planet has changed
entirely more than once since the Labyrinthodon
waddled over the Cheshire flats. A lizard, for in-
stance, which has been found in the Keuper, had a
skull like a bird's, and no teeth — a type which is now
quite extinct. But there is a more remarkable animal
of which I must say a few words, and one which to
scientific men is most interesting and significant.

Both near Warwick, and near Elgin in Scotland, in
Central India, and in South Africa, fossil remains are
found of a family of lizards utterly unlike anything
now living save one, and that one is crawling about,
plentifully I believe — of all places in the world — in
New Zealand. How it got there ; how so strange a
type of creature should have died out over the rest of
the world, and yet have lasted on in that remote island
for long ages, ever since the days of the New Red
sandstone, is one of those questions — quite awful
questions I consider them — with which I will not
puzzle my readers. I only mention it to show them
what serious questions the scientific man has to face,
and to answer, if he can. Only the next time they go
to the Zoological Gardens in London, let them go
to the reptile-house, and ask the very clever and
courteous attendant to show them the Sphenodons, or
Hatterias, as he will probably call them — and then
look, I hope with kindly interest, at the oldest Conser-
vatives they ever saw, or are like to see ; gentlemen of

73 TOWN GEOLOGY. [m.

most ancient pedigree, who have remained all but un-
changed, while the whole surface of the globe has
changed around them more than once or twice.

And now, of course, my readers will expect to hear
something of the deposits of rock-salt, for which
Cheshire and its red rocks are famous. I have never
seen them, and can only say that the salt does not, it
is said by geologists, lie in the sandstone, but at the
bottom of the red marl which caps the sandstone. It
was formed most probably by the gradual drying up
of lagoons, such as are depositing salt, it is said now,
both in the Gulf of Tadjara, on the Abyssinian frontier
opposite Aden, and in the Runn of Cutch, near the
Delta of the Indus. If this be so, then these New
Bed sandstones may be the remains of a whole Sahara
— a sheet of sandy and all but lifeless deserts, reaching
from the west of England into Germany, and rising
slowly out of the sea ; to sink, as we shall find, beneath
the sea again.

And now, as to the vast period of time — the four
or five worlds, as I called it — which elapsed between
the laying down of the New Red sandstones and the
laying down of the boulder-clays.

I think this fact — for fact it is — may be better
proved by taking readers an imaginary railway journey
to London from any spot in the manufacturing districts
of central England — begging them, meanwhile, to keep
their eyes open on the way.

And here I must say that I wish folks in general
would keep their eyes a little more open when they
travel by rail. When I see young people rolling along
in a luxurious carriage, their eyes and their brains
absorbed probably in a trashy shilling novel, and never

in.] THE STONES IN THE WALL. 79

lifted up to look out of the window, unconscious of all
that they are passing — of the reverend antiquities, the
admirable agriculture, the rich and peaceful scenery,
the like of which no country upon earth can show;
unconscious, too, of how much they might learn of
botany and zoology, by simply watching the flowers
along the railway banks and the sections in the cut-
tings : then it grieves me to see what little use people
make of the eyes and of the understanding which God
has given them. They complain of a dull journey :
but it is not the journey which is dull ; it is they who
are dull. Eyes have they, and see not ; ears have they,
and hear not; mere dolls in smart clothes, too many
of them, like the idols of the heathen.

But my readers, I trust, are of a better mind. So
the next time they find themselves running up south-
ward to London — or the reverse way — let them keep
their eyes open, and verify, with the help of a geological
map, the sketch which is given in the following pages.
Of the " Black Countries " — the actual coal districts
I shall speak hereafter. They are in England either
shores or islands yet undestroyed, which stand out of
the great sea of New Eed sandstone, and often carry
along their edges layers of far younger rocks, called
now Permian, from the ancient kingdom of Permia, in
Russia, where they cover a vast area. With them I
will not confuse the reader just now, but will only ask
him to keep his eye on the rolling plain of New Red
sands and marls past, say, Birmingham and Warwick.
After those places, these sands and marls dip to the
south-east, and other rocks and soils appear above
them, one after another, dipping likewise towards the
south-east — that is, toward London.

80 TOWN GEOLOGY. [in.

First appear thin layers of a very hard blue lime-
stone, full of shells, and parted by layers of blue mud.
That rock runs in a broad belt across England, from
Whitby in Yorkshire, to Lyme in Dorsetshire, and is
known as Lias. Famous it is, as some readers may
know, for holding the bones of extinct monsters —
Ichthyosaurs and Plesiosaurs, such as the unlearned
may behold in the lake at the Crystal Palace. On
this rock lie the rich cheese pastures, and the best
tracts of the famous ' ' hunting shires " of England.

Lying on it, as we go south-eastward, appear
alternate beds of sandy limestone, with vast depths of
clay between them. These "oolites," or freestones,
furnish the famous Bath stone, the Oxford stone, and
the Barnack stone of Northamptonshire, of which
some of the finest cathedrals are built — a stone only
surpassed, I believe, by the Caen stone, which comes
from beds of the same age in Normandy. These
freestones and clays abound in fossils, but of kinds,
be it remembered, which differ more and more from
those of the lias beneath, as the beds are higher in
the series, and therefore nearer. There, too, are
found principally the bones of that extraordinary
flying lizard, the Pterodactyle, which had wings
formed out of its fore-legs, on somewhat the same
plan as those of a bat, but with one exception. In
the bat, as any one may see, four fingers of the hand
are lengthened to carry the wing, while the first alone
is left free, as a thumb : but in the Pterodactyle, the
outer or " little " finger alone is lengthened, and the
other four fingers left free — one of those strange
instances in nature of the same effect being produced
in widely different plants and animals, and yet by

Hi.] THE STONES IN THE WALL. 81

slightly different means, on which a whole chapter of
natural philosophy — say, rather, natural theology —
will have to be written some day.

But now consider what this Lias, and the Oolites
and clays upon it mean. They mean that the New
Eed sandstone, after it had been dry land, or all but
dry land (as is proved by the footprints of animals
and the deposits of salt), was sunk again beneath the
sea. Each deposit of limestone signifies a long period
of time, during which that sea was pure enough to
allow reefs of coral to grow, and shells to propagate,
at the bottom. Each great band of clay signifies a
long period, during which fine mud was brought down
from some wasting land in the neighbourhood. And
that land was not far distant is proved by the bones
of the Pterodactyle, of Crocodiles, and of Marsupials ;
by the fact that the shells are of shallow-water or
shore species ; by the presence, mixed with them, of
fragments of wood, impressions of plants, and even
wing-shells of beetles ; and lastly, if further proof was
needed, by the fact that in the " dirt-bed " of the
Isle of Portland and the neighbouring shores, stumps
of trees allied to the modern sago-palms are found as
they grew in the soil, which, with them, has been
covered up in layers of freshwater shale and lime-
stone. A tropic forest has plainly sunk beneath a
lagoon ; and that lagoon, again, beneath the sea.

And how long did this period of slow sinking go on ?
Who can tell ? The thickness of the Lias and Oolites
together cannot be less than a thousand feet. Con-
sidering, then, the length of time required to lay down
a thousand feet of strata, and considering the vast
difference between the animals found in them, and the

sc. a

82 TOWN GEOLOGY. [HI.

few found in the New Red sandstone, we have a righb
to call them another world, and that one which must
have lasted for ages.

After we pass Oxford, or the Vale of Aylesbury, we
enter yet another world. We come to a bed of sand,
under which the freestones and their adjoining clays
dip to the south-east. This is called commonly the
lower Greensand, though it is not green, but rich iron-
red. Then succeeds a band of stiff blue clay, called
the Gault, and then another bed of sand, the upper
Greensand, which is more worthy of the name, for ifc
does carry, in most places, a band of green or "glau-
conite" sand. But it and the upper layers of the lower
Greensand also, are worth our attention; for we are all
probably eating them from time to time in the form of
bran.

It had been long remarked that certain parts of
these beds carried admirable wheatland ; it had been
remarked, too, that the finest hop-lands — those of
Farnham, for instance, and Tunbridge — lay upon them:
but that the fertile band was very narrow ; that, as in
the Surrey Moors, vast sheets of the lower Greensand
were not worth cultivation. What caused the striking
difference ?

My beloved friend and teacher, the late Dr.
Henslow, when Professor of Botany at Cambridge, had
brought to him by a farmer (so the story ran) a few
fossils. He saw, being somewhat of a geologist and
chemist, that they were not, as fossils usually are,
carbonate of lime, but phosphate of lime — bone-earth.
He said at once, as by an inspiration, "You have
found a treasure — not a gold-mine, indeed, but a food-
mine. This is bone-earth, which we are at our wits'

in.] THE STONES IN THE WALL. 83

end to get for our grain and pulse ; which we are im-
porting, as expensive bones, all the way from Buenos
Ayres. Only find enough of them, and you will
increase immensely the food supply of England, and
perhaps make her independent of foreign phosphates
in case of war."

His advice was acted on ; for the British farmer is
by no means the stupid personage which townsfolk
are too apt to fancy him. This bed of phosphates was
found everywhere in the Greensand, underlying the
Chalk. It may be traced from Dorsetshire through
England to Cambridge, and thence, I believe, into
Yorkshire. It may be traced again, I believe, all round
the Weald of Kent and Sussex, from Hythe to Farnham
— where it is peculiarly rich — and so to Eastbourne
and Beachey Head ; and it furnishes, in Cambridge-
shire, the greater part of those so-called " coprolites,"
which are used perpetually now for manure, being
ground up, and then treated with sulphuric acid, till
they become a " soluble super-phosphate of lime."

So much for the useless " hobby," as some fancy
it, of poking over old bones and stones, and learning a
little of the composition of this earth on which God
has placed us.

How to explain the presence of this vast mass of
animal matter, in one or two thin bands right across
England, I know not. That the fossils have been
rolled on a sea-beach is plain to those who look at
them. But what caused so vast a destruction of
animal life along that beach, must remain one of the
buried secrets of the past.

And now we are fast nearing another world, which
is far younger than that coprolite bed, and has been
formed under circumstances the most opposite to it.

a 2

81 TOWN GEOLOGY. [HI.

We are nearing, by whatever rail we approach London,
the escarpment of the chalk downs.

All readers, surely, know the white chalk, the
special feature and the special pride of the south of
England. All know its softly-rounded downs, its vast
beech woods, its short and sweet turf, its snowy cliffs,
which have given — so some say — to the whole island
the name of Albion — the white land. But all do not,
perhaps, know that till we get to the chalk no single
plant or animal has been found which is exactly like
any plant or animal now known to be living. The
plants and animals grow, on the whole, more and more
like our living forms as we rise in the series of beds.
But only above the chalk (as far as we yet know) do
we begin to find species identical with those living
now.

This in itself would prove a vast lapse of time.
We shall have a further proof of that vast lapse when
we examine the chalk itself. It is composed — of this
there is now no doubt — almost entirely of the shells
of minute animalcules ; and animalcules (I use an
unscientific word for the sake of unscientific readers)
like these, and in some cases identical with them, are
now forming a similar deposit of mud, at vast depths,
over the greater part of the Atlantic sea-floor. This
fact has been put out of doubt by recent deep-sea
dredgings. A whole literature has been written on it
of late. Any reader who wishes to know it, need only
ask the first geologist he meets; and if he has the
wholesome instinct of wonder in him, fill his imagina-
tion with true wonders, more grand and strange than
he is like to find in any fairy tale. All I have to do
with the matter here is, to say that, arguing from the

in.] THE STONES IN THE WALL. 85

known to the unknown, from the Atlantic deep-sea
ooze which we do know about, to the chalk which
we do not know about, the whole of the chalk must
have been laid down at the bottom of a deep and still
ocean, far out of the reach of winds, tides, and even
currents, as a great part of the Atlantic sea-floor is at
this day.

Prodigious ! says the reader. And so it is.
Prodigious to think that that shallow Greensand
shore, strewed with dead animals, should sink to the
bottom of an ocean, perhaps a mile, perhaps some
four miles deep. Prodigious the time during which it
must have lain as a still ocean-floor. For so minute
are the living atomies which form the ooze, that an
inch, I should say, is as much as we can allow for their
yearly deposit ; and the chalk is at least a thousand
feet thick. It may have taken, therefore, twelve
thousand years to form the chalk alone. A rough
guess, of course, but one as likely to be two or three
times too little as two or three times too big. Such,
or somewhat such, is the fact. It had long been
suspected, and more than suspected; and the late
discoveries of Dr. Carpenter and Mr. Wy ville Thompson
have surely placed it beyond doubt.

Thus, surely, if we call the Oolitic beds one new
world above the New Red sandstone, we must call the
chalk a second new world in like wise.

I will not trouble the reader here with the reasons
why geologists connect the chalk with the greensands
below it, by regular gradations, in spite of the enormous
downward leap, from sea-shore to deep ocean, which
the beds seem (but only seem) to have taken. The
change — like all changes in geology — was probably

86 TOWN GEOLOGY. [m.

gradual. Not by spasmodic leaps and starts, but
slowly and stately, as befits a God of order, of patience,
and of strength, have these great deeds been done.

But we have not yet done with new worlds or new
prodigies on our way to London, as any Londoner may
ascertain for him self , if he will run out a few miles by
rail, and look in any cutting or pit, where the sur-
face of the chalk, and the beds which lie on it, are
exposed.

On the chalk lie — especially in the Blackheath and
Woolwich district — sands and clays. And what do
they tell us ?

Of another new world, in which the chalk has been
lifted up again, to form gradually, doubtless, and at
different points in succession, the shore of a sea.

But what proof is there of this ?

The surface of the chalk is not flat and smooth, as
it must have been when at the bottom of the sea. It
is eaten out into holes and furrows, plainly by the
gnawing of the waves ; and on it lie, in many places,
large rolled flints out of chalk which has been de-
stroyed, beds of shore-shingle, beds of oysters lying
as they grew, fresh or brackish water-shells standing
as they lived, bits of lignite (fossil wood half turned
to coal), and (as in Katesgrove pits at Eeading) leaves
of trees. Proof enough, one would say, that the chalk
had been raised till part of it at least became dry land,
and carried vegetation.

And yet we have not done. There is another world
to tell of yet.

For these beds (known as the Woolwich and
Beading beds) dip under that vast bed of London
clay, four hundred and more feet thick, which (as I

in.] THE STONES IN THE WALL. 87

said in my last chapter) was certainly laid down by the
estuary of some great tropic river, among palm-trees
and Anonas, crocodiles and turtles.

Is the reader's power of belief exhausted?

If not : there are to be seen, capping almost every
high land round London, the remains of a fifth world.
Some of my readers may have been to Ascot races, or
to Aldershot camp, and may recollect the table-land of
the sandy moors, perfectly flat atop, dreary enough to
those to whom they are not (as they have long been to
me) a home and a work-field. Those sands are several
hundred feet thick. They lie on the London clay.
And they represent — the reader must take geologists'
word for it — a series of beds in some places thousands
of feet thick, in the Isle of Wight, in the Paris basin,
in the volcanic country of the Auvergne, in Switzer-
land, in Italy ; a period during which the land must at
first have swarmed with forms of tropic life, and then
grown — but very gradually — more temperate, and then
colder and colder still ; till at last set in that age of
ice, which spread the boulder pebbles over all rocks
and soils indiscriminately, from the Lake mountains to
within a few miles of London.

For everywhere about those Ascot moors, the top
of the sands has been ploughed by shore-ice in winter,
as they lay a-wash in the shallow sea ; and over them,
in many places, is spread a thin sheet of ice gravel,
more ancient, the best geologists think, than the
boulder and the boulder-clay.

If any of my readers ask how long the period was
during which those sands of Ascot Heath and Alder-
shot have been laid down, I cannot tell. But this we
can tell. It was long enough to see such changes in

88 TOWN GEOLOGY. [in.

land and sea, that maps representing Europe during
the greater part of that period (as far as we can guess
at it) look no more like Europe than like America or
the South Sea Islands. And this we can tell besides :
that that period was long enough for the Swiss Alps
to be lifted up at least 10,000 feet of their present
height. And that was a work which — though God
could, if He willed it, have done it in a single day —
we have proof positive was not done in less than ages,
beside which the mortal life of man is as the life of
the gnat which dances in the sun.

And all this, and more — as may be proved from
the geology of foreign countries — happened between
the date of the boulder-clay, and that of the New Eed
sandstone on which it rests.

17.

THE COAL IN THE FIEE.

MY dear town-dwelling readers, let me tell you now
something of a geological product well known, happily,
to all dwellers in towns, and of late years, thanks to
railroad extension, to most dwellers in country
districts : I mean coal.

Coal, as of course you know, is commonly said to
be composed of vegetable matter, of the leaves and
stems of ancient plants and trees — a startling state-
ment, and one which I do not wish you to take
entirely on trust. I shall therefore spend a few pages
in showing you how this fact — for fact it is — was dis-
covered. It is a very good example of reasoning from
the known to the unknown. You will have a right to
say at first starting, " Coal is utterly different in look
from leaves and stems. The only property which they
seem to have in common is that they can both burn."
True. But difference of mere look may be only owing
to a transformation, or series of transformations.
There are plenty in nature quite as great, and greater.
What can be more different in look, for instance, than

90 TOWN GEOLOGY. [IT.

a green field of wheat and a basket of loaves at the
baker's ? And yet there is, I trust, no doubt what-
soever that the bread has been once green wheat, and
that the green wheat has been transformed into bread
— making due allowance, of course, for the bone-dust,
or gypsum, or alum with which the worthy baker may
have found it profitable to adulterate his bread, in
order to improve the digestion of Her Majesty's
subjects.

But you may say, " Yes, but we can see the wheat
growing, flowering, ripening, reaped, ground, kneaded,
baked. We see, in the case of bread, the processes of
the transformation going on : but in the case of coal
we do not see the wood and leaves being actually
transformed into coal, or anything like it."

Now suppose we laid out the wheat on a table
in a regular series, such as you may see in many
exhibitions of manufactures ; beginning with the wheat
plant at one end, and ending with the loaf at the
other; and called in to look at them a savage who
knew nothing of agriculture and nothing of cookery
— called in, as an extreme case, the man in the moon,
who certainly can know nothing of either ; for as there
is neither air nor water round the moon, there can be
nothing to grow there, and therefore nothing to cook
— and suppose we asked him to study the series from
end to end. Do you not think that the man in the
moon, if he were half as shrewd as Crofton Croker
makes him in his conversation with Daniel O'Rourke,
would answer after due meditation, " How the wheat
plant got changed into the loaf I cannot see from my
experience in the moon : but that it has been changed,
and that the two are the same thing I do see, for I see

IT.] THE COAL IN THE FIRE. 91

all the different stages of the change." And so I
think you may say of the wood and the coal.

The man in the moon would be quite reasonable in
his conclusion ; for it is a law, a rule, and one which
you will have to apply again and again in the study of
natural objects, that however different two objects
may look in some respects, yet if you can find a
regular series of gradations between them, with all
shades of likeness, first to one of them and then to the
other, then you have a fair right to suppose them to
be only varieties of the same species, the same kind
of thing, and that, therefore, they have a common
origin.

That sounds rather magniloquent. Let me give
you a simple example.

Suppose you had come into Britain with Brute, the
grandson of yEneas, at that remote epoch when (as all
archaeologists know who h&ve duly read Geoffrey of
Monmouth and the Arthuric legends) Britain was
inhabited only by a few giants. Now if you had met
giants with one head, and also giants with seven heads,
and no others, you would have had a right to say,
" There are two breeds of giants here, one-headed and
seven-headed." But if you had found, as Jack the
Giant-Killer (who belongs to the same old cycle of
myths) appears to have found, two-headed giants
also, and three-headed, and giants, indeed, with any
reasonable number of heads, would you not have been
justified in saying, "They are all of the same breed,
after all ; only some are more capitate, or heady, than
others ! "

I hope that you agree to that reasoning ; for by it
I think we arrive most surely at a belief in the unity

92 TOWN GEOLOGY. [iv.

of the human race, and that the Negro is actually a
man and a brother.

If the only two types of men in the world were an
-extreme white type, like the Norwegians, and an
extreme black type, like the Negros, then there would
be fair ground for saying, " These two types have been
always distinct ; they are different races, who have no
common origin." But if you found, as you will find,
many types of man showing endless gradations between
the white man and the Negro, and not only that, but
•endless gradations between them both and a third
type, whose extreme perhaps is the Chinese — endless
gradations, I say, showing every conceivable shade of
resemblance or difference, till you often cannot say to
what type a given individual belongs ; and all of them,
however different from each other, more like each
other than they are like any other creature upon earth ;
then you are justified in saying, "All these are mere
varieties of one kind. However distinct they are
now, they were probably like each other at first, and
therefore all probably had a common origin/' That
seems to me sound reasoning, and advanced natural
science is corroborating it more and more daily.

Now apply the same reasoning to coal. You may
find about the world — you may see even in England
alone — every gradation between coal and growing
forest. You may see the forest growing in its bed of
vegetable mould; you may see the forest dead and
converted into peat, with stems and roots in it ; that,
Again, into sunken forests, like those to be seen below
high-water mark on many coasts of this island. You
find gradations between them and beds of lignite, or
•wood coal; then gradations between lignite and

iv.] THE COAL IN THE FIRE. 93

common or bituminous coal; and then gradations
between common coal and culm, or anthracite, such as
is found in South Wales. Have you not a right to say,
" These are all but varieties of the same kind of thing
— namely, vegetable matter ? They have a common
origin — namely, woody fibre. And coal, or rather
culm, is the last link in a series of transformations from
growing vegetation ? "

This is our first theory. Let us try to verify it, as
scientific men are in the habit of doing, by saying, If
that be true, then something else is likely to be
true too.

If coal has all been vegetable soil, then it is likely
that some of it has not been quite converted into
shapeless coal. It is likely that there will be vegetable
fibre still to be seen here and there ; perhaps leaves,
perhaps even stems of trees, as in a peat bog. Let us
look for them.

You will not need to look far. The coal, and the
sands and shales which accompany the coal, are so full
of plant-remains, that three hundred species were
known to Adolphe Brongniart as early as 1849, and
that number has largely increased since.

Now one point is specially noticeable about these
plants of the coal ; namely, that they may at least have
grown in swamps.

First, you will be interested if you study the coal
flora, with the abundance, beauty, and variety of the
ferns. Now ferns in these islands grow principally in
rocky woods, because there, beside the moisture, they
get from decaying vegetable or decaying rock, especi-
ally limestone, the carbonic acid which is their special
food, and which they do not get on our dry pastures,

94 TOWN GEOLOGY. [IT.

and still less in our cultivated fields. But in the^e
islands there are two noble species, at least, which are
true swamp-ferns ; the Lastreea Thelypteris, which of
old filled the fens, but is now all but extinct; and the
Osmunda, or King-fern, which, as all know, will grow
wherever it is damp enough about the roots. In
Hampshire, in Devon, and Cornwall, and in the south-
west of Ireland, the King-fern too is a true swamp
fern. But in the Tropics I have seen more than once
noble tree-ferns growing in wet savannahs at the sea-
level, as freely as in the mountain- woods ; ferns with
such a stem as some of the coal ferns had, some fifteen
feet iu height, under which, as one rode on horseback,
one saw the blazing blue sky, as through a parasol of
delicate lace, as men might have long ages since have
seen it, through the plumed fronds of the ferns now
buried in the coal, had there only been a man then
created to enjoy its beauty.

Next we find plants called by geologists Calamites.
There is no doubt now that they are of the same
family as our Equiseta, or horse-tails, a race which has,
over most parts of the globe, dwindled down now from
twenty or thirty feet in height, as they were in the old
coal measures, to paltry little weeds. The tallest
Equisetum in England — the beautiful E. Telmateia —
is seldom five feet high. But they, too, are mostly mud
and swamp plants; and so may the Calamites have
been.

The Lepidodendrons, again, are without doubt the
splendid old representatives of a family now dwindled
down to such creeping things as our club-mosses, or
Lycopodiums. Now it is a certain fact, which can be
proved by the microscope, that a very great part of the

t?.] THE COAL IN THE FIRE. 95

best coal is actually made up of millions of the minute
seeds of club-mosses, such as grow — a few of them, and
those very small — on our moors ; a proof, surely, not
only of the vast amount of the vegetation in the coal-
making age, but also of the vast time during which it
lasted. The Lepidodendra may have been fifty or sixty
feet high. There is not a Lycopodium in the world
now, I believe, five feet high. But the club-mosses
are now, in these islands and elsewhere, lovers of wet
and peaty soils, and so may their huger prototypes
have been, in the old forests of the coal.

Of the Sigillariae we cannot say as much with
certainty, for botanists are not agreed as to what low
order of flowerless plants they belong. But that they
rooted in clay beds there is proof, as you will hear
presently.

And as to the Conifers, or pine-like trees — the
Dadoxylon, of which the pith goes by the name of
Sternbergia, and the uncertain tree which furnishes in
some coal-measures bushels of a seed connected with
that of the yew — we may suppose that they would find
no more difficulty in growing in swamps than the
cypress, which forms so large a portion of the vegetation
in the swamps of the Southern United States.

I have given you these hints, because you will
naturally wish to know what sort of a world it was in
which all these strange plants grew and turned into
coal.

My answer is, that it was most probably just like
the world in which we are living now, with the one
exception that the plants and animals are different.

It was the fashion a few years since to explain the
coal — like other phenomena of geology — by some mere

96 TOWN GEOLOGY. [IT.

hypothesis of a state of things quite unlike what we
see now. We were brought up to believe that in the
Carboniferous, or coal-bearing era, the atmosphere was
intensely moist and hot, and overcharged with carbonic
acid, which had been poured out from the interior of
the planet by volcanic eruptions, or by some other
convulsion. I forget most of it now: and really there
is no need to remember ; for it is all, I verily believe,
a dream — an attempt to explain the unknown not
by the known, but by the still more unknown. You
may find such theories lingering still in sensational
school-books, if you like to be unscientific. If
you like, on the other hand, to be scientific you
will listen to those who tell you that instead of
there having been one unique carboniferous epoch,
with a peculiar coal-making climate, all epochs are
carboniferous if they get the chance; that coal is
of every age, from that of the Scotch and English beds,
up to the present day. The great coal-beds along the
Eocky Mountains, for instance, are tertiary — that is,
later than the chalk. Coal is forming now, I doubt not,
in many places on the earth, and would form in many
more, if man did not interfere with the processes of
wild nature, by draining the fens, and embanking the
rivers.

Let me by a few words prove this statement. They
will give you, beside, a fresh proof of Sir Charles Lyell's
great geological rule — that the best way to explain what
we see in ancient rocks is to take for granted, as long
as we can do so fairly, that things were going on then
very much as they are going on now.

When it was first seen that coal had been once
vegetable, the question arose — How did all these huge

iv.] THE COAL IX THE FIRE. 97

masses of vegetable matter get there ? The Yorkshire
and Derbyshire coal-fields, I hear, cover 700 or 800
square miles ; the Lancashire about 200. How large
the North Wales and the Scotch fields are I cannot say.
But doubtless a great deal more coal than can be got
at lies under the sea, especially in the north of Wales.
Coal probably exists over vast sheets of England and
France, buried so deeply under later rocks, that it
cannot be reached by mining. As an instance, a
distinguished geologist has long held that there are
beds of coal under London itself, which rise, owing to
a peculiar disturbance of the strata, to within 1,000 or
1,200 feet of the surface, and that we or our children
may yet see coal-mines in the marshes of the Thames.
And more, it is a provable fact that only a portion of
the coal measures is left. A great part of Ireland must
once have been covered with coal, which is now des-
troyed. Indeed, it is likely that the coal now known
of in Europe and America is but a remnant of what has
existed there in former ages, and has been eaten away
by the inroads of the sea.

Now whence did all that enormous mass of vege-
table soil come ? Off some neighbouring land, was
the first and most natural answer. It was a rational
one. It proceeded from the known to the unknown.
It was clear that these plants had grown on land ; for
they were land-plants. It was clear that there must
have been land close by, for between the beds of coal,
as you all know, the rock is principally coarse sand-
stone, which could only have been laid down (as I
have explained to you already) in very shallow water.

It was natural, then, to suppose that these plants
and trees had been swept down by rivers into the sea,
sc. H

98 TOWN GEOLOGY. [IT.

as the sands and muds which buried them had been.
And it was known that at the mouths of certain rivers
— the Mississippi, for instance — vast rafts of dead
floating trees accumulated ; and that the bottoms of
the rivers were often full of snags, etc. ; trees which
had grounded, and stuck in the mud ; and why should
not the coal have been formed in the same way ?

Because — and this was a serious objection — then
surely the coal would be impure — mixed up with mud
and sand, till it was not worth burning. Instead of
which, the coal is usually pure vegetable, parted
sharply from the sandstone which lies on it. The
only other explanation was, that the coal vegetation
had grown in the very places where it was found.
But that seemed too strange to be true, till that great
geologist, Sir W. Logan — who has since done such
good work in Canada — showed that every bed of coal
had a bed of clay under it, and that that clay always
contained fossils called Stigmaria. Then it came out
that the Stigmaria in the under clay had long filaments
attached to them, while when found in the sandstones
or shales, they had lost their filaments, and seemed
more or less rolled — in fact, that the natural place of
the Stigmaria was in the under clay. Then Mr.
Binney discovered a tree — a Sigillaria, standing
upright in the coal-measures with its roots attached.
Those roots penetrated into the under clay of the coal;
and those roots were Stigmarias. That seems to
have settled the question. The Sigillarias, at least,
had grown where they were found, and the clay
beneath the coal-beds was the original soil on which
they had grown. Just so, if you will look at any
peat bog you will find it bottomed by clay, which clay

IV.] THE COAL IN THE FIRE. 99

is pierced everywhere by the roots of the moss forming
the peat, or of the trees, birches, alders, poplars, and
willows, which grow in the bog. So the proof seemed
complete, that the coal had been formed out of vege-
tation growing where it was buried. If any further
proof for that theory was needed, it would be found
in this fact, most ingeniously suggested by Mr. Boyd
Dawkins. The resinous spores, or seeds of the Lepi-
dodendra make up — as said above — a great part of the
bituminous coal. Now those spores are so light, that
if the coal had been laid down by water, they would
have floated on it, and have been carried away ; and
therefore the bituminous coal must have been formed,
not under water, but on dry land.

I have dwelt at length on these further arguments,
because they seem to me as pretty a specimen as I can
give my readers of that regular and gradual induction,
that common-sense regulated, by which geological
theories are worked out.

But how does this theory explain the perfect
purity of the coal ? I think Sir C. Lyell answers
that question fully in p. 383 of his " Student's
Elements of Geology." He tells us that the dense
growths of reeds and herbage which encompass the
margins of forest-covered swamps in the valley and
delta of the Mississippi, in passing through them, are
filtered and made to clear themselves entirely before
they reach the areas in which vegetable matter may
accumulate for centuries, forming coal if the climate
be favourable ; and that in the cypress-swamps of that
region no sediment mingles with the vegetable matter
accumulated from the decay of trees and semi-aquatic
plants ; so that when, in a very dry season, the swamp

H 2

100 TOWN GEOLOGY. [IT.

is set on fire, pits are burnt into the ground many feet
deep, or as far as the fire can go down without reach-
ing water, and scarcely any earthy residuum is left j
just as when the soil of the English fens catches fire,
red-hot holes are eaten down through pure peat till the
water-bearing clay below is reached. But the purity
of the water in peaty lagoons is observable elsewhere
than in the delta of the Mississippi. What can be
more transparent than many a pool surrounded by
quaking bogs, fringed, as they are in Ireland, with a
ring of white water-lilies, which you dare not stoop to
pick, lest the peat, bending inward, slide you down
into that clear dark gulf some twenty feet in depth,
bottomed and walled with yielding ooze, from which
there is no escape ? Most transparent, likewise, is the
water of the West Indian swamps. Though it is of
the colour of coffee, or rather of dark beer, and so
impregnated with gases that it produces fever or
cholera when drunk, yet it is — at least when it does
not mingle with the salt water — so clear, that one
might see every marking on a boa-constrictor or
alligator, if he glided along the bottom under the
canoe.

But now comes the question — Even if all this be
true, how were the forests covered up in shale and
sandstone, one after another ?

By gradual sinking of the land, one would suppose.

If we find, as we may find in a hundred coal-pits,
trees rooted as they grew, with their trunks either
standing up through the coal, and through the sand-
stone above the coal; their bark often remaining as
coal while their inside is filled up with sandstone, has
not our common-sense a right to say — The land on

iv.] THE COAL IN THE FIKE. 101

which they grew sank below the water-line ; the trees
were killed ; and the mud and sand which were brought
down the streams enveloped their trunks ? As for the
inside being full of sandstone, have we not all seen
hollow trees ? Do we not all know that when a tree
dies its wood decays first, its bark last? It is so,
especially in the Tropics. There one may see huge
dead trees with their bark seemingly sound, and their
inside a mere cavern with touchwood at the bottom ;
into which caverns one used to peep with some caution.
For though one might have found inside only a pair of
toucans, or parrots, or a whole party of jolly little
monkeys, one was quite as likely to find a poisonous
snake four or five feet long, whose bite would have
very certainly prevented me having the pleasure of
writing this book.

Now is it not plain that if such trees as that sunk,
their bark would be turned into lignite, and at last into
coal, while their insides would be silted up with mud
and sand ? Thus a core or pillar of hard sandstone
would be formed, which might do to the collier of the
future what they are too apt to do now in the Newcastle
and Bristol collieries. For there, when the coal is
worked out below, the sandstone stems — " coal-pipes "
as the colliers call them — in the roof of the seam,
having no branches, and nothing to hold them up
but their friable bark of coal, are but too apt to drop
out suddenly, killing or wounding the hapless men
below.

Or again, if we find — as we very often find — as was
found at Parkfield Colliery, near Wolverhampton, in
the year 1844 — a quarter of an acre of coal-seam filled
with stumps of trees as they grew, their trunks broken

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^Y OT? r « T TFORNIA

102 TOWN GEOLOGY. [iv.

off and lying in every direction, turned into coal, and
flattened, as coal-fossils so often are, by the weight of
the rock above — should we not have a right to say —
These trees were snapped off where they grew by some
violent convulsion ; by a storm, or by a sudden inrush
of water owing to a sudden sinking of the land, or
by the very earthquake shock itself which sank the
land?

But what evidence have we of such sinkings ?
The plain fact that yon have coal-seam above coal-
seam, each with its bed of under-clay ; and that there-
fore the land must have sunk ere the next bed of soil
could have been deposited, and the next forest have
grown on it.

In one of the Rocky Mountain coal-fields there are
more than thirty seams of coal, each with its under-
clay below it. What can that mean but thirty or more
subsidences of the land, and the peat of thirty or
more forests or peat-mosses, one above the other ?
And now if any reader shall say, Subsidence ? What
is this quite new element which you have brought into
your argument ? You told us that you would reason
from the known to the unknown. What do wa know
of subsidence ? You offered to explain the thing
which had gone on once by that which is going on
now. Where is subsidence going on now upon the
surface of our planet ? And where, too, upheaval,
such as would bring us these buried forests up again
from under the sea-level, and make them, like our
British coal-field, dry land once more ?

The answer is — Subsidence and elevation of the
land are common now, probably just as common as
they were in any age of this planet's history.

iv.] THE COAL IN THE FIRE. 103

To give two instances, made now notorious by the
writings of geologists. As lately as 1819 a single
earthquake shock in Cutch, at the mouth of the Indus,
sunk a tract of land larger than the Lake of Geneva
in some places to a depth of eighteen feet, and con-
verted it into an inland sea. The same shock raised,
a few miles off, a corresponding sheet of land some
fifty miles in length, and in some parts sixteen miles
broad, ten feet above the level of the alluvial plain,
and left it to be named by the country-people the
" Ullah Bund," or bank of God, to distinguish it from
the artificial banks in the neighbourhood.

Again: in the valley of the Mississippi — a tract
which is now, it would seem, in much the same state
as central England was while our coal-fields were
being laid down — the earthquakes of 1811-12 caused
large lakes to appear suddenly in many parts of the
district, amid the dense forests of cypress. One of
these, the " Sunk Country," near New Madrid, is
between seventy and eighty miles in length, and
thirty miles in breadth, and throughout it, as late as
1846, "dead trees were conspicuous, some erect in
the water, others fallen, and strewed in dense masses
over the bottom, in the shallows, and near the
shore." I quote these words from Sir Charles Lyell's
"Principles of Geology" (llth edit.), vol. i. p. 453.
And I cannot do better than advise my readers, if
they wish to know more of the way in which coal was
formed, to read what is said in that book concerning
the Delta of the Mississippi, and its strata of forests
sunk where they grew, and in some places upraised
again, alternating with beds of clay and sand, vege-
table soil, recent sea-shells, and what not, forming, to

104 TOWN GEOLOGY. [IT.

a depth of several hundred feet, just such a mass of
beds as exists in our own coal-fields at this day.

If, therefore, the reader wishes to picture to him-
self the scenery of what is now central England,
during the period when our coal was being laid down,
he has only, I believe, to transport himself in fancy to
any great alluvial delta, in a moist and warm climate,
favourable to the growth of vegetation. He has only
to conceive wooded marshes, at the mouth of great
rivers, slowly sinking beneath the sea ; the forests in
them killed by the water, and then covered up by
layers of sand, brought down from inland, till that
new layer became dry land, to carry a fresh crop of
vegetation. He has thus all that he needs to explain
how coal-measures were formed. I myself saw once
a scene of that kind, which I should be sorry to forget ;
for there was, as I conceived, coal, making, or getting
ready to be made, before my eyes : a sheet of swamp,
sinking slowly into the sea ; for there stood trees, still
rooted below high-water mark, and killed by the
waves ; while inland huge trees stood dying, or dead,
from the water at their roots. But what a scene — a
labyrinth of narrow creeks, so narrow that a canoe
could not pass up, haunted with alligators and boa-
constrictors, parrots and white herons, amid an inex-
tricable confusion of vegetable mud, roots of the alder-
like mangroves, and tangled creepers hanging from
tree to tree ; and overhead huge fan-palms, delighting
in the moisture, mingled with still huger broad-leaved
trees in every stage of decay. The drowned vegetable
soil of ages beneath me ; above my head, for a
hundred feet, a mass of stems and boughs, and leaves
and flowers, compared with which the richest hothouse

IT.] THE COAL IN THE FIBE. 105

in England was poor and small. But if the sinking
process which, was going on continued a few hundred
years, all that huge mass of wood and leaf would be
sunk beneath the swamp, and covered tip in mud
washed down from the mountains, and sand driven in
from the sea ; to form a bed many feet thick, of what
would be first peat, then lignite, and last, it may be,
coal, with the stems of killed trees standing up out of
it into the new mud and sand-beds above it, just as
the Sigillariaa and other stems stand up in the coal-
beds both of Britain and of Nova Scotia ; while over
it a fresh forest would grow up, to suffer the same fate
— if the sinking process went on — as that which had
preceded it.

That was a sight not easily to be forgotten. But
we need not have gone so far from home, at least, a.
few hundred years ago, to see an exactly similar one^
The fens of Norfolk and Cambridgeshire, before the
rivers were embanked, the water pumped off, the
forests felled, and the reed-beds ploughed up, were
exactly in the same state. The vast deposits of peat
between Cambridge and the sea, often filled with
timber-trees, either fallen or upright as they grew,,
and often mixed with beds of sand or mud, brought
down in floods, were formed in exactly the same way ;.
and if they had remained undrained, then that slow
sinking, which geologists say is going on over the
whole area of the Fens, would have brought them
gradually, but surely, below the sea-level, to be
covered up by new forests, and converted in due time
into coal. And future geologists would have found —
they may find yet, if, which God forbid, England
should become barbarous and the trees be thrown out

106 TOWN GEOLOGY. [IT.

of cultivation — instead of fossil Lepidodendra and
Sigillariae, Calamites and ferns, fossil ashes and oaks,
alders and poplars, bulrushes and reeds. Almost the
only fossil fern would have been that tall and beautiful
Lastrsea Thelypteris, once so abundant, now all but
destroyed by drainage and the plough.

We need not, therefore, fancy any extraordinary
state of things on this planet while our English coal
was being formed. The climate of the northern
hemisphere — Britain, at least, and Nova Scotia — was
warmer than now, to judge from the abundance of
ferns ; and especially of tree-ferns ; but not so warm,
to judge from the presence of conifers (trees of the
pine tribe), as the Tropics. Moreover, there must
have been, it seems to me, a great scarcity of animal
life. Insects are found, beautifully preserved ; a few
reptiles, too, and land-shells ; but very few. And
where are the traces of such a swarming life as would
be entombed were a tropic forest now sunk; which
is found entombed in many parts of our English fens ?
The only explanation which I can offer is this — that
the club-mosses, tree-ferns, pines, and other low-
ranked vegetation of the coal afforded little or no food
for animals, as the same families of plants do to this
day ; and if creatures can get nothing to eat, they
certainly cannot multiply and replenish the earth.
But, be that as it may, the fact that coal is buried
forest is not affected.

Meanwhile, the shape and arrangements of sea
and land must have been utterly different from what
they are now. Where was that great land, off which
great rivers ran to deposit our coal-measures in their
deltas ? It has been supposed, for good reasons, that

IT.] THE COAL IN THE FIRE. 107

north-western France, Belgium, Holland, and Germany
were then under the sea; that Denmark and Norway
were joined to Scotland by a continent, a tongue of
which ran across the centre of England, and into
Ireland, dividing the northern and southern coal-
fields. But how far to the west and north did that
old continent stretch ? Did it, as it almost certainly
did long ages afterwards, join Greenland and North
America with Scotland and Norway ? Were the
northern fields of Nova Scotia, which are of the same
geological age as our own, and contain the same
plants, laid down by rivers which ran off the same
continent as ours ? Who can tell now ? That old
land, and all record of it, save what these fragmentary
coal-measures can give, are buried in the dark abyss
of countless ages ; and we can only look back with
awe, and comfort ourselves with the thought — Let
Time be ever so vast, yet Time is not Eternity.

One word more. If my readers have granted that
all for which I have argued is probable, they will still
have a right to ask for further proof.

They will be justified in saying : " You say that
coal is transformed vegetable matter; but can you
show us how the transformation takes place ? Is it
possible according to known natural laws ? "

The chemist must answer that. And he tells us
that wood can become lignite, or wood-coal, by
parting with its oxygen, in the shape of carbonic acid
gas, or choke-damp ; and then common or bituminous
coal, by parting with its hydrogen, chiefly in the form
of carburetted hydrogen — the gas with which we light
our streets. That is about as much as the unscientific
reader need know. But it is a fresh corroboration of

108 TOWN GEOLOGY. [IT.

the theory that coal has been once vegetable fibre, for
it shows how vegetable fibre can, by the laws of
nature, become coal. And it certainly helps us to
believe that a thing has been done, if we are shown
that it can be done.

This fact explains, also, why in mines of wood-
coal carbonic acid, i.e. choke-damp, alone is given off.
For in the wood-coal a great deal of the hydrogen still
remains. In mines of true coal, not only is choke-
damp given off, but that more terrible pest of the
miners, fire-damp, or explosive carburetted hydrogen
and olefiant gases. Now the occurrence of that fire-
damp in mines proves that changes are still going on
in the coal : that it is getting rid of its hydrogen, and
so progressing toward the state of anthracite or culm
— stone-coal as it is sometimes called. In the Penn-
sylvanian coal-fields some of the coal has actually done
this, under the disturbing force of earthquakes; for
the coal, which is bituminous, like our common coal,
to the westward where the strata are horizontal,
becomes gradually anthracite as it is tossed and torn
by the earthquake faults of the Alleghany and
Appalachian mountains.

And is a further transformation possible ? Yes ;
and more than one. If we conceive the anthracite
cleared of all but its last atoms of oxygen, hydrogen,
and nitrogen, till it has become all but pure carbon, it
would become — as it has become in certain rocks of
immense antiquity, graphite — what we miscall black-
lead. And, after that, it might go through one
transformation more, and that the most startling of all.
It would need only perfect purification and crystal-
lisation to become — a diamond; nothing less. We

tv.] THE COAL IN THE FIBB. 109

may consider the coal upon the fire as the middle term
of a series, of which the first is live wood, and the last
diamond ; and indulge safely in the fancy that every
diamond in the world has probably, at some remote
epoch, formed part of a growing plant.

A strange transformation; which will look to us
more strange, more truly poetical, the more steadily we
consider it.

The coal on the fire ; the table at which I write —
what are they made of ? Gas and sunbeams ; with a
small percentage of ash, or earthy salts, which need
hardly be taken into account.

Gas and sunbeams. Strange, but true.

The life of the growing plant — and what that life
is who can tell ? — laid hold of the gases in the air and
in the soil ; of the carbonic acid, the atmospheric air,
the water — for that too is gas. It drank them in through
its rootlets : it breathed them in through its leaf -pores,
that it might distil them into sap, and bud, and leaf,
and wood. But it has to take in another element,
without which the distillation and the shaping could
never have taken place. It had to drink in the
sunbeams — that mysterious and complex force which
is for ever pouring from the sun, and making itself
partly palpable to our senses as heat and light. So the
life of the plant seized the sunbeams, and absorbed
them, buried them in itself — no longer as light and heat,
but as invisible chemical force, locked up for ages in
that woody fibre.

So it is. Lord Lytton told us long ago, in a
beautiful song, how

The Wind and the Beam loved the Rose.

110 TOWN GEOLOGY. [iv.

But Nature's poetry was more beautiful than man's.
The wind and the beam loved the rose so well that they
made the rose — or rather, the rose took the wind and
the beam, and built up out of them, by her own inner
life, her exquisite texture, hue, and fragrance.

What next ? The rose dies ; the timber tree dies ;
decays down into vegetable fibre, is buried, and turned to
coal: but the plant cannot altogether undo its own work.
Even in death and decay it cannot set free the sunbeams
imprisoned in its tissue. The sun-force must stay, shut
up age after age, invisible, but strong ; working at its
own prison-cells ; transmuting them, or making them
capable of being transmuted by man, into the manifold
products of coal — coke, petroleum, mineral pitch, gases,
coal-tar, benzole, delicate aniline dyes, and what not,
till its day of deliverance comes.

Man digs it, throws it on the fire, a black, dead-
seeming lump. A corner, an atom of it, warms till it
reaches the igniting point ; the temperature at which
it is able to combine with oxygen.

And then, like a dormant live thing, awaking after
ages to the sense of its own powers, its own needs,
the whole lump is seized, atom after atom, with an in-
fectious hunger for that oxygen which it lost centuries
since in the bottom of the earth. It drinks the oxygen
in at every pore ; and burns.

And so the spell of ages is broken. The sun-force
bursts its prison-cells, and blazes into the free atmos-
phere, as light and heat once more; returning in a
moment into the same forms in which it entered the
growing leaf a thousand centuries since.

Strange it all is, yet true. But of nature, as of the
heart of man, the old saying stands — that truth is
stranger than fiction.

V.

THE LIME IN THE MORTAR.

I SHALL presume in all my readers some slight
knowledge about lime. I shall take for granted, for
instance, that aH are better informed than a certain
party of Australian black fellows were a few years
since.

In prowling on the track of a party of English
settlers, to see what they could pick up, they came—
oh joy I — on a sack of flour, dropped and left behind
in the bush at a certain creek. The poor savages had
not had such a prospect of a good meal for many a
day. With endless jabbering and dancing, the whole
tribe gathered round the precious flour-bag with all
the pannikins, gourds, and other hollow articles it
could muster, each of course with a due quantity of
water from the creek therein, and the chief began
dealing out the flour by handfuls, beginning of course
with the boldest warriors. But, horror of horrors,
each man's porridge swelled before his eyes, grew hot,
smoked, boiled over. They turned and fled, man,
woman, and child, from before that supernatural

112 TOWN GEOLOGY. [T.

prodigy; and the settlers coming back to look for the
dropped sack, saw a sight which told the whole tale.
For the poor creatures, in their terror, had thrown
away their pans and calabashes, each filled with that
which it was likely to contain, seeing that the sack
itself had contained, not flour, but quick-lime. In
memory of which comi-tragedy, that creek is called to
this day, " Flour-bag Creek."

Now I take for granted that you are all more
learned than these black fellows, and know quick-lime
from flour. But still you are not bound to know what
quick-lime is. Let me explain it to you.

Lime, properly speaking, is a metal, which goes
among chemists by the name of calcium. But it is
formed, as you all know, in the earth, not as a metal,
but as a stone, as chalk or limestone, which is a
carbonate of lime ; that is, calcium combined with
oxygen and carbonic-acid gases.

In that state it will make, if it is crystalline and
hard, excellent building stone. The finest white
marble, like that of Carrara in Italy, of which the most
delicate statues are carved, is carbonate of lime altered
and hardened by volcanic heat. But to make mortar
of it, it must be softened and then brought into a state
in which it can be hardened again; and ages since,
some man or other, who deserves to rank as one of the
great inventors, one of the great benefactors of his
race, discovered the art of making lime soft and hard
again ; in fact of making mortar. The discovery was
probably very ancient; and made, probably like most
of the old discoveries, in the East, spreading Westward
gradually. The earlier Greek buildings are cyclopean,
that is, of stone fitted together without mortar. The

v.] THE LIME IN THE MORTAR. 113

earlier Egyptian buildings, though the stones are ex-
quisitely squared and polished, are put together like-
wise without mortar. So, long ages after, were the
earlier Eoman buildings, and even some of the later.
The famous aqueduct of the Pont du Gard, near
Nismes, in the south of France, has, if I recollect
right, no mortar whatever in it. The stones of its
noble double tier of circular arches have been dropped
into their places upon the wooden centres, and stand un-
moved to this day, simply by the jamming of their own
weight; a miracle of art. But the fact is puzzling;
for these Eomans were the best mortar makers of the
world. We cannot, I believe, surpass them in the art
even now ; and in some of their old castles, the mortar
is actually to this day harder and tougher than the
stones which it holds together. And they had plenty
of lime at hand if they had chosen to make mortar.
The Pont du Gard crosses a limestone ravine, and is
itself built of limestone. But I presume the cunning
llomans would not trust mortar made from that coarse
Nummulite limestone, filled with gritty sand, and pre-
ferred, with their usual carefulness, no mortar at all to
bad.

But I must return, and tell my readers, in a few
words, the chemical history of mortar. If limestone be
burnt, or rather roasted, in a kiln, the carbonic acid is
given off — as you may discover by your own nose ; as
many a poor tramp has discovered too late, when, on
a cold winter night, he has lain down by the side of
the burning kiln to keep himself warm, and woke in
the other world, stifled to death by the poisonous
fumes.

The lime then gives off its carbonic acid, and also

114 TOWN GEOLOGY. [v.

its water of crystallisation, that is, water which it
holds (as do many rocks) locked up in it unseen, and
only to be discovered by chemical analysis. It is then
anhydrous — that is, waterless — oxide of lime, what we
call quick-lime; that which figured in the comi-tragedy
of " Flour-bag Creek ; " and then, as you may find if
you get it under your nails or into your eyes, will burn
and blister like an acid.

This has to be turned again into a hard and tough
artificial limestone, in plain words, into mortar; and
the first step is to slack it — that is, to give it back the
water which it has lost, and for which it is as it were
thirsting. So it is slacked with water, which it drinks
in, heating itself and the water till it steams and
swells in bulk, because it takes the substance of the
water into its own substance. Slacked lime, as we all
know, is not visibly wetter than quick-lime ; it
crumbles to a dry white powder in spite of all the
water which it contains.

Then it must be made to set, that is, to return to
limestone, to carbonate of lime, by drinking in the
carbonic acid from water and air, which some sorts of
lime will do instantly, setting at once, and being
therefore used as cements. But the lime usually
employed must be mixed with more or less sand to
make it set hard : a mysterious process, of which it
will be enough to tell the reader that the sand and
lime are said to unite gradually, not only mechanically,
that is, by sticking together ; but also in part chemi-
cally— that is, by forming out of themselves a new
substance, which is called silicate of lime.

Be that as it may, the mortar paste has now to do
two things ; first to dry, and next to take up carbonic

v.] THE LIME IN THE MORTAR. 115

acid from the air and water, enough to harden it again
into limestone : and that it will take some time in
doing. A thick wall, I am informed, requires several
years before it is set throughout, and has acquired its
full hardness, or rather toughness ; and good mortar,
as is well known, will acquire extreme hardness with
age, probably from the very same cause that it did
when it was limestone in the earth. For, as a general
rule, the more ancient the strata is in which the lime-
Btone is found, the harder the limestone is ; except in
cases where volcanic action and earthquake pressure
have hardened limestone in more recent strata, as in
the case of the white marbles of Carrara in Italy,
which are of the age of our Oolites, that is, of the
freestone of Bath, etc., hardened by the heat of
intruded volcanic rocks.

Bat now: what is the limestone? and how did it get
where it is — not into the mortar, I mean, but into the
limestone quarry ? Let me tell you, or rather, help
you to tell yourselves, by leading you, as before, from
the known to the unknown. Let me lead you to
places unknown indeed to most; but there may be
sailors or soldiers among my readers who know them
far better than I do. Let me lead you, in fancy, to
some island in the Tropic seas. After all, I am not
leading you as far away as you fancy by several
thousand miles, as you will see, I trust, ere I have
done.

Let me take you to some island : what shall it be
like ? Shall it be a high island, with cliff piled on
cliff, and peak on peak, all rich with mighty forests,
like a furred mantle of green velvet, mounting up and
ap till it is lost among white clouds above ? Or shall it

i 2

116 TOWN GEOLOGY. [v.

be a mere low reef, which you do not see till you are
close upon it ; on which nothing rises above the water,
but here and there a knot of cocoa-nut palms or a
block of stone, or a few bushes, swarming with innu-
merable sea-fowl and their eggs ? Let it be which
you will: both are strange enough; both beautiful;
both will tell us a story.

The ship will have to lie- to, and anchor if she can;
it may be a mile, it may be only a few yards, from the
land. For between it and the land will be a line of
breakers, raging in before the warm trade-wind. And
this, you will be told, marks the edge of the coral reef.

You will have to go ashore in a boat, over a sea
which looks unfathomable, and which may be a mile or
more in depth, and search for an opening in the reef,
through which the boat can pass without being knocked
to pieces.

You find one : and in a moment, what a change ! The
deep has suddenly become shallow; the blue white, from
the gleam of the white coral at the bottom. But the
coral is not all white, only indeed a little of it ; for as
you look down through the clear water, you find that
the coral is starred with innumerable live flowers, blue,
crimson, grey, every conceivable hue ; and that these
are the coral polypes, each with its ring of arms thrust
out of its cell, who are building up their common
habitations of lime. If you want to understand, by a
rough but correct description, what a coral polype is :
all who have been to the sea-side know, or at least
have heard of, sea-anemones. Now coral polypes are
sea-anemones, which make each a shell of lime, growing
with its growth. As for their shapes, the variety of
them, the beauty of them, no tongue can describe

v.] THE LIME IS THE MORTAR. 117

them. If you want to see them, go to the Coral Rooms
of the British or Liverpool Museums, and judge for
yourselves. Only remember that you must re-clothe
each, of those exquisite forms with a coating of live
jelly of some delicate hue, and put back into every one
of the thousand cells its living flower ; and into the
beds, or rather banks, of the salt-water flower garden,
the gaudiest of shell-less sea-anemones, such as we have
on our coasts, rooted in the cracks, and live shells and
sea-slugs, as gaudy as they, crawling about, with fifty
other forms of fantastic and exuberant life. You must
not overlook, too, the fish, especially the parrot-fish,
some of them of the gaudiest colours, who spend their
lives in browsing on the live coral, with strong clipping
and grinding teeth, just as a cow browses the grass,
keeping the animal matter, and throwing away the
lime in the form of an impalpable white mud, which
fills up the interstices in the coral beds.

The bottom, just outside the reef, is covered with
that mud, mixed with more lime-mud, which the surge
wears off the reef ; and if you have, as you should have,
a dredge on board, and try a haul of that mud as you
row home, you may find, but not always, animal forms
rooted in it, which will delight the soul of a scientific
man. One, I hope, would be some sort of Terebratula,
or shell akin to it. You would probably think it a
cockle : but you would be wrong. The animal which
dwells in it has about the same relationship to a cockle
as a dog has to a bird. It is a Brachiopod ; a family
with which, the ancient seas once swarmed, but which
is rare now, all over the world, having been supplanted
and driven out of the seas by newer and stronger forms
of shelled animals. The nearest spot at which you are

118 TOWN GEOLOGY. [v.

likely to dredge a live Brachiopod will be in the deep
water of Loch Fyne, in Argyleshire, where two species
still linger, fastened, strangely enough, to the smooth
pebbles of a submerged glacier, formed in the open air
during the age of ice, but sunk now to a depth of
eighty fathoms. The first time I saw those shells
come up in the dredge out of the dark and motionless
abyss, I could sympathise with the feelings of mingled
delight and awe which, so my companion told me, the
great Professor Owen had in the same spot first beheld
the same lingering remnants of a primaeval world.

The other might be (but I cannot promise you
even a chance of dredging that, unless you were off
the coast of Portugal, or the windward side of some of
the West India Islands) a live Crinoid; an exquisite
starfish, with long and branching arms, but rooted in
the mud by a long stalk, and that stalk throwing out
barren side branches; the whole a living plant of
stone. You may see in museums specimens of this
family, now so rare, all but extinct. And yet fifty or
a hundred different forms of the same type swarmed
in the ancient seas : whole masses of limestone are
made up of little else but the fragments of such
animals.

But we have not landed yet on the dry part of the
reef. Let us make for it, taking care meanwhile that
we do not get our feet cut by the coral, or stung as by
nettles by the coral insects. We shall see that the dry
land is made up entirely of coral, ground and broken
by the waves, and hurled inland by the storm, some-
times in huge boulders, mostly as fine mud ; and that,
under the influence of the sun and of the rain, which
filters through it, charged with lime from the rotting

v.] THE LIME IN THE MOETAE. 119

coral, the whole is setting, as cement sets, into rock.
And what is this ? A long bank of stone standing up
as a low cliff, ten or twelve feet above high-water
mark. It is full of fragments of shell, of fragments of
coral, of all sorts of animal remains ; and the lower
part of it is quite hard rock. Moreover, it is bedded
in regular layers, just such as you see in a quarry.
But how did it get there ? It must have been formed
at the sea-level, some of it, indeed, under the sea ; for
here are great masses of madrepore and limestone
corals imbedded just as they grew. What lifted it up ?
Your companions, if you have any who -know the
island, have no difficulty in telling you. It was hove
up, they say, in the earthquake in such and such a
year; and they will tell you, perhaps, that if you
will go on shore to the main island which rises inside
the reef, you may see dead coral beds just like these
lying on the old rocks, and sloping up along the
flanks of the mountains to several hundred feet above
the sea. I have seen such many a time.

Thus you find the coral being converted gradually
into a limestone rock, either fine and homogeneous,
composed of coral grown into pulp, or filled with corals
and shells, or with angular fragments of older coral
rock. Did you never see that last ? No ? Yes, you
have a hundred times. You have but to look at the
marbles commonly used about these islands, with
angular fragments imbedded in the mass, and here and
there a shell, the whole cemented together by water
holding in solution carbonate of lime, and there see
the veiy same phenomenon perpetuated to this day.

Thus, I think, we have got first from the known to
the unknown ; from a tropic coral island back here to

120 TOWN GEOLOGY. [v.

the limestone Mils of Great Britain; and I did not
speak at random when I said that I was not leading
you away as far as you fancied by several thousand
miles.

Examine any average limestone quarry from Bristol
to Berwick, and you will see there all that I have been
describing ; that is, all of it which is not soft animal
matter, certain to decay. You will see the lime-mud
hardened into rock beds ; you will see the shells em-
bedded in it ; you will see the corals in every
stage of destruction ; you will see whole layers made
up of innumerable fragments of Crinoids — no wonder
they are innumerable, for, it has been calculated, there
are in a single animal of some of the species 140,000
joints — 140,000 bits of lime to fall apart when its soft
parts decay. But is it not all there ? And why
should it not have got there by the same process by
which similar old coral beds get up the mountain
sides in the West Indies and elsewhere ; namely, by
the upheaving force of earthquakes ? When you see
similar effects, you have a right to presume similar
causes. If you see a man fall off a house here, and
break his neck ; and some years after, in London or
New York, or anywhere else, find another man lying
at the foot of another house, with his neck broken in
the same way, is it not a very fair presumption that he
has fallen off a house likewise ?

You may be wrong. He may have come to his end
by a dozen other means : but you must have proof of
that. You will have a full right, in science and in
common sense, to say — That man fell off the house,
till some one proves to you that he did not.

In fact, there is nothing which you see in the lime-

<-.] THE LIME IN THE MORTAR. 121

stones of these isles — save and except the difference in
every shell and coral — which you would not see in the
coral-beds of the West Indies, if such earthquakes as
that famous one at St. Thomas's, in 1866, became
common and periodic, upheaving the land (they needs
upheave it a very little, only two hundred and fifty
feet), till St. Thomas's, and all the Virgin Isles, and
the mighty mountain of Porto Rico, which looms up
dim and purple to the west, were all joined into dry
land once more, and the lonely coral-shoal of Anegada
were raised, as it would be raised then, into a limestone
table-land, like that of Central Ireland, of Galway, or
of County Clare.

But you must clearly understand, that however
much these coralline limestones have been upheaved
since they were formed, yet the sea-bottom, while they
were being formed, was sinking and not rising. This
is a fact which was first pointed out by Mr. Darwin,
from the observations which he made in the world-
famous Voyage of the Beagle ; and the observations of
subsequent great naturalists have all gone to corrobo-
rate his theory.

It was supposed at first, you must understand, that
when a coral island rose steeply to the surface of the
sea out of blue water, perhaps a thousand fathoms or
more, that fact was plain proof that the little coral
polypes had begun at the bottom of the sea, and, in
the course of ages, built up the whole island an
enormous depth.

But it soon came out that that theory was not
correct ; for the coral polypes cannot live and build
save in shallow water — say in thirty to forty fathoms.
Indeed, some of the strongest and largest species work

122 TOWN GEOLOGY. [r.

best at the very surface, and in the cut of the fiercest
surf. And so arose a puzzle as to how coral rock is
often found of vast thickness, which Mr. Darwin ex-
plained. His theory was, and there is no doubt now
that it is correct, that in these cases the sea-bottom is
sinking ; that as it sinks, carrying the coral beds down
with it, the coral dies, and a fresh live crop of polypes
builds on the top of the houses of their dead ancestors :
so that, as the depression goes on, generation after
generation builds upwards, the living on the dead,
keeping the upper surface of the reef at the same level,
while its base is sinking downward into the abyss.

Applying this theory to the coral reef of the
Pacific Ocean, the following interesting facts were made
out:

That where you find an Island rising out of deep
water, with a ring of coral round it, a little way from
the shore — or, as in Eastern Australia, a coast with a
fringing reef (the Flinders reef of Australia is eleven
thousand miles long) — that is a pretty sure sign that
that shore, or mountain, is sinking slowly beneath the
sea. That where you find, as you often do in the Pacific,
a mere atoll, or circular reef of coral, with a shallow
pond of smooth water in the centre, and deep sea round,
that is a pretty sure sign that the mountain-top has
sunk completely into the sea, and that the corals are
going on building where its peak once was.

And more. On working out the geography of the
South Sea Islands by the light of this theory of
Mr. Darwin's, the following extraordinary fact has
been discovered :

That over a great part of the Pacific Ocean sinking
is going on, and has been going on for ages ; and that

v.] THE LIME IN THE MORTAE. 123

the greater number of the beautiful and precious South
Sea Islands are only the remnants of a vast continent
or archipelago, which once stretched for thousands of
miles between Australia and South America,

Now, applying the same theory to limestone beds,
which are, as you know, only fossil coral reefs, we
have a right to say, when we see in England, Scotland,
Ireland, limestones several thousand feet thick, that
while they were being laid down as coral reef, the sea-
bottom, and probably the neighbouring land, must
have been sinking to the amount of their thickness —
to several thousand feet — before that later sinking
which enabled several hundred feet of millstone grit to
be laid down on the top of the limestone.

This millstone grit is a new and a very remarkable
element in our strange story. From Derby to North-
umberland it forms vast and lofty moors, capping,
as at Whernside and Penygent, the highest limestone
hills with its hard, rough, barren, and unfossiliferous
strata. Wherever it is found, it lies on the top of
the " mountain," or carboniferous limestone. Almost
everywhere, where coal is found in England, it lies on
the millstone grit. I speak roughly, for fear of con-
fusing my readers with details. The three deposits
pass more or less, in many places, into each other :
but always in the order of mountain limestone below,
millstone grit on it, and coal on that again.

Now what does its presence prove ? What but
this ? That after the great coral reefs which spread
over Somersetshire and South Wales, around the pre-
sent estuary of the Severn, — and those, once perhaps
joined to them, which spread from Derby to Berwick,
with a western branch through North-east Wales, —

124 TOWN GEOLOGY. [v.

were laid down — after all this, I say, some change took
place in the sea-bottom, and brought down on the
reefs of coral sheets of sand, which killed the corals
and buried them in grit. Does any reader wish for
proof of this ? Let him examine the " cherty," or
flinty, beds which so often appear where the bottom
of the millstone grit is passing into the top of the
mountain limestone — the beds, to give an instance,
which are now quarried on the top of the Halkiii
Mountain in Flintshire, for chert, which is sent to
Staffordshire to be ground down for the manufac-
ture of china. He will find layers in those beds,
of several feet in thickness, as hard as flint, but
as porous as sponge. On examining their cavities
he will find them to be simply hollow casts of in-
numerable joints of Crinoids, so exquisitely preserved,
even to their most delicate markings, that it is plain
they were never washed about upon a beach, but have
grown where, or nearly where, they lie. What then,
has happened to them ? They have been killed by
the sand. The soft parts of the animals have decayed,
letting the 140,000 joints (more or less) belonging to
each animal fall into a heap, and be imbedded in the
growing sand-rock; and then, it may be long years
after, water filtering through the porous sand has
removed the lime of which the joints were made, and
left their perfect casts behind.

So much for the millstone grits. How long the
deposition of sand went on, how long after it that
second deposition of sands took place, which goes by
the name of the " gannister," or lower coal-measures,
we cannot tell. But it is clear, at least, that parts of
that ancient sea were filling up and becoming dry

v.] THE LIME IN THE MORTAR. 125

land. For coal, or fossilised vegetable matter, be-
comes more and more common as we ascend in the
series of beds ; till at last, in the upper coal-measures,
the enormous wealth of vegetation which grew, much
of it, where it is now found, prove the existence of
some such sheets of fertile and forest- clad lowland as
I described in my last paper.

Thousands of feet of rich coral reef ; thousands of
feet of barren sands; then thousands of feet of rich
alluvial forest — and all these sliding into each other, if
not in one place, then in another, without violent
break or change ; this is the story which the lime in
the mortar and the coal on the fire, between the two,
reveal.

THE SLATES ON THE ROOF.

THE slates on the roof should be, when rightly under-
stood, a pleasant subject for contemplation to the
dweller in a town. I do not ask him to imitate the
boy who, cliff-bred from his youth, used to spend
stolen hours on the house-top, with his back against
a chimney-stalk, transfiguring in his imagination the
roof-slopes into mountain-sides, the slates into sheets
of rock, the cats into lions, and the sparrows into
eagles. I only wish that he should — at least after
reading this paper — let the slates on the roof carry
him back in fancy to the mountains whence they
came ; perhaps to pleasant trips to the lakes and hills
of Cumberland, Westmoreland, and North Wales ;
and to recognise — as he will do if he have intellect as
well as fancy — how beautiful and how curious an
object is a common slate.

Beautiful, not only for the compactness and deli-
cacy of its texture, and for the regularity and smooth-
ness of its surface, but still more for its colour.
Whether merely warm grey, as when dry, or bright

vi.] THE SLATES ON THE EOOF. 127

purple, as when wet, the colour of the English slate
well justifies Mr. Ruskin's saying, that wherever there
is a brick wall and a slate roof there need be no want
of rich colour in an English landscape. But most
beautiful is the hue of slate, when, shining wet in the
sunshine after a summer shower, its blue is brought
out in rich contrast by golden spots of circular lichen,
whose spores, I presume, have travelled with it off
its native mountains. Then, indeed, it reminds the
voyager of a sight which it almost rivals in brilliancy
— of the sapphire of the deep ocean, brought out into
blazing intensity by the contrast of the golden patches
of floating gulf- weed beneath the tropic sun.

Beautiful, I say, is the slate ; and curious likewise,
nay, venerable ; a most ancient and elaborate work of
God, which has lasted long enough, and endured
enough likewise, to bring out in it whatsoever latent
capabilities of strength and usefulness might lie hid
in it ; which has literally been — as far as such words
can apply to a thing inanimate —

Heated hot with burning fears,
And bathed in baths of hissing tears,
And battered by the strokes of doom
To shape and use.

And yet it was at first naught but an ugly lump of
soft and shapeless ooze.

Therefore, the slates to me are as a parable, on
which I will not enlarge, but will leave each reader to
interpret it for himself. I shall confine myself now to
proofs that slate is hardened mud, and to hints as to
how it assumed its present form.

That slate may have been once mud, is made

128 TOWN GEOLOGY. [vi.

probable by the simple fact that it can be turned into
inud again. If you grind up slate, and then analyse
it, you will find its mineral constituents to be exactly
those of a fine, rich, and tenacious clay. The slate
districts (at least in Snowdon) carry such a rich clay
on them, wherever it is not masked by the ruins of
other rocks. At Ilfracombe, in North Devon, the
passage from slate below to clay above, may be clearly
seen. Wherever the top of the slate beds, and the
soil upon it, is laid bare, the black layers of slate may
be seen gradually melting — if I may use the word —
under the influence of rain and frost, into a rich
tenacious clay, which is now not black, like its parent
slate, but red, from the oxidation of the iron which it
contains.

But, granting this, how did the first change take
place ?

It must be allowed, at starting, that time enough
has elapsed, and events enough have happened, since
our supposed mud began first to become slate, to allow
of many and strange transformations. For these slates
are found in the oldest beds of rocks, save one series,
in the known world ; and it is notorious that the older
and lower the beds in which the slates are found, the
better, that is, the more perfectly elaborate, is the
slate. The best slates of Snowdon — I must confine
myself to the district which I know personally — are
found in the so-called " Cambrian " beds. Below
these beds but one series of beds is as yet known in-
the world, called the " Laurentian." They occur, to a
thickness of some eighty thousand feet, in Labrador,
Canada, and the Adirondack mountains of New York :
but their representatives in Europe are, as far as is.

vi.] THE SLATES OX THE EOOF. 129

known, only to be found in the north-west highlands
of Scotland, and in the island of Lewis, which consists
entirely of them. And it is to be remembered, as a
proof of their inconceivable antiquity, that they have
been upheaved and shifted long before the Cambrian
rocks were laid down " un conformably " on their worn
and broken edges.

Above the " Cambrian " slates — whether the lower
and older ones of Penrhyn and Llanberris, which are
the same — one slate mountain being worked at both
sides in two opposite valleys — or the upper and newer
slates of Trenmdoc, lie other and newer slate-bearing
beds of inferior quality, and belonging to a yet newer
world, the " Silurian/' To them belong the Llandeilo
flags and slates of Wales, and the Skiddaw slates of
Cumberland, amid beds abounding in extinct fossil
forms. Fossil shells are found, it is true, in the upper
Cambrian beds. In the lower they have all but dis-
appeared. Whether their traces have been obliterated
by heat and pressure, and chemical action, during long
ages ; or whether, in these lower beds, we are actually
reaching that " Primordial Zone " conceived of by
M. Barrande, namely, rocks which existed before living
things had begun to people this planet, is a question
not yet answered. I believe the former theory to be
the true one. That there was life, in the sea at least,
even before the oldest Cambrian rocks were laid down,
is proved by the discovery of the now famous fossil,
the Eozoon, in the Laurentian limestones, which seemo
to have grown layer after layer, and to have formed
reefs of limestone as do the living coral- building
polypes. We know no more as yet. But all that we
do know points downwards, downwards still, warning

so. K

130 TOWN GEOLOGY. [vr.

us that we must dig deeper tliaii we have dug as yet,
before we reach the graves of the first living things.

Let this suffice at present for the Cambrian and
Laurentian rocks.

The Silurian rocks, lower and upper, -which in
these islands have their chief development in Wales,
and which are nearly thirty-eight thousand feet thick ;
' and the Devonian or Old Eed sandstone beds, which
in the Fans of Brecon and Carmarthenshire attain a
thickness of ten thousand feet, must be passed through
in an upward direction before we reach the bottom o£
that Carboniferous Limestone of which I spoke in my
last paper. We thus find on the Cambrian rocks
forty-five thousand feet at least of newer rocks, in
several cases lying unconformably on each other,
showing thereby that the lower beds had been up-
heaved, and their edges worn off on a sea-shore, ere
the upper were laid down on them; and throughout
this vast thickness of rocks, the remains of hundreds
of forms of animals, corals, shells, fish, older forms
dying out in the newer rocks, and new ones taking
their places in a steady succession of ever- vary ing-
forms, till those in the upper beds have become
unlike those in the lower, and all are from the
beginning more or less unlike any existing now on
earth. Whole families, indeed, disappear entirely, like
the Trilobites, which seem to have swarmed in the
Silurian seas, holding the same place there as crabs
and shrimps do in our modern seas. They vanish after
the period of the coal, and their place is taken by an
allied family of Crustaceans/T)f which only one form
(as far as I am aware) lingers now on earth, namely,
the " King Crab," or Limulus, of the Indian Seas, a

vi.] THE SLATES ON THE ROOF. 131

well-known, animal, of which specimens may sometimes
be seen alive in English aquaria. So perished in the
lapse of those same ages, the armour-plated or
"Ganoid" fish which Hugh Miller made so justly
famous — and which made him so justly famous in
return — appearing first in the upper Silurian beds> and
abounding in vast variety of strange forms in the old
Eed Sandstone, but gradually disappearing from the
waters of the world, till their only representatives, as
far as known, are the Lepidostei, or " Bony Pikes,"
of North America ; the Polypteri of the Nile and
Senegal ; the Lepidosirens of the African lakes and
Western rivers; the Ceratodus or Barramundi of
Queensland (the two latter of which approach Am-
phibians), and one or two more fantastic forms, either
rudimentary or degraded, which have lasted on here
and there in isolated stations through long ages,
comparatively unchanged while all the world is changed
around them, and their own kindred, buried like the
fossil Ceratodus of the Trias beneath thousands of feet
of ancient rock, among creatures the likes whereof
are not to be found now on earth. And these are but
two examples out of hundreds of the vast changes
which have taken place in the animal life of the
globe, between the laying down of the Cambrian
slates and the present time.

Surely — and it is to this conclusion I have been
tending throughout a seemingly wandering paragraph
— surely there has been time enough during all those
ages for clay to change into slate.

And how were they changed ?

I think I cannot teach my readers this more simply
than by asking them first to buy Sheet No. LXXVIII.

K 2

132 TOWN GEOLOGY. [TI.

S.E. (Bangor) of the'Snowdon district of the Govern-
ment Geological Survey, which may be ordered at
any good stationer's, price 3s. ; and study it with me.
He will see down the right-hand margin interpretations
of the different colours which mark the different
beds, beginning with the youngest (alluvium) atop,
and going down through Carboniferous Limestone and
Sandstone, Upper Silurian, Lower Silurian, Cambrian,
and below them certain rocks marked of different
shades of red, which signify rocks either altered by
heat, or poured out of old volcanic vents. He will next
see that the map is covered with a labyrinth of red
patches and curved lines, signifying the outcrop or
appearance at the surface of these volcanic beds.
They lie at every conceivable slope ; and the hills and
valleys have been scooped out by rain and ice into
every conceivable slope likewise. Wherefore we see,
here a broad patch of red, where the back of a sheet of
Lava, Porphyry, Greenstone, or what not is exposed ;
there a narrow line curving often with the curve of the
hill-side, where only the edge of a similar sheet is
exposed; and every possible variety of shape and
attitude between these two. He will see also large
spaces covered with little coloured dots, which signify
(as he will find at the margin) beds of volcanic ash. If
he look below the little coloured squares on the margin,
he will see figures marking the strike, or direction
of the inclination of the beds — inclined, vertical, hori-
zontal, contorted ; that the white lines in the map
signify faults, i.e. shifts in the strata ; the gold lines,
lodes of metal — the latter of which I should advise
him strongly, in this district at least, not to meddle
with : but to button up his pockets, and to put into

YI.] THE SLATES ON THE EOOF. 133

the fire, in wholesome fear of his own weakness and
ignorance, any puffs of mining companies which may
be sent him — as one or two have probably been sent
him already.

Furnished with which keys to the map, let him
begin to con it over, sure that there is if not an order,
still a grand meaning in all its seeming confusion; and
let him, if he be a courteous and grateful person,
return due thanks to Professor Ramsay for having
found it all out; not without wondering, as I have
often wondered, how even Professor Ramsay's acuteness
and industry could find it all out.

When my reader has studied awhile the confusion
— for it is a true confusion — of the different beds, he
will ask, or at least have a right to ask, what known
process of nature can have produced it ? How have
these various volcanic rocks, which he sees marked as
Felspathic Traps, Quartz Porphyries, Greenstones, and
so forth, got intermingled with beds which he is told
to believe are volcanic ashes, and those again with
fossil-bearing Silurian beds and Cambrian slates, which
he is told to believe were deposited under water?
And his puzzle will not be lessened when he is told
that, in some cases, as in that of the summit of
Snowdon, these very volcanic ashes contain fossil
shells.

The best answer I can give is to ask him to use
his imagination, or his common sense ; and to picture
to himself what must go on in the case of a submarine
eruption, such as broke out off the coast of Iceland in
1783 and 1830, off the Azores in 1811, and in our day
in more than one spot in the Pacific Ocean.

A main bore or vent — or more than one — opens

131 TOWN GEOLOGY. [vi.

itself between the bottom of tlie sea and the nether
fires. From each rushes an enormous jet of high-
pressure steam and other gases, which boils up through
the sea, and forms a cloud above ; that cloud descends
again in heavy rain, and gives out often true lightning
from its under side.

But it does more. It acts as a true steam-gun,
hurling into the air fragments of cold rock rasped off
from the sides of the bore, and fragments also of
melted lava, and clouds of dust, which fall again into
the sea, and form there beds either of fine mud or of
breccia — that is, fragments of stone embedded in
paste. This, the reader will understand, is no fancy
sketch, as far as I am concerned. I have steamed
into craters sawn through by the sea, and showing
sections of beds of ash dipping outwards and under
the sea, and in them boulders and pebbles of every
size, which had been hurled out of the crater ; and in
them also veins of hardened lava, which had burrowed
out through the soft ashes of the cone. Of those lava
veins I will speak presently. What I want the reader
to think of now is the immense quantity of ash which
the steam-mitrailleuse hurls to so vast a height into
the air, that it is often drifted many miles down to
leeward. To give two instances : The jet of steam
from Vesuvius, in the eruption of 1822, rose more than
four miles into the air; the jet from the Souffriere of
St. Vincent in the West Indies, in 1812, probably rose
higher; certainly it met the N.E. trade-wind, for it
poured down a layer of ashes, several inches thick,
not only on St. Vincent itself, but on Barbadoes,
eighty miles to windward, and therefore on all the sea
between. Now let us consider what that represents —

vi.] THE SLATES OX THE ROOF. 125

a layer of fine mud, laid down at the bottom of tlie
ocean, several inches thick, eighty miles at least long,
and twenty miles perhaps broad, by a single eruption.
Suppose that hardened in long ages (as it would be
under pressure) into a bed of fine grained Felstone,
or volcanic ash; and we can understand how the ash-
beds of Snowdonia — which may be traced some of
them for many square miles — were laid down at the
bottom of an ancient sea.

But now about the lavas or true volcanic rocks,
which are painted (as is usual in geological maps) red.
Let us go down to the bottom of the sea, and build up
our volcano towards the surface.

First, as I said, the subterranean steam would
blast a bore. The dust and stones, rasped and blasted
out of that hole would be spread about the sea-
bottom as an ash-bed sloping away round the hole ;
then the molten lava would rise in the bore, and
flow out over the ashes and the sea-bottom —
perhaps in one direction, perhaps all round. Then,
usually, the volcano, having vented itself, would be
quieter for a time, till the heat accumulated below,
and more ash was blasted out, making a second ash-
bed ; and then would follow a second lava flow. Thus
are produced the alternate beds of lava and ash which
are so common.

Now suppose that at this point the volcano was
exhausted, and lay quiet for a few hundred years, or
more. If there was any land near, from which mud
and sand were washed down, we might have layers on
layers of sediment deposited, with live shells, etc.,
living in them, which would be converted into fossils
when they died ; and so we should have f ossiliferous

136 TOWN GEOLOGY. . [>'i.

beds over the ashes and lavas. Indeed, shells might
live and thrive in the ash-mnd itself, when it cooled,
and the sea grew quiet, as they have lived and thriven
in Snowdouia.

Now suppose that after these sedimentary beds
are laid down by water, the volcano breaks out again
— what would happen ?

Many things : specially this, which has often
happened already.

The lava, kept down by the weight of these new
rocks, searches for the point of least resistance, and
finds it in a more horizontal direction. It burrows
out through the softer ash-beds, and between the
sedimentary beds, spreading itself along horizontally.
This process accounts for the very puzzling, though
very common case in Snowdon and elsewhere, in
which we find lavas interstratified with rocks which
are plainly older than those lavas. Perhaps when
that is done the volcano has got rid of all its lava, and
is quiet. But if not, sooner or later, it bores up
through the new sedimentary rocks, faulting them by
earthquake shocks till it gets free vent, and begins its
layers of alternate ash and lava once more.

And consider this fact also : If near the first (as
often happens) there is another volcano, the lava from
one may run over the lava from the other, and we
may have two lavas of different materials overlying
each other, which have come from different directions.
The ashes blown out of the two craters may mingle
also, and so, in the course of ages, the result may be
such a confusion of ashes, lavas, and sedimentary
rocks as we find throughout most mountain ranges in
Snowdon, in the Lake mountains, in the Auvergne in

vi.] THE SLATES ON THE ROOF. 137

France, in Sicily round Etna, in Italy round Vesuvius,
and in so many West Indian Islands ; the last confusion
of which is very likely to be this :

That when the volcano has succeeded — as it did in
the case of Sabrina Island off the Azores in 1811, and
as it did, perhaps often, in Snowdonia — in piling up an
ash cone some hundred feet out of the sea ; that — as
has happened to Sabrina Island — the cone is sunk
again by earthquakes, and gnawn down at the same
time by the sea-waves, till nothing is left but a shoal
under water. But where have all its vast heaps of
ashes gone ? To be spread about over the bottom of
the sea, to mingle with the mud already there, and so
make beds of which, like many in Snowdon, we cannot
say whether they are of volcanic or of marine origin,
because they are of both.

But what has all this to do with the slates ?
I shall not be surprised if my readers ask that
question two or three times during this paper. But
they must be kind enough to let me tell my story my
own way. The slates were not made in a day, and I
fear they cannot be explained in an hour : unless we
begin carefully at the beginning in order to end at the
end. Let me first make my readers clearly understand
that all our slate-bearing mountains, and most also of
the non-slate-bearing ones likewise, are formed after
the fashion which I have described, namely, beneath
the sea. I do not say that there may not have been,
again, and again, ash-cones rising above the surface of
the waves. But if so, they were washed away, again
and again, ages before the land assumed anything of
its present shape ; ages before the beds were twisted
and upheaved as they are now.

133 TOWN GEOLOGY. [vi.

And therefore I beg my readers to put out of their
miuds once and for all the fancy that in any known
part of these islands craters are to be still seen, such
as exist in Etna, or Vesuvius, or other volcanoes now
at work in the open air.

It is necessary to insist on this, because many
people hearing that certain mountains are volcanic,
conclude — and very naturally and harmlessly — that the
circular lakes about their tops are true craters. I have
been told, for instance, that that wonderful little blue
Glas Llyn, under the highest cliff of Snowdon, is the
old crater of the mountain ; and I have heard people
insist that a similar lake, of almost equal grandeur, in
the south side of Cader Idris, is a crater likewise.

But the fact is not so. Any one acquainted with
recent craters would see at once that Glas Llyn is not
an ancient one ; and I am not surprised to find the
Government geologists declaring that the Llyn on
Cader Idris is not one either. The fact is, that the
crater, or rather the place where the crater has been,
in ancient volcanoes of this kind, is probably now
covered by one of the innumerable bosses of lava.

For, as an eruption ceases, the melted lava cools in
the vents, and hardens; usually into lava infinitely
harder than the ash-cone round it ; and this, when
the ash-cone is washed off, remains as the highest
part of the hill, as in the Mont Dore and the Cantal
in France, and in several extinct volcanoes in the
Antilles. Of course the lava must have been poured
out, and the ashes blown out from some vents or
other, connected with the nether world of fire ;
probably from many successive vents. For in
volcanoes, when one vent is choked, another is wont

vi.] THE SLATES ON THE ROOF. 139

to open at some fresh point of least resistance among
the overlying rocks. Bat where are these vents?
Buried deep under successive eruptions, shifted
probably from their places by successive upheavings
and dislocations ; and if we wanted to find them we
should have to quarry the mountain range all over,
a mile deep, before we hit upon here and there a
tap-root of ancient lava, connecting the upper and
the nether worlds. There are such tap-roots, probably,
under each of our British mountain ranges. But
Snowdon, certainly, does not owe its shape to the
fact of one of these old fire vents being under it. It
owes its shape simply to the accident of some of the
beds toward the summit being especially hard, and
thus able to stand the wear and tear of sea-wave, ice,
and rain. Its lakes have been formed quite regardless
of the lie of the rocks, though not regardless of their
relative hardness. But what forces scooped them out
— whether they were originally holes left in the
ground by earthquakes, and deepened since by rain
and rivers, or whether they were scooped out by ice,
or by any other means, is a question on which the
best geologists are yet undecided — decided only on
this — that craters they are not.

As for the enormous changes which have taken
place in the outline of the whole of the mountains,
since first their strata were laid down at the bottom of
the sea : I shall give facts enough, before this paper
is done, to enable readers to judge of them for
themselves.

The reader will now ask, naturally enough, how such
a heap of beds as I have described can take the shape
of mountains like Suowdon.

140 TOWN GEOLOGY. [n.

Look at any sea cliff in which the strata are twisted
and set on slope. There are hundreds of such in these
isles. The beds must have been at one time straight
and horizontal. But it is equally clear that they have
been folded by being squeezed laterally. At least, that
is the simplest explanation, as may be proved by
experiment. Take a number of pieces of cloth, or any
such stuff ; lay them on each other and then squeeze
them together at each end. They will arrange them-
selves in folds, just as the beds of the cliff have done.
And if, instead of cloth, you take some more brittle
matter, you will find that, as you squeeze on, these
folds will tend to snap at the points of greatest tension
or stretching, which will be of course at the anticlinal
and synclinal lines — in plain English, the tops and
bottoms of the folds. Thus cracks will be formed; and
if the pressure goes on, the ends of the layers will shift
against each other in the line of those cracks, forming
faults like those so common in rocks.

But again, suppose that instead of squeezing these
broken and folded lines together any more, you took
off the pressure right and left, and pressed them
upwards from below, by a mimic earthquake. They
would rise j and as they rose leave open space between
them. Now if you could contrive to squeeze into
them from below a paste, which would harden in the
cracks and between the layer?, and so keep them
permanently apart, you would make them into a fair
likeness of an average mountain range — a mess — if I
may make use of a plain old word — of rocks which
have, by alternate contraction and expansion, helped
in the latter case by the injection of molten lava, been
thrust about as they are in most mountain ranges.

vi.] THE SLATES ON THE ROOF. 141

That such a contraction and expansion goes on in
the crust of the earth is evident; for here are the
palpable effects of it. And the simplest general cause
which I can give for it is this : That things expand as
they are heated, and contract as they are cooled.

Now I am not learned enough — and were I, I have
not time — to enter into the various theories which
philosophers have put forward, to account for these
grand phenomena.

The most remarkable, perhaps, and the most
probable, is the theory of M. Elie de Beaumont,
which is, in a few words, this :

That this earth, like all the planets, must have
been once in a state of intense heat throughout, as its
mass inside is probably now.

That it must be cooling, and giving off its heat
into space.

That, therefore, as it cools, its crust must contract.
That, therefore, in contracting, wrinkles (for the
loftiest mountain chains are nothing but tiny wrinkles,
compared with the whole mass of the earth), wrinkles,
I say, must form on its surface from time to time.
And that the mountain chains are these wrinkles.

Be that as it may, we may safely say this. That
wherever the internal heat of the earth tends (as in
the case of volcanoes) towards a particular spot, that
spot must expand, and swell up, bulging the rocks
out, and probably cracking them, and inserting
melting lava into those cracks from below. On the
other hand, if the internal heat leaves that spot again,
and it cools, then it must contract more or less, in
falling inward toward the centre of the earth ; and so
the beds must be crumpled, and crushed, and shifted

142 TOWN GEOLOGY. [vi.

against each other still more., as those of our mountains
have been.

But here may arise, in some of my readers' minds,
a reasonable question — If these upheaved beds were
once horizontal, should we not be likely to find them,
in some places, horizontal still ?

A reasonable question, and one which admits of a
full answer.

They know, of course, that there has been a
gradual, but steady, change in the animals of this
planet; and that the relative age of beds can, on
the strength of that known change, be determined
generally by the fossils, usually shells, peculiar to
them : so that if we find the same fashion of shells,
and still more the same species of shells, in two
beds in different quarters of the world, then we
have a right to say — These beds were laid down at
least about the same time. That is a general rule
among all geologists, and not to be gainsaid.

Now I think I may say, that, granting that we can
recognise a bed by its fossils, there are few or no beds
which are found in one place upheaved, broken, and
altered by heat, which are not found in some other
place still horizontal, unbroken, unaltered, and more
or less as they were at first.

From the most recent beds ; from the upheaved
coral-rocks of the West Indies, and the upheaved and
faulted boulder clay and chalk of the Isle of Moen in
Denmark — downwards through all the strata, down to
that very ancient one in which the best slates are found,
this rule, I believe, stands true.

It stands true, certainly, of the ancient Silurian
rocks of Wales, Cumberland, Ireland, and Scotland.

TI.] THE SLATES OX THE ROOF. 143

For, throughout great tracts of Russia, and in parts
of Norway and Sweden, Sir Roderick Murchison dis-
covered our own Silurian beds, recognisable from their
peculiar fossils. But in what state ? Not contracted,
upheaved, and hardened to slates and grits, as they
are in Wales and elsewhere : but horizontal, unbroken,
and still soft, because undisturbed by volcanic rocks
and earthquakes. At the bottom of them all, near-
Petersburg, Sir Roderick found a shale of dried mud
(to quote his own words), " so soft and incoherent that
it is even used by sculptors for modelling, although it
underlies the great mass of fossil-bearing Silurian
rocks, and is, therefore, of the same age as the lower
crystalline hard slates of North Wales. So entirely
have most of these eldest rocks in Russia been ex-
empted from the influence of change, throughout
those enormous periods which have passed away since-
their accumulation."

Among the many discoveries which science owes to
that illustrious veteran, I know none more valuable
for its bearing on the whole question of the making of
the earth-crust, than this one magnificent fact.

But what a contrast between these Scandinavian
and Russian rocks and those of Britain ! Never ex-
ceeding, in Scandinavia, a thousand feet in thickness,
and lying usually horizontal, as they were first laid
down, they are swelled in Britain to a thickness of
thirty thousand feet, by intruded lavas and ashes ;
snapt, turned, set on end at every conceivable angle ;
shifted against each other to such an extent, that, to
give a single instance, in the Vale of Gwynnant, under
Snowdon, an immense wedge of porphyry has been
thrust up, in what is now the bottom of the valley,

144 TOWN GEOLOGY. [TI.

between rocks far newer than it, on one side to a
height of eight hundred, on the other to a height of
eighteen hundred feet — half the present height of
Snowdon, Nay, the very slate beds of Snowdonia
have not forced their way up from under the mountain
without long and fearful struggles. They are set in
places upright on end, then horizontal again, then
sunk in an opposite direction, then curled like sea-
waves, then set nearly upright once more, and faulted
through and through, six times, I believe, in the
distance of a mile or two ; they carry here and there
on their backs patches of newer beds, the rest of
which has long vanished; and in their rise they have
hurled back to the eastward, and set upright, what is
now the whole western flank of Snowdon, a mass of
rock which was then several times as thick as it is
now.

The force which thus tortured them was probably
exerted by the great mass of volcanic Quartz-
porphyry, which rises from under them to the north-
west, crossing the end of the lower lake of theLlanberris;
and indeed the shifts and convulsions which have taken
place between them and the Menai Straits are so vast
that they can only be estimated by looking at them on
the section which may be found at the end of Professor
Ramsay's "Geological Survey of North Wales." But
anyone who will study that section, and use (as with
the map) a little imagination and common sense, will
see that between the heat of that Porphyry, which
must have been poured out as a fluid mass as hot,
probably, as melted iron, and the pressure of it below,
and of the Silurian beds above, the Cambrian mud-
strata of Llanberris and Penrhyn quarries must have

vi.] THE SLATES ON THE ROOF. 145

suffered enough to change them into something very
different from mud, and, therefore, probably, into
what they are now — namely, slate.

And now, at last, we have got to the slates on the
roof, and may disport ourselves over them — like the
cats.

Look at any piece of slate. All know that slate
splits or cleaves freely, in one direction only, into flat
layers. Now any one would suppose at first sight, and
fairly enough, that the flat surface — the "plane of
cleavage " — was also the plane of bedding. In simpler
English we should say — The mud which has hardened
into the slate was laid down horizontally ; and therefore
each slate is one of the little horizontal beds of it,
perhaps just what was laid down in a single tide. We
should have a right to do so, because that would be
true of most sedimentary rocks. But it would not be
true of slate. The plane of bedding in slate has
nothing to do with the plane of cleavage. Or, more
plainly, the mud of which the slate is made may have
been deposited at the sea-bottom at any angle to the
plane of cleavage. We may sometimes see the lines
of the true bedding — the lines which were actually
horizontal when the mud was laid down — in bits of
slate, and find them sometimes perpendicular to, some-
times inclined to, and sometimes again coinciding
with the plane of cleavage, which they have evidently
acquired long after.

Nay, more. These parallel planes of cleavage, at
each of which the slate splits freely, will run through
a whole mountain at the same angle, though the beds
through which they run may be tilted at different
angles, and twisted into curves.

sc. L

146 TOWN GEOLOGY. [vi.

Now what lias made this change in the rock ? We
do not exactly know. One thing is clear, that the
particles of the now solid rock have actually moved on
themselves. And this is proved by a very curious
fact — fwhich the reader, if he geologises about slate
quarries much, may see with his own eyes. The fossils
in the slate are often distorted into quaint shapes,
pulled out long if they lie along the plane of cleavage,
or squeezed together, or doubled down on both sides,
if they lie across the plane. So that some force has
been at work which could actually change the shape of
hard shells, very slowly, no doubt, else it would have
snapped and crumbled them.

If I am asked what that force was, I do not know.
I should advise young geologists to read what Sir
Henry de la Beche has said on it in his admirable
"Geological Observer/' pp. 706-725. He will find
there, too, some remarks on that equally mysterious
phenomena of jointing, which you may see in almost
all the older rocks ; it is common in limestones. AIL
we can say is, that some force has gone on, or may be
even now going on, in the more ancient rocks, which
is similar to that which produces single crystals ; and
similar, too, to that which produced the jointed crystals
of basalt, i.e. lava, at the Giant's Causeway, in Ireland,
and Staffa, in the Hebrides. Two philosophers — Mr.
Eobert Were Fox and Mr. Eobert Hunt — are of opinion
that the force which has determined the cleavage of
slates may be that of the electric currents, which (as is
well known) run through the crust of the earth. Mr.
Sharpe, I believe, attributes the cleavage to the mere
mechanical pressure of enormous weights of rock,
especially where crushed by earthquakes. Professor

vi.] THE SLATES ON THE ROOF. 147

Kogers, again, points out that as these slates may have
been highly heated, thermal electricity (i.e. electricity
brought out by heat) may have acted on them.

One thing at least is clear. That the best slates
are found among ancient lavas, and also in rocks which
are faulted and tilted enormously, all which could not
have happened without a proportionately enormous
pressure, and therefore heat ; and next, that the best
slates are invariably found in the oldest beds — that is,
in the beds which have had most time to endure the
changes, whether mechanical or chemical, which have
made the earth's surface what we see it now.

Another startling fact the section of Snowdonia,
and I believe of most mountain chains in these islands,
would prove — namely, that the contour of the earth's
surface, as we see it now, depends very little, certainly
in mountains composed of these elder rocks upon the
lie of the strata, or beds, but has been carved out by
great forces, long after those beds were not only laid
down and hardened, but faulted and tilted on end.
Snowdon itself is so remarkable an instance of this
fact that, as it is a mountain which every one in these
happy days of excursion-trains and steamers either
has seen or can see, I must say a few more words
about it.

Any one who saw that noble peak leaping high
into the air, dominating all the country round, at least
upon three sides, and was told that its summit con-
sisted of beds much newer, not much older, than the
slate-beds fifteen hundred feet down on its north-
western flank — any one, I say, would have the right at
first sight, on hearing of earthquake faults and up-
heavals, to say — The peak of Snowdon has been

L 2

148 TOWX GEOLOGY. [vi.

upheaved to its present height above and out of the
lower lands around. But when he came to examine
sections, he would find his reasonable guess utterly
wrong. Snowdon is no swelling up of the earth's
crust. The beds do not, as they w^ould in that case,
slope up to it. They slope up from it, to the north-
west in one direction, and the south-south-west in the
other ; and Snowdon is a mere insignificant boss, left
hanging on one slope of what was once an enormous
trough, or valley, of strata far older than itself. By
restoring these strata, in the direction of the angles,
in which they crop out, and vanish at the surface, it is
found that to the north-west — the direction of the
Menai Straits — they must once have risen to a height
of at least six or seven thousand feet ; and more, by
restoring them, specially the ash-bed of Snowdon,
towards the south-east— which can be done by the
guidance of certain patches of it left on other hills —
it is found that south of Ffestiniog, where the Cambrian
rocks rise again to the surface, the south side of the
trough must have sloped upwards to a height of from
fifteen to twenty thousand feet, whether at the bottom
of the sea, or in the upper air, we cannot tell. But
the fact is certain, that off the surface of Wales, south
of Ffestiniog a mass of solid rock as high as the Andes
has been worn down and carried bodily away; and
that a few miles south again, the peak of Arran
Mowddy, which is now not two thousand feet high, was
once — either under the sea or above it — nearer ten
thousand feet.

If I am asked whither is all that enormous mass
of rock — millions of tons — gone ? Where is it now ?
I know not. But if I dared to hazard a guess, I

vi.] THE SLATES ON THE ROOF 149

should say it went to make the New Red sandstones of
England.

The New Red sandstones must have come from
somewhere. The most likely region for them to have
come from is from North Wales, where, as we know,
vast masses of gritty rock have been ground off, such
as would make fine sandstones if they had the chance.
So that many a grain of sand in Chester walls was
probably once blasted out of the bowels of the earth
into the old Silurian sea, and after a few hundreds of
thousands of years' repose in a Snowdonian ash-bed,
was sent eastward to build the good old city and many
a good town more.

And the red marl — the great deposit of red marl
which covers a wide region of England — why should
not it have come from the same quarter ? Why should
it not be simply the remains of the Snowdon Slate ?
Mud the slate was, and into mud it has returned.
Why not ? Some of the richest red marl land I know,
is, as I have said, actually being made now, out of the
black slates of Ilf racombe, wherever they are weathered
by rain and air. The chemical composition is the same.
The difference in colour between black slate and red
marl is caused simply by the oxidation of the iron in
the slate.

And if my readers want a probable cause why the
sandstones lie undermost, and the red marl uppermost
— can they not find one for themselves ? I do not say
that it is the cause, but it is at least a causa vera, one
which would fully explain the fact, though it may be
explicable in other ways. Think, then, or shall I think
for my readers ?

Then do they not see that when the Welsh

150 TOWN GEOLOGY. [vi.

mountains "were ground down, the Silurian strata,
being uppermost, would be ground down first, and
would go to make the lower strata of the great New
Red Sandstone Lowland ; and that being sandy, they
would make the sandstones ? But wherever they were
ground through, the Lower Cambrian slates would be
laid bare ; and their remains, being washed away by
the sea the last, would be washed on to the top of the
remains of the Silurians ; and so (as in most cases) the
remains of the older rock, when redeposited by water,
would lie on the remains of the younger rock. And
do they not see that (if what I just said is true) these
slates would grind up into red marl, such as is seen
over the west and south of Cheshire and Staffordshire
and far away into Nottinghamshire ? The red marl
must almost certainly have been black slate some-
where, somewhen. Why should it not have been such
in Snowdon ? And why should not the slates in the
roof be the remnants of the very beds which are now
the marl in the fields ?

And thus I end my story of the slates in the roof,
and these papers on Town Geology. I do so, well
knowing how imperfect they are : though not, I
believe, inaccurate. They are, after all, merely sug-
gestive of the great amount that there is to be learnt
about the face of the earth and how it got made, even
by the townsman, who can escape into the country and
exchange the world of man for the world of God, only,
perhaps, on Sundays — if, alas ! even then — or only
once a year by a trip in a steamer or an excursion
train. Little, indeed, can he learn of the planet on
which he lives. Little in that direction is given to
him, and of him little shall be required. But to him,

vi.] THE SLATES ON THE ROOF. 151

for that very reason, all that can be given should be
given; he should have every facility for learning
what he can about this earth, its composition, its
capabilities ; lest his intellect, crushed and fettered by
that artificial drudgery which we for a time miscall
civilisation, should begin to fancy, as too many do
already, that the world is composed mainly of bricks
and deal, and governed by acts of parliament. If I
shall have awakened any townsmen here and there to
think seriously of the complexity, the antiquity, the
grandeur, the true poetry, of the commonest objects
around them, even the stones beneath their feet ; if I
shall have suggested to them the solemn thought that
all these things, and they themselves still more, are
ordered by laws, utterly independent of man's will
about them, man's belief in them; if I shall at all
have helped to open their eyes that they may see, and
their ears that they may hear, the great book which is
free to all alike, to peasant as to peer, to men of
business as to men of science, even that great book of
nature, which is, as Lord Bacon said of old, the "Word
of God revealed in facts — then I shall have a fresh
reason for loving that science of geology, which has
been my favourite study since I was a boy.

ON BIO-GEOLOGY.

ON BIO-GEOLOGY. "

I AM not sure that the subject of my address is rightly
chosen. I am not sure that I ought not to have post-
poned a question of mere natural history, to speak to
you as scientific men, on the questions of life and
death, which have been forced upon us by the awful
warning of an illustrious personage's illness ; of pre-
ventible disease, its frightful prevalency; of the
200,000 persons who are said to have died of fever
alone since the Prince Consort's death, ten years ago ;
of the remedies ; of drainage ; of sewage disinfection
and utilisation ; and of the assistance which you, as a
body of scientific men, can give to any effort towards
saving the lives and health of our fellow-citizens from
those unseen poisons which lurk like wild beasts
couched in the jungle, ready to spring at any moment
on the unsuspecting, the innocent, the helpless. Of
all this I longed to speak ; but I thought it best only
to hint at it, and leave the question to your common
sense and your humanity ; taking for granted that
your minds, like the minds of all right-minded English -
* An Address given to the Scientific Society of Winchester, 1871.

156 ON BIO-GEOLOGY. [vn.

men, have been of late painfully awakened to its
importance. It seemed to me almost an impertinence
to say more in a city of whose local circumstances I
know little or nothing. As an old sanitary reformer,
practical, as well as theoretical, I am but too well
aware of the difficulties which beset any complete
scheme of drainage, especially in an ancient city like
this ; where men are paying the penalty of their prede-
cessors' ignorance ; and dwelling, whether they choose
or not, over fifteen centuries of accumulated dirt.

And, therefore, taking for granted that there is
energy and intellect enough in Winchester to conquer
these difficulties in due time, I go on to ask you to
consider, for a time, a subject which is growing more
and more important and interesting, a subject the
study of which will do much towards raising the field
naturalist from a mere collector of specimens — as he
was twenty years ago — to a philosopher elucidating
•some of the grandest problems. I mean the infant
science of Bio-geology — the science which treats of the
distribution of plants and animals over the globe, and
the cause of that distribution.

I doubt not that there are many here who know far
more about the subject than I; who are far better read
than I am in the works of Forbes, Darwin, Wallace,
Hooker, Moritz Wagner, and the other illustrious men
who have written on it. But I may, perhaps, give a
few hints which will be of use to the younger members
of this Society, and will point out to them how to get
a new relish for the pursuit of field science.

Bio-geology, then, begins with asking every plant
or animal you meet, large or small, not merely — What
is your name ? That is the collector and classifier's

vii.] WHERE PLANTS COME FROM? 157

duty ; and a most necessary duty it is, and one to be
performed with the most conscientious patience and
accuracy, so that a sound foundation may be built for
future speculations. But young naturalists should act
not merely as Nature's registrars and census-takers,
but as her policemen and gamekeepers ; and ask every-
thing they meet — How did you get there ? By what
road did you come ? What was your last place of
abode ? And now you are here, how do you get your
living ? Are you and your children thriving, like
decent people who can take care of themselves, or
growing pauperised and degraded, and dying out?
Not that we have a fear of your becoming a dangerous
class. Madame Nature allows no dangerous classes, in
the modern sense. She has, doubtless for some wise
reason, no mercy for the weak. She rewards each
organism according to its works ; and if anything grows
too weak or stupid to take care of itself, she gives it its
due deserts by letting it die and disappear. So, you
plant or you animal, are you among the strong, the
successful, the multiplying, the colonising ? Or are
you among the weak, the failing, the dwindling, the
doomed ?

These questions may seem somewhat rude : but
you may comfort yourself by the thought that plants
and animals, though they deserve all kindness, all
admiration, deserve no courtesy — at least in this
respect. For they are, one and all, wherever you
find them, vagrants and landlopers, intruders and
conquerors, who have got where they happen to be
simply by the law of the strongest — generally not
without a little robbery and murder. They have no
right save that of possession ; the same by which the

158 ON BIO-GEOLOGY. [vn.

puffin turns out the old rabbits, eats tlie young ones,
and then lays her eggs in the rabbit-burrow — simply
because she can.

Now, you will see at once that such a course of
questioning will call out a great many curious and
interesting answers, if you can only get the things to
tell you their story ; as you always may if you will
cross-examine them long enough ; and will lead you
into many subjects beside mere botany or entomology.
So various, indeed, are the subjects which you will
thus start, that I can only hint at them now in the
most cursory fashion.

At the outset you will soon find yourself involved in
chemical and meteorological questions ; as, for instance,
when you ask — How is it that I find one flora on the
sea-shore, another on the sandstone, another on the
chalk, and another on the peat-making gravelly strata ?
The usual answer would be, I presume — if we could
work it out by twenty years' experiment, such as
Mr. Lawes, of Eothampsted, has been making on the
growth of grassesand leguminous plants in different soils
and under different manures — the usual answer, I say,
would be — Because we plants want such and such
mineral constituents in our woody fibre ; again, because
we want a certain amount of moisture at a certain
period of the year : or, perhaps, simply because the
mechanical arrangement of the particles of a certain soil
happens to suit the shape of our roots and of their
stomata. Sometimes you will get an answer quickly
enough; sometimes not. If you ask, for instance,
Asplenium viride how it contrives to grow plentifully
in the Craven of Yorkshire down to COO or 800 feet
above the sea, while in Snowdon it dislikes growing

vii.] HOW DID THEY GET THERE? 159

lower than 2000 feet, and is not plentiful even there? —
it will reply — Because in the Craven I can get as much
carbonic acid as I want from the decomposing lime-
stone ; while on the Snowdon Silurian I get very little ;
and I have to make it up by clinging" to the mountain
tops, for the sake of the greater rainfall. But if you
ask Polypodium calcareum — How is it you choose only
to grow on limestone, while Polypodium Dryopteris, of
which, I suspect, you are only a variety, is ready to
grow anywhere ? — Polypodium calcareum will refuse,
as yet, to answer a word.

Again — I can only give you the merest string of
hints — you will find in your questionings that many
plants and animals have no reason at all to show why
they should be in one place and not in another, save
the very sound reason for the latter which was
suggested to me once by a great naturalist. I was
asking — Why don't I find such and such a species in my
parish, while it is plentiful a few miles off in exactly
the same soil ? — and he answered — For the same reason
that you are not in America. Because you have not
got there. Which answer threw to me a flood of light
on this wiole science. Things are often where they are,
simply because they happen to have got there, and not
elsewhere. But they must have got there by some
means, and those means I want young naturalists to
discover; at least, to guess at.

A species, for instance — and I suspect it is a common
case with insects — may abound in a single spot, simply
because, long years ago, a single brood of eggs happened
to hatch at a time when eggs of other species, who
would have competed against them for food, did not
hatch ; and they may remain confined to that spot,

160 ON BIO-GEOLOGY. [vii.

though there is plenty of food for them outside it,
simply because they do not increase fast enough to
require to spread out in search of more food. Thus I
should explain a case which I heard of lately of Antho-
cera trifolii, abundant for years in one corner of a
certain .field, and only there; while there was just as
much trefoil all round for its larvae as there was in the
selected spot. I can, I say, only give hints : but they
will suffice, I hope, to show the path of thought into
which I want young naturalists to turn their minds.

Or, again, you will have to inquire whether the
species has not been prevented from spreading by some
natural barrier. Mr. Wallace, whom you all of course
know, has shown in his "Malay Archipelago " that a
strait of deep sea can act as such a barrier between
species. Moritz Wagner has shown that, in the case
of insects, a moderately-broad river may divide two
closely-allied species of beetles, or a very narrow
snow-range, two closely-allied species of moths.

Again, another cause, and a most common one, is :
that the plants cannot spread because they find the
ground beyond them already occupied by other plants,
who will not tolerate a fresh mouth, having only just
enough to feed themselves. Take the case of Saxifraga
hypnoides and 8. umbrosa, " London pride." They
are two especially strong species. They show that,
S. hypnoides especially, by their power of sporting,
of diverging into varieties ; they show it equally by
their power of thriving anywhere, if they can only get
there. They will grow both in my sandy garden, under
a rainfall of only 23 inches, more luxuriantly than in
their native mountains under a rainfall of 50 or 60
inches. Then how is it that S. hypnoides cannot get

vn.] TEAVELS OF FEATHERED SEEDS. 161

down off the mountains ; and that S. umbrosa, though
in Kerry it has got off the mountains and down to the
sea-level, exterminating, I suspect, many species in
its progress, yet cannot get across County Cork ? The
only answer is, I believe, that both species are con-
tinually trying to go ahead ; but that the other plants
already in front of them are too strong for them, and
massacre their infants as soon as born.

And this brings us to another curious question :
the sudden and abundant appearance of plants, like
the foxglove and Epilobium angustifolium, in spots
where they have never been seen before. Are there
seeds, as some think, dormant in the ground; or are
the seeds which have germinated, fresh ones wafted
thither by wind or otherwise, and only able to germi-
nate in that one spot because there the soil is clear ?
General Monro, now famous for his unequalled memoir
on the bamboos, holds to the latter theory. He pointed
out to me that the Epilobium seeds, being feathered
could travel with the wind; that the plant always
made its appearance first on new banks, landslips,
clearings, where it had nothing to compete against;
and that the foxglove did the same. True, and most
painfully true, in the case of thistles and groundsels :
but foxglove seeds, though minute, would hardly be
carried by the wind any more than those of the white
clover, which comes up so abundantly in drained fens.
Adhuc sub judice lis est, and I wish some young
naturalists would work carefully at the solution ; by
experiment, which is the most sure way to find out
anything.

But in researches in this direction they will find
puzzles enough. I will give them one which I shall

162 ON BIO-GEOLOGY. [vn.

be most thankful to hear they have solved within the
next seven years — How is it that we find certain
plants, namely, the thrift and the scurvy grass, abun-
dant on the sea-shore and common on certain mountain-
tops, but nowhere between the two ? Answer me
that. For I have looked at the fact for years — before,
behind, sideways, upside down, and inside cut — and I
cannot understand it.

But all these questions, and especially, I suspect,
that last one, ought to lead the young student up to
the great and complex question — How were these
islands re-peopled with plants and animals, after the
long and wholesale catastrophe of the glacial epoch ?

I presume you all know, and will agree, that the
whole of these islands, north of the Thames, save
certain ice-clad mountain -tops, were buried for long
ages under an icy sea. From whence did vegetable
and animal life crawl back to the land, as it rose again ;
and cover its mantle of glacial drift with fresh life and
verdure ?

Now let me give you a few prolegomena on this
matter. You must study the plants of course, species
by species. Take Watson's " Cybele Britannica " and
Moore's " Cybele Hibernica ;" and let — as Mr. Matthew
Arnold would say — " your thought play freely about
them/' Look carefully, too, in the case of each species,
at the note on its distribution, which you will find
appended in Bentham's " Handbook/' and in Hooker's
" Student's Flora." Get all the help you can, if you
wish to work the subject out, from foreign botanists,
both European and American; and I think that, on
the whole, you will come to some such theory as this
for a general starting platform. We do not owe our

vii.] CONQUERING RACES AND NEW PLANTS. i63

flora — I must keep to the flora just now — to so many
different regions, or types, as Mr. Watson conceives,
but to three, namely, an European or Germanic flora,
from the south-east ; an Atlantic flora, from the south-
east; a Northern flora, from the north. These three
invaded us after the glacial epoch; and our general
flora is their result.

But this will cause you much trouble. Before you
go a step farther you will have to eliminate from all
your calculations most of the plants which Watson calls
glareal, i.e. found in cultivated ground about habita-
tions. And what their limit may be I think we never
shall know. But of this we may be sure; that just as
invading armies always bring with them, in forage or
otherwise, some plants from their own country — just as
the Cossacks, in 1815, brought more than one Russian
plant through Germany into France — just as you have
already a crop of North German plants upon the battle-
fields of France — thus do conquering races bring new
plants. The Romans, during their 300 or 400 years
of occupation and civilisation, must have brought more
species, I believe, 'than I dare mention. I suspect them
of having brought, not merely the common hedge elm
of the south, not merely the three species of nettle,
but all our red poppies, and a great number of the
weeds which are common in our cornfields ; and when
we add to them the plants which may have been brought
by returning crusaders and pilgrims ; by monks from
every part of Europe, by Flemings or other dealers in
foreign wool — we have to cut a huge can tie out of our
indigenous flora : only, having no records, we hardly
know where and what to cut out ; and can only, we
elder ones, recommend the subject to the notice of the

M 2

16i ON BIO-GEOLOGY. [TII.

younger botanists, that they may work it out after our
work is done.

Of course these plants introduced by man, if they
are cut out, must be cut out of only one of the floras,
namely, the European ; for they, probably, came from
the south-east, by whatever means they came.

That European flora invaded us, I presume, imme-
diately after the glacial epoch, at a time when France
and England were united, and the German Ocean a
mere network of rivers, which emptied into the deep
sea between Scotland and Scandinavia. And here I
must add, that endless questions of interest will arise
to those who will study, not merely the invasion of
that truly European flora, but the invasion of reptiles,
insects, and birds, especially birds of passage, which
must have followed it as soon as the land was sufficiently
covered with vegetation to support life. Whole volumes
remain to be written on this subject. I trust that
some of your younger members may live to write one of
them. The way to begin will be : to compare the flora
and fauna of this part of England very carefully with
that of the southern and eastern counties ; and then to
compare them again with the fauna and flora of France,
Belgium, and Holland.

As for the Atlantic flora, you will have to decide
for yourselves whether you accept or not the theory
of a sunken Atlantic continent. I confess that all
objections to that theory, however astounding it may
seem, are outweighed in my mind by a host of facts
which I can explain by no other theory. But you
must judge for yourselves ; and to do so you must
study carefully the distribution of heaths both in
Europe and at the Cape, and their non-appearance

fii.J THE PRE-GLACIAL FLORA. 165

beyond the Ural Mountains, and in America, save in
Labrador, where the common ling, an older and less
specialised form, exists. You must consider, too, the
plants common to the Azores, Portugal, the West of
England, Ireland, and the Western Hebrides. In so
doing young naturalists will at least find proofs of a
change in the distribution of land and water, which
will utterly astound them when they face it for the
first time.

As for the Northern flora, the question whence it
came is puzzling enough. It seems difficult to conceive
how any plants could have survived when Scotland
was an archipelago in the same ice-covered condition
as Greenland is now ; and we have no proof that there
existed after the glacial epoch any northern continent
from which the plants and animals could have come
back to us. The species of plants and animals common
to Britain, Scandinavia, and North America, must
have spread in pre-glacial times when a continent
joining them did exist.

But some light has been thrown on this question
by an article, as charming as it is able, on "The
Physics of the Arctic Ice," by Dr. Brown of Campster.
You will find it in the " Quarterly Journal of the Geo-
logical Society" for February, 1870. He shows there
that even in Greenland peaks and crags are left free
enough from ice to support a vegetation of between
three hundred or four hundred species of flowering
plants ; and, therefore, he well says, we must be careful
to avoid concluding that the plant and animal life on
the dreary shores or mountain-tops of the old glacial
Scotland was poor. The same would hold good of our
mountains ; and, if so, we may look with respect, even

166 ON BIO-GEOLOGY. [TII.

awe, on the Alpine plants of Wales, Scotland, and the
Lake mountains, as organisms, stunted it may be, and
even degraded by their long battle with the elements,
but venerable from their age, historic from their en-
durance. Relics of an older temperate world, they
have lived through thousands of centuries of frost and
fog, to sun themselves in a temperate climate once
more. I can never pick one of them without a tinge
of shame; and to exterminate one of them is to
destroy, for the mere pleasure of collecting, the last of
a family which God has taken the trouble to preserve
for thousands of centuries.

I trust that these hints — for I can call them nothing
more — will at least awaken any young naturalist who
has hitherto only collected natural objects, to study
the really important and interesting question — How
did these things get here ?

Now hence arise questions which may puzzle the
mind of a Hampshire naturalist. You have in this
neighbourhood, as you well know, two, or rather three,
soils, each carrying its peculiar vegetation. First, you
have the clay lying on the chalk, and carrying vast
woodlands, seemingly primeval. Next, you have the
chalk, with its peculiar, delicate, and often fragrant
crop of lime-loving plants ; and next, you have the
poor sands and clays of the New Forest basin, satu-
rated with iron, and therefore carrying a moorland or
peat-loving vegetation, in many respects quite different
from the others. And this moorland soil, and this
vegetation, with a few singular exceptions, repeats
itself, as I daresay you know, in the north of the
county, in the Bagshot basin, as it is called — the moors
of Aldershot, Hartford Bridge, and Windsor Forest.

vii.] THE MOST ANCIENT FORMS. 167

Now what a variety of interesting questions are
opened up by these simple facts. How did these three
floras get each to its present place ? Where did each
come from ? How did it get past or through the other,
till each set of plants, after long internecine compe-
tition, settled itself down in the sheet of land most
congenial to it ? And when did each come hither ?
Which is the oldest ? Will any one tell me whether
the healthy floras of the moors, or the thymy flora of the
chalk downs, were the earlier inhabitants of these isles ?
To these questions I cannot get any answer; and
they cannot be answered without, first — a very careful
study of the range of each species of plant on the
continent of Europe ; and next, without careful study
of those stupendous changes in the shape of this island
which have taken place at a very late geological epoch.
The composition of the flora of our moorlands is as yet
to me an utter puzzle. We have Lycopodiums — three
species — enormously ancient forms which have survived
the age of ice : but did they crawl downward hither
from the northern mountains or upward hither from
the Pyrenees ? • We have the beautiful bog asphodel
again — an enormously ancient form ; for it is, strange
to say, common to North America and to Northern
Europe, but does not enter Asia — almost an unique
instance. It must, surely, have come from the north ;
and points — as do many species of plants and animals
— to the time when North Europe and North America
were joined. We have, sparingly, in North Hampshire,
though, strangely, not on the Bagshot moors, the Com-
mon or Northern Butterwort (Pinguicula vulgaris);
and also, in the south, the New Forest part of the
county, the delicate little Pinguicula lusitanica, the

1C8 ON BIO-GEOLOGY. [vii.

only species now found in Devon and Cornwall,
marking the New Forest as the extreme eastern limit
of the Atlantic flora. We have again the heaths,
which, as I have just said, are found neither in
America nor in Asia, and must, I believe, have come
from some south-western land long since submerged
beneath the sea. But more, we have in the New
Forest two plants which are members of the South
Europe, or properly, the Atlantic flora; which must
have come from the south and south-east ; and which
are found in no other spots in these islands. I mean
the lovely Gladiolus, which grows abundantly under
the ferns near Lyndhurst, certainly wild, but it does
not approach England elsewhere nearer than the
Loire and the Rhine ; and next, that delicate orchid,
the tipiranthes cestivalis, which is known only in a bog
near Lyndhurst and in the Channel Islands, while on the
Continent it extends from Southern Europe all through
France. Now, what do these two plants mark ? They
give us a point in botany, though not in time, to de-
termine when the south of England was parted from
the opposite shores of France; and whenever that was,
it was just after the Gladiolus and Spiranthes got
hither. Two little colonies of these lovely flowers
arrived just before their retreat was cut off. They
found the country already occupied with other plants ;
and, not being reinforced by fresh colonists from the
south, have not been able to spread farther north than
Lyndhurst. Thus, in the New Forest, and, I may say
in the Bagshot moors, you find plants which you do
not expect, and do not find plants which you do expect;
and you are, or ought to be, puzzled, and I hope also
interested, and stirred up to find out more.

vii.] BEFORE THE STRAITS. OF DOVER. 169

I spoke just now of the time when England was
joined to France, as bearing on Hampshire botany. It
bears no less on Hampshire zoology. In insects, for
instance, the presence of the purple emperor and the
white admiral in our Hampshire woods, as well as the
abundance of the great stag-beetle, point to a time
when the two countries were joined, at least as far
west as Hampshire; while the absence of these insects
farther to the westward shows that the countries, if
ever joined, were already parted; and that those
insects have not yet had time to spread westward.
The presence of these two butterflies, and partly of
the stag-beetle, along the south-east coast of England
as far as the primeval forests of South Lincolnshire,
points, as do a hundred other facts, to a time when
the Straits of Dover either did not exist, or were the
bed of a river running from the west ; and when, as I
told you just now, all the rivers which now run into
the German Ocean, from the Humber on the west to
the Elbe on the east, discharged themselves into the
sea between Scotland and Norway, after wandering
through a vast lowland, covered with countless herds
of mammoth, rhinoceros, gigantic ox, and other
mammals now extinct; while the birds, as far as
we know, the insects, the fresh-water fish, and even,
as my friend Mr. Brady has proved, the Entomostraca
of the rivers, were the same in what is now Holland as
in what is now our Eastern counties. I could dwell
long on this matter. I could talk long about how
certain species of Lepidoptera — moths and butterflies
— like Papilio Machaon and P. Fodalirius, swarm
through France, reach up to the British Channel, and
have not crossed it, with the exception of one colony

170 ON BIO-GEOLOGY. [vn.

of Machaon in the Cambridgeshire fens. I could talk
long about a similar phenomenon in the case of our
migratory and singing birds ; how many exquisite
species — notably those two glorious songsters, the
Orphean Warbler and Hippolais, which delight our
ears everywhere on the other side of the Channel —
follow our nightingales, blackcaps, and warblers
northward every spring almost to the Straits of
Dover, but dare not cross, simply because they have
been, as it were, created since the gulf was opened,
and have never learnt from their parents how to fly
over it.

In the case of fishes, again, I might say much on
the curious fact that the Cyprinidse, or white fish —
carp, etc. — and their natural enemy, the pike, are
indigenous, I believe, only to the rivers, English or
continental, on the eastern side of the Straits of
Dover; while the rivers on the western side were
originally tenanted, like our Hampshire streams, as
now, almost entirely by trout, their only Cyprinoid
being the minnow — if it, too, be not an interloper;
and I might ask you to consider the bearing of this
curious fact on the former junction of England and
France.

But I have only time to point out to you a few
curious facts with regard to reptiles, which should be
specially interesting to a Hampshire bio-geologist.
You know, of course, that in Ireland there are no
reptiles, save the little common lizard, Lacerta agilis,
and a few frogs on the mountain-tops — how they got
there I cannot conceive. And you will, of course,
guess, and rightly, that the reason of the absence of
reptiles is : that Ireland was parted off from England

vii.] LIZARDS AND NATTERJACKS. 171

before the creatures, which certainly spread from
southern and warmer climates, had time to get there.
You know, of course, that we have a few reptiles
in England. But you may not be aware that, as
soon as you cross the Channel, you find many more
species of reptiles than here, as well as those which
you find here. The magnificent green lizard which
rattles about like a rabbit in a French forest, is never
found here ; simply because it had not worked north-
ward till after the Channel was formed. But there
are three reptiles peculiar to this part of England
which should be most interesting to a Hampshire
zoologist. The one is the sand lizard (L. stirpium),
found on Bourne-heath, and, I suspect, in the South
Hampshire moors likewise — a North European and
French species. Another, the Coronella Icevis, a harm-
less French and Austrian snake, which has been found
about me, in North Hants and South Berks, now about
fifteen or twenty times. I have had three specimens
from my own parish. I believe it not to be uncommon ;
and most probably to be found, by those who will look,
both in the New Forest and Woolmer. The third is
the Natterjack, or running toad (Bufo Rubeta), a most
beautifully-spotted animal, with a yellow stripe down
his back, which is common with us at Eversley, and
common also in many moorlands of Hants and Surrey ;
and, according to Fleming, on heaths near London, and
as far north-east as Lincolnshire ; in which case it will
belong to the Germanic fauna. Now, here again we
have cases of animals which have just been able to get
hither before the severance of England and France ;
aud which, not being reinforced from the rear, have
been forced to stop, in small and probably decreasing

172 ON BIO-GEOLOGY. [vn.

colonies, on the spots nearest the coast which were fit
for them.

I trust that I have not kept you too long over these
details. What I wish to impress upon you is that
Hampshire is a country specially fitted for the study of
important bio-geological questions.

To work them out, you must trace the geology of
Hampshire, and indeed, of East Dorset. You must try
to form a conception of how the land was shaped in
miocene times, before that tremendous upheaval which
reared the chalk cliffs at Freshwater upright, lifting
the tertiary beds upon their northern slopes. You
must ask — Was there not land to the south of the Isle
of Wight in those ages, and for ages after ; and what
was its extent and shape ? You must ask — When was
the gap between the Isle of Wight and the Isle of Pur-
beck sawn through, leaving the Needles as remnants
on one side, and Old Harry on the opposite ? And was
it sawn asunder merely by the age-long gnawing of
the waves ? You must ask — Where did the great river
which ran from the west, where Poole Harbour is
now, and probably through what is now the Solent,
depositing brackish water-beds right and left — where,
I say, did it run into the sea ? Where the Straits of
Dover are now ? Or, if not there, where ? What, too,
is become of the land to the Westward, composed of
ancient metamorphic rocks, out of which it ran, and
deposited on what are now the Haggerstone Moors of
Poole, vast beds of grit ? What was the climate on its
banks when it washed down the delicate leaves of broad-
leaved trees, akin to our modern English ones, which are
found in the fine mud-sand strata of Bournemouth ?
When, finally, did it dwindle down to the brook which

vn.] WISDOM BEFORE HAPPINESS. 173

now runs through Wareham town? Was its bed, sea or
dry land, or under an ice sheet, during the long ages of
the glacial epoch ? And if you say — Who is sufficient
for these things ? — Who can answer these questions ? I
answer — Who but you, or your pupils after you, if you
will but try ?

And if any shall reply — And what use if I do try ?
What use, if I do try ? What use if I succeed in
answering every question which you have propounded
to-night ? Shall I be the happier for it ? Shall I be
the wiser ?

My friends, whether you will be the happier for it,
or for any knowledge of physical science, or for any
other knowledge whatsoever, I cannot tell : that lies in
the decision of a Higher Power than I ; and, indeed, to
speak honestly, I do not think that bio-geology or any
other branch of physical science is likely, at first at
least, to make you happy. Neither is the study of your
fellow-men. Neither is religion itself. We were not
sent into the world to be happy, but to be right ; at
least, poor creatures that we are, as right as we can
be ; and we must be content with being right, and not
happy. For I fear, or rather I hope, that most of us
are not capable of carrying out Talleyrand's recipe for
perfect happiness on earth — namely, a hard heart and
a good digestion. Therefore, as our hearts are, happily,
not always hard, and our digestions, unhappily, not
always good, we will be content to be made wise by
physical science, even though we be not made happy.

And we shall be made truly wise if we be made con-
tent ; content, too, not only with what we can under-
stand, but, content with what we do not understand —
the habit of mind which theologians call — and rightly

174 ON BIO-GEOLOGY. [VH.

— faith in God ; the true and solid faith, which comes
of ten out of sadness, and out of doubt, such as bio-geology
may well stir in us at first sight. For our first feeling
will be — I know mine was when I began to look into
these matters — one somewhat of dread and of horror.

Here were all these creatures, animal and vegetable,
competing against each other. And their competition
was so earnest and complete, that it did not mean — as
it does among honest shopkeepers in a civilised country
— I will make a little more money than you; but — I will
crush you, enslave you, exterminate you, eat you up.
"Woe to the weak/' seems to be Nature's watchword.
The Psalmist says : "The righteous shall inherit the
land." If you go to a tropical forest, or, indeed, if you
observe carefully a square acre of any English land,
cultivated or uncultivated, you will find that Nature's
text at first sight looks a very different one. She seems
to say : Not the righteous, but the strong, shall inherit
the land. Plant, insect, bird, what not — Find a weaker
plant, insect, bird, than yourself, and kill it, and take
possession of its little vineyard, and no Naboth's curse
shall follow you: but you shall inherit, and thrive
therein, you, and your children after you, if they will
be only as strong and as cruel as you are. That is
Nature's law : and is it not at first sight a fearful law ?
Internecine competition, ruthless selfishness, so inter-
necine and so ruthless that, as I have wandered in tropic
forests, where this temper is shown more quickly and
fiercely, though not in the least more evilly, than in
our slow and cold temperate one, I have said : Beally
these trees and plants are as wicked as so many human
beings.

Throughout the great republic of the organic world,

vii.] MUTUAL COMPETITION AND MUTUAL HELP. 175

the motto of the majority is, and always has been as far
back as we can see, what it is, and always has been, with
the majority of human beings : " Everyone for himself,
and the devil take the hindmost." Overreaching
tyranny; the temper which fawns, and clings, and plays
the parasite as long as it is down, and when it has
risen, fattens on its patron's blood and life — these, and
the other works of the flesh, are the works of average
plants and animals, as far as they can practise them.
At least, so says at first sight the science of bio-geology;
till the naturalist, if he be also human and humane, is
glad to escape from the confusion and darkness of the
universal battle-field of selfishness into the order and
light of Christmas-tide.

For then there comes to him the thought — And are
these all the facts ? And is this all which the facts
mean ? That mutual competition is one law of Nature,
we see too plainly. But is there not, besides that law,
a law of mutual help ? True it is, as the wise man
has said, that the very hyssop on the wall grows there
because all the forces of the universe could not prevent
its growing. All honour to the hyssop. A brave plant,
it has fought a brave fight, and has its just deserts — as
everything in Nature has — and so has won. But did
all the powers of the universe combine to prevent it
growing ? Is not that a one-sided statement of facts?
Did not all the powers of the universe also combine 1o
make it grow, if only it had valour and worth where-
with to grow ? Did not the rains feed it, the very
mortar in the wall give lime to its roots ? Were not
electricity, gravitation, and I know not what of chemical
and mechanical forces, busy about the little plant, and
every cell of it, kindly and patiently ready to help it

J76 ON BIO-GEOLOGY. [vn.

if it would only help itself ? Surely this is true ; true
of every organic thing, animal and vegetable, and
mineral too, for aught I know: and so we must soften
our sadness at the sight of the universal mutual war by
the sight of an equally universal mutual help.

But more. It is true — too true if you will — that all
things live on each other. But is it not, therefore,
equally true that all things live for each other ? — that
self-sacrifice, and not selfishness, is at the bottom the
law of Nature, as it is the law of Grace; and the law of
bio-geology, as it is the law of all religion and virtue
worthy of the name ? Is it not true that everything
has to help something else to live, whether it knows it
or not ? — that not a plant or an animal can turn again
to its dust without giving food and existence to other
plants, other animals ? — that the very tiger, seemingly
the most useless tyrant of all tyrants, is still of use,,
when, after sending out of the world suddenly, and all
but painlessly, many an animal which would without
him have starved in misery through a diseased old age,
he himself dies, and, in dying, gives, by his own carcase,
the means of life and of enjoyment to a thousandfold
more living creatures than ever his paws destroyed ?

And so, the longer one watches the great struggle
for existence, the more charitable, the more hopeful,
one becomes ; as one sees that, consciously or uncon-
sciously, the law of Nature is, after all self-sacrifice :
unconscious in plants and animals, as far as we know ;.
save always those magnificent instances of true self-
sacrifice shown by the social insects, by ants, bees, and
others, which put to shame by a civilisation truly noble
— why should I not say divine, for God ordained it ? —

vii.] LAW OF SELF-SACRIFICE. 177

the selfishness and barbarism of man. But be that as
it may, in man the law of self-sacrifice — whether un-
conscious or not in the animals— rises into consciousness
just as far as he is a man ; and the crowning lesson of
bio-geology may be, when we have worked it out after
all, the lesson of Christmas-tide — of the infinite self-
sacrifice of God for man; and Nature as well as religion
may say to us :

Ah, could you crush that ever craving lust

For bliss, which kills all bliss, and lose your life,

Your barren unit life, to find again

A thousand times in those for whom you die —

So were you men and women, and should hold

Your rightful rank in God's great universe,

Wherein, in heaven or earth, by will or nature,

Naught lives for self. All, all, from crown to base —

The Lamb, before the world's foundation slain —

The angels, ministers to God's elect —

The sun, who only shines to light the worlds —

The clouds, whose glory is to die in showers —

The fleeting streams, who in their ocean graves

Flee the decay of stagnant self -content —

The oak, ennobled by the shipwright's axe —

The soil, which yields its marrow to the flower —

The flower, which feeds a thousand velvet worms

Born only to be prey to every bird —

All spend themselves on others : and shall man,

Whose twofold being is the mystic knot

Which couples earth with heaven, doubly bound,

As being both worm and angel, to that service

By which both worms and angels hold their life,

Shall he, whose every breath is debt on debt,

Refuse, forsooth, to be what God has made him ?

No ; let him show himself the creatures' Lord

By free-will gift of that self-sacrifice

Which they, perforce, by Nature's laws endure.

178 ON BIO-GEOLOGY. [vii.

My friends, scientific and others, if the study of bio-
geology shall help to teach you this, or anything like
this, I think that though it may not make you more
happy, it may yet make you more wise ; and, therefore,
what is better than being more happy, namely, more
blessed.

THE STUDY OF NATURAL HISTORY
FOR SOLDIERS.

THE STUDY OF NATURAL HISTORY:

GENTLEMEN : When I accepted the honour of lecturing
here, I took for granted that so select an audience
would expect from me not mere amusement, but
somewhat of instruction ; or, if that be too ambitious
a word for me to use, at least some fresh hint — if I
were able to give one — as to how they should fulfil
the ideal of military men in such an age as this.

To touch on military matters, even had I been
conversant with them, seemed to me an impertinence.
I am bound to take for granted that every man knows
his own business best ; and I incline more and more to
the opinion that military men should be left to work
out the problems of their art for themselves, without
the advice or criticism of civilians. But I hold — and I
am sure that you will agree with me — that if the soldier
is to be thus trusted by the nation, and left to himself
to do his own work his own way, he must be educated
in all practical matters as highly as the average of
educated civilians. He must know all that they know,
and his own art besides. Just as a clergyman, being

* A Lecture delivered to the Officers of the Eoyal Artillery,
Woolwich, 1872.

182 THE STUDY OF NATURAL HISTORY. [vin.

a man plus a priest, is bound to be a man, and a good
man, over and above his priesthood, so is the soldier
bound to be a civilian, and a highly- educated civilian,
plus his soldierly qualities and acquirements.

It seemed to me, therefore, that I might, without
impertinence, ask you to consider a branch of know-
ledge which is becoming yearly more and more im-
portant in the eyes of well-educated civilians ; of
which, therefore, the soldier ought at least to know-
something, in order to put him on a par with the
general intelligence of the nation. I do not say that
he is to devote much time to it, or to follow it up into
specialities : but that he ought to be well grounded in
its principles and methods ; that he ought to be aware
of its importance and its usefulness; that so, if he
comes into contact — as he will more and more — with
scientific men, he may understand them, respect them,
befriend them, and be befriended by them in turn;
and how desirable this last result is, I shall tell you
hereafter.

There are those, I doubt not, among my audience
who do not need the advice which I shall presume to
give to-night ; who belong to that fast-increasing class
among officers of whom I have often said — and I have
found scientific men cordially agree with me — that
they are the most modest and the most teachable of
men. But even in their case there can be no harm in
going over deliberately a question of such importance;
in putting it, as it were, into shape ; and insisting on
arguments which may perhaps not have occurred to
some of them.

Let me, in the first place, reassure those — if any
such there be — who may suppose, from the title of my

Tin.] THE HISTOEY OF NATURE. 183

lecture, that I am only going to recommend them to
collect weeds and butterflies, " rats and mice, and such
small deer." Far from it. The honourable title of
Natural History has, and unwisely, been restricted too
much of late years to the mere study of plants and
animals. I desire to restore the words to their original
and proper meaning — the History of Nature ; that is,
of all that is born, and grows in time ; in short, of all
natural objects.

If any one shall say — By that definition you make
not only geology and chemistry branches of natural
history, but meteorology and astronomy likewise — I
cannot deny it. They deal each of them, with realms
oO Nature. Geology is, literally, the natural history of
soils and lands ; chemistry the natural history of
compounds, organic and inorganic; meteorology the
natural history of climates; astronomy the natural
history of planetary and solar bodies. And more, you
cannot now study deeply any branch of what is
popularly called Natural History — that is, plants and
animals — without finding it necessary to learn some-
thing, and more and more as you go deeper, of those
very sciences. As the marvellous interdependence of
all natural objects and forces unfolds itself more and
more, so the once separate sciences, which treated of
different classes of natural objects, are forced to inter-
penetrate, as it were; and to supplement themselves
by knowledge borrowed from each other. Thus — to
give a single instance — no man can now be a first-rate
botanist unless he be also no mean meteorologist, no
mean geologist, and — as Mr. Darwin has shown in his
extraordinary discoveries about the fertilisation of
plants by insects — no mean entomologist likewise.

184 THE STUDY OF NATURAL HISTORY. [vm.

It is difficult, therefore, and indeed somewhat
unwise and unfair, to put any limit to the term
Natural History, save that it shall deal only with
nature and with matter; and shall not pretend — as
some would have it to do just now — to go out of its
own sphere to meddle with moral and spiritual matters.
But, for practical purposes, we may define the natural
history of the causes which have made it what it is, and
filled it with the natural objects which it holds. And
if any one would know how to study the natural
history of any given spot as the history of the
causes which have made it what it is, and filled it
with the natural objects which it holds. And if
any one would know how to study the natural history
of a place, and how to write it, let him read —
and if he has read its delightful pages in youth, read
once again — that hitherto unrivalled little monograph,
White's "Natural History of Selborne;" and let him
then try, by the light of improved science, to do for
any district where he may be stationed, what White
did for Selborne nearly one hundred years ago. Let
him study its plants, its animals, its soils and rocks ;
and last, but not least, its scenery, as the total outcome
of what the soils, and plants, and animals, have made
it. I say, have made it. How far the nature of the
soils, and the rocks will affect the scenery of a district
may be well learnt from a very clever and interesting
little book of Professor Geikie's, on " The Scenery of
Scotland as affected by its Geological Structure."
How far the plants, and trees affect not merely the
general beauty, the richness or barrenness of a
country, but also its very shape ; the rate at which the
hills are destroyed and washed into the lowland; the

¥in.] THE INDUCTIVE HABIT OF MIND. 185

rate at which the seaboard is being removed by the
action of waves — all these are branches of study which
is becoming more and more important.

And even in the study of animals and their effects
on the vegetation, questions of really deep interest will
arise. You will find that certain plants and trees
cannot thrive in a district, while others can, because
the former are browsed down by cattle, or their seeds
eaten by birds, and the latter are not; that certain
seeds are carried in the coats of animals, or wafted
abroad by winds — others are not ; certain trees
destroyed wholesale by insects, while others are not ;
that in a hundred ways the animal and vegetable life of
a district act and react upon each other, and that the
climate, the average temperature, the maximum and
minimum temperatures, the rainfall, act on them, and in
the case of the vegetation, are reacted on again by them.
The diminution of rainfall by the destruction of forests,
its increase by replanting them, and the effect of both
on the healthiness or unhealthiness of a place — as in
the case of the Mauritius, where a once healthy island
has become pestilential, seemingly from the clearing
away of the vegetation on the banks of streams — all
this, though to study it deeply requires a fair know-
ledge of meteorology, and even of a science or two
more, is surely well worth the attention of any
educated man who is put in charge of the health and
lives of human beings.

You will surely agree with me that the habit of
mind required for such a study as this, is the very
same as is required for successful military study. In
fact, I should say that the same intellect which would
develop into a great military man, would develop also

186 THE STUDY OF NATURAL HISTORY. [vni.

into a great naturalist. I say, intellect. The military
man would require — what the naturalist would not —
over and above his intellect, a special force of will, in
order to translate his theories into fact, and make his
campaigns in the field and not merely on paper. But
I am speaking only of the habit of mind required for
study ; of that inductive habit of mind which works,
steadily and by rule, from the known to the unknown ;
that habit of mind of which it has been said : " The
habit of seeing ; the habit of knowing what we see ;
the habit of discerning differences and likenesses ; the
habit of classifying accordingly; the habit of searching
for hypotheses which shall connect and explain those
classified facts; the habit of verifying these hypotheses
by applying them to fresh facts; the habit of throwing
them away bravely if they will not fit ; the habit of
general patience, diligence, accuracy, reverence for
facts for their own sake, and love of truth for its own
sake ; in one word, the habit of reverent and implicit
obedience to the laws of Nature, whatever they may be
— these are not merely intellectual, buF also moral
habits, which will stand men in practical good stead in
every affair of life, and in every question, even the
most awful, which may come before them as rational
and social beings." And specially valuable are they,
surely, to the military man, the very essence of whose
study, to be successful, lies first in continuous and
accurate observation, and then in calm and judicious
arrangement.

Therefore it is that I hold, and hold strongly, that
the study of physical science, far from interfering
with an officer's studies, much less unfitting for them,
must assist him in them, by keeping his mind always

Tin.] THE PHILOSOPHER AND THE SOLDIER. 187

in the very attitude and the very temper which they
require.

If any smile at this theory of mine, let them recol-
lect one curious fact: that perhaps the greatest captain
of the old world was trained by perhaps the greatest
philosopher of the old world — the father of Natural
History ; that Aristotle was the tutor of Alexander of
Macedon. I do not fancy, of course, that Aristotle
taught Alexander any Natural History. But this we
know, that he taught him to use those very faculties
by which Aristotle became a natural historian, and
many things besides ; that he called out in his pupil
somewhat of his own extraordinary powers of observa-
tion, extraordinary powers of arrangement. He
helped to make him a great general: but he helped
to make him more — a great politician, coloniser, dis-
coverer. He instilled into him such a sense of the
importance of Natural History, that Alexander helped
him nobly in his researches; and, if Athenaeus is to be
believed, gave him eight hundred talents towards per-
fecting his history of animals. Surely it is not too much
to say that this close friendship between the natural
philosopher and the soldier has changed the whole
course of civilisation to this very day. Do not consider
me utopian when I tell you, that I should like to see
the study of physical science an integral part of the
curriculum of every military school. I would train the
mind of the lad who was to become hereafter an officer
in the army — and in the navy likewise — by accustoming
him to careful observation of, and sound thought about,
the face of nature; of the commonest objects under his
feet, just as much as the stars above his head; pro-
vided always that he learnt, not at second-hand from

188 THE STUDY OF NATURAL HISTORY. [TIII.

books, but where alone lie can really learn either war
or nature — in the field ; by actual observation, actual
experiment. A laboratory for chemical experiment is
a good thing, it is true, as far as it goes ; but I should
prefer to the laboratory a naturalists' field-club, such
as are prospering now at several of the best public
schools, certain that the boys would get more of sound
inductive habits of mind, as well as more health, man-
liness, and cheerfulness, amid scenes to remember
which will be a joy for ever, than they ever can by
bending over retorts and crucibles, amid smells even
to remember which is a pain for ever.

But I would, whether a field-club existed or not,
require of every young man entering the army or navy
— indeed of every young man entering any liberal pro-
fession whatsoever — a fair knowledge, such as would
enable him to pass an examination, in what the
Germans call Erd-kunde — earth-lore — in that know-
ledge of the face of the earth and of its products, for
which we English have as yet cared so little that we
have actually no English name for it, save the clumsy
and questionable one of physical geography; and, I
am sorry to say, hardly any readable school books
about it, save Keith Johnston's " Physical Atlas " — an
acquaintance with which last I should certainly require
of young men.

It does seem most strange — or rather will seem most
strange a hundred years hence — that we, the nation of
colonists, the nation of sailors, the nation of foreign
commerce, the nation of foreign military stations, the
nation of travellers for travelling's sake, the nation of
which one man here and another there — as Schleiden
Bets forth in his book, " The Plant," in a charming ideal
conversation at the Travellers' Club — has seen and

vin.] IMPORTANCE OF BOTANY TO- SOLDIERS. 189

enjoyed more of the wonders and beauties of this
planet than the men of any nation, not even excepting
the Germans — that this nation, I say, should as yet
have done nothing, or all but nothing, to teach in her
schools a knowledge of that planet, of which she needs
to know more, and can if she will know more, than any
other nation upon it.

As for the practical utility of such studies to a
soldier, I only need, I trust, to hint at it to such an
assembly as this. All must see of what advantage a
rough knowledge of the botany of a district would be
to an officer leading an exploring party, or engaged in
bush warfare. To know what plants are poisonous ;
what plants, too, are eatable — and many more are eat-
able than is usually supposed; what plants yield
oleaginous substances, whether for food or for other
uses ; what plants yield vegetable acids, as preventives
of scurvy; what timbers are available for each of many
different purposes; what will resist wet, salt-water,
and the attacks of insects; what, again, can be used,
at a pinch, for medicine or for styptics — and be sure,
as a wise West Indian doctor once said ta me, that
there is more good medicine wild in the bush than
there is in all the druggists' shops — surely all this is
a knowledge not beneath the notice of any enter-
prising officer, above all of an officer of engineers. I
only ask any one who thinks that I may be in the
right, to glance through the lists of useful vegetable
products given in Lindley's "Vegetable Kingdom" —
a miracle of learning — and see the vast field open still
to a thoughtful and observant man, even while on
service ; and not to forget that such knowledge, if he
should hereafter leave the service and settle, as many
do, in a distant land, may be a solid help to his future

190 THE STUDY OF NATURAL HISTORY. [/in.

prosperity. So strongly do I feel on this matter, that
I should like to see some knowledge at least of
Dr. Oliver's excellent little "First Book of Indian
Botany" required of all officers going to our Indian
Empire : but as that will not be, at least for many
a year to come, I recommend any gentlemen going
to India to get that book, and while away the hours
of the outward voyage by acquiring knowledge which
will be a continual source of interest, and it may
be now and then of profit, to them during their stay
abroad.

And for geology, again. As I do not expect you all,
or perhaps any of you, to become such botanists as
General Monro, whose recent "Monograph of the
Bamboos" is an honour to British botanists, and a
proof of the scientific power which is to be found here
and there among British officers : so I do not expect
you to become such geologists as Sir Roderick
Murchison, or even to add such a grand chapter to the
history of extinct animals as Major Cautley did by his
discoveries in the Sewalik Hills. Nevertheless, you can
learn — and I should earnestly advise you to learn —
geology and mineralogy enough to be of great use to
you in your profession, and of use, too, should you
relinquish your profession hereafter. It must be
profitable for any man, and specially for you, to know
how and where to find good limestone, building stone,
road metal ; it must be good to be able to distinguish
ores and mineral products ; it must be good to know —
as a geologist will usually know, even in a country
which he sees for the first time — where water is likely
to be found, and at what probable depth ; it must be good
to know whether the water is fit for drinking or not,

vni.] SCIENTIFIC AND SANATORY LAWS. 1S1

whether it is unwholesome or merely muddy ; it must
be good to know what spots are likely to be healthy,
and what unhealthy, for encamping. The two last
questions depend, doubtless, on meteorological as well
as geological accidents : but the answers to them will
be most surely found out by the scientific man, because
the facts connected with them are, like all other facts,
determined by natural laws. After what one has heard,
in past years, of barracks built in spots plainly pesti-
lential ; of soldiers encamped in ruined cities, reeking
with the dirt and poison of centuries; of — but it is
not my place to find fault ; all I will say is, that the
wise and humane officer, when once his eyes are opened
to the practical value of physical science, will surely
try to acquaint himself somewhat with those laws of
drainage and of climate, geological, meteorological,
chemical, which influence, often with terrible sudden-
ness and fury, the health of whole armies. He will
not find it beyond his province to ascertain the amount
and period of rainfalls, the maxima of heat and of cold
which his troops may have to endure, and many another
point on which their health and efficiency — nay, their
very life may depend, but which are now too exclu-
sively delegated to the doctor, to whose province they
do not really belong. For cure, I take the liberty of
believing, is the duty of the medical officer; prevention,
that of the military.

Thus much I can say just now — and there is much
more to be said — on the practical uses of the study of
Natural History. But let me remind you, on the othei
side, if Natural History will help you, you in return can
help her ; and would, I doubt not, help her and help
scientific men at home, if once you looked fairly and

192 THE STUDY OF NATURAL HISTOEY. [vin.

steadily at the immense importance of Natural History
— of the knowledge of the " face of the earth." I
believe that all will one day feel, more or less, that to
know the earth on which we live, and the laws of it by
which we live, is a sacred duty to ourselves, to our
children after us, and to all whom we may have to
command and to influence; ay, and a duty to God
likewise. For is it not a duty of common reverence
and faith towards Him, if He has put us into a beautiful
and wonderful place, and given us faculties by which
we can see, and enjoy, and use that place — is it not a
duty of reverence and faith towards Him to use these
faculties, and to learn the lessons which He has laid
open for us ? If you feel that, as I think you all will
some day feel, then you will surely feel likewise that it
will be a good deed — I do not say a necessary duty, but
still a good deed and praiseworthy — to help physical
science forward ; and to add your contributions, how-
ever small, to our general knowledge of the earth. And
how much may be done for science by British officers,
especially on foreign stations, I need not point out. I
know that much has been done, chivalrously and well,
by officers ; and that men of science owe them and
give them hearty thanks for their labours. But I should
like, I confess, to see more done still. I should like to
see every foreign station what one or two highly-
educated officers might easily make it, an advanced post
" of physical science, in regular communication with our
scientific societies at home, sending to them accurate
and methodic details of the natural history of each
district — details -^j-ths of which might seem worthless
in the eyes of the public, but which would all be
precious in the eyes of scientific men, who know that

viii.] WORK ON FOREIGN STATIONS. 193

no fact is really unimportant ; and more, that while
plodding patiently through seemingly unimportant
facts, you may stumble on one of infinite importance,
both scientific and practical. For the student of nature,
gentlemen, if he will be but patient, diligent, metho-
dical, is liable at any moment to the same good fortune
as befell Saul of old, when he went out to seek his
father's asses, and found a kingdom.

There are those, lastly, who have neither time nor
taste for the technicalities and nice distinctions of
formal Natural History; who enjoy Nature, but as
artists or as sportsmen, and not as men of science.
Let them follow their bent freely : but let them not
suppose that in following it they can do nothing to-
wards enlarging our knowledge of Nature, especially
when on foreign stations. So far from it, drawings
ought always to be valuable, whether of plants,
animals, or scenery, provided only they are accurate ;
and the more spirited and full of genius they are, the
more accurate they are certain to be ; for Nature being
alive, a lifeless copy of her is necessarily an untrue
copy. Most thankful to any officer for a mere sight of
sketches will be the closest botanist, who, to his own
sorrow, knows three-fourths of his plants only from
dried specimens; or the closest zoologist, who knows
his animals from skins and bones. And if any one
answers — But I cannot draw. I rejoin, You can at
least photograph. If a young officer, going out to
foreign parts, and knowing nothing at all about
physical science, did me the honour to ask me what
he could do for science, I should tell him — Learn to
photograph ; take photographs of every strange bit of
rock -formation which strikes your fancy, and of every
SO. 0

194 THE STUDY OF NATURAL HISTORY. [vm.

widely-extended view which may give a notion of the
general lie of the country. Append, if you can, a note
or two, saying whether a plain is rich or barren;
whether the rock is sandstone, limestone, granitic,
metamorphic, or volcanic lava ; and if there be more
rocks than one, which of them lies on the other;
and send them to be exhibited at a meeting of the
Geological Society. I doubt not that the learned
gentlemen there will find in your photographs a valu-
able hint or two, for which they will be much obliged.
I learnt, for instance, what seemed to me most valuable
geological lessons from mere glances at drawings — I
believe from photographs — of the Abyssinian ranges
about Magdala.

Or again, let a man, if he knows nothing of botany,
not trouble himself with collecting and drying speci-
mens ; let him simply photograph every strange and
new tree or plant he sees, to give a general notion of
its species, its look ; let him append, where he can, a
photograph of its leafage, flower, fruit ; and send them
to Dr. Hooker, or any distinguished botanist : and he
will find that, though he may know nothing of botany,
he will have pretty certainly increased the knowledge
of those who do know.

The sportsman, again — I mean the sportsman of
that type which seems peculiar to these islands, who
loves toil and danger for their own sakes ; he surely is
a naturalist, ipso facto, though he knows it not. He
has those very habits of keen observation on which all
sound knowledge of nature is based ; and he, if he will
— as he may do without interfering with his sport —
can study the habits of the animals among whom he
spends wholesome and exciting days. You have only

Viii.] THE UNCONSCIOUS NATURALIST. 195

to look over such good old books as Williams's " Wild
Sports of the East/' Campbell's " Old Forest Ranger,"
Lloyd's " Scandinavian Adventures/' and last, but not
least, Waterton's " Wanderings/' to see what valuable
additions to true zoology — the knowledge of live
creatures, not merely dead ones — British sportsmen
have made, and still can make. And as for the
employment of time, which often hangs so heavily on
a soldier's hands, really I am ready to say, if you are
neither men of science, nor draughtsmen, nor sports-
men, why, go and collect beetles. It is not very
dignified, I know, nor exciting : but it will be some-
thing to do. It cannot harm you, if you take, as
beetle-hunters do, an indiarubber sheet to lie on ; and
it will certainly benefit science. Moreover, there will
be a noble humility in the act. You will confess to the
public that you consider yourself only fit to catch
beetles; by which very confession you will prove
yourself fit for much finer things than catching beetles;
and meanwhile, as I said before, you will be at least
out of harm's way. At a foreign barrack once, the
happiest officer I met, because the most regularly
employed, was one who spent his time in collecting
butterflies. He knew nothing about them scientifically
— not even their names. He took them simply for
their wonderful beauty and variety ; and in the hope,
too — in which he was really scientific — that if he care-
fully kept every form which he saw, his collection
might be of use some day to entomologists at home.
A most pleasant gentleman he was ; and, I doubt not,
none the worse soldier for his butterfly catching.
Commendable, also, in my eyes, was another officer —
whom I have not the pleasure of knowing — who, on a

o 2

196 THE STUDY OF NATURAL HISTORY. [vui.

remote foreign station, used wisely to escape from the
temptations of the world into an entirely original and
most pleasant hermitage. For finding — so the story
went — that many of the finest insects kept to the tree-
tops, and never came to ground at all, he used to settle
himself among the boughs of some tree in the tropic
forests, with a long-handled net and plenty of cigars,
and pass his hours in that airy flower-garden, making
dashes every now and then at some splendid monster
as it fluttered round his head. His example need not
be followed by every one ; but it must be allowed that
— at least as long as he was in his tree — he was neither
dawdling, grumbling, spending money, nor otherwise
harming himself, and perhaps his fellow-creatures, from
sheer want of employment.

One word more, and I have done. If I was allowed
to give one special piece of advice to a young officer,
whether of the army or navy, I would say : Respect
scientific men; associate with them; learn from them ;
find them to be, as you will usually, the most pleasant
and instructive of companions — but always respect
them. Allow them chivalrously, you who have an
acknowledgedrank,theiryet unacknowledged rank; and
treat them as all the world will treat them in a higher
and truer state of civilisation. They do not yet wear
the Queen's uniform; they are not yet accepted servants
of the State ; as they will be in some more perfectly
organised and civilised land : but they are soldiers
nevertheless, and good soldiers and chivalrous, fighting
their nation's battle, often on even less pay than you,
and with still less chance of promotion and of fame,
against most real and fatal enemies — against ignorance
of the laws of this planet, and all the miseries which

viii.] HONOUR TO WHOM HONOUR IS DUE. 197

that ignorance begets. Honour them for their work ;
sympathise in it; give them a helping hand in it
whenever you have an opportunity — and what oppor-
tunities you have, I have been trying to sketch for
you to-night ; and more, work at it yourselves when-
ever and wherever you can. Show them that the
spirit which animates them — the hatred of ignorance
and disorder, and of their bestial consequences —
animates you likewise ; show them that the habit of
mind which they value in themselves — the habit of
accurate observation and careful judgment — is your
habit likewise ; show them that you value science,
not merely because it gives better weapons of destruc-
tion and of defence, but because it helps you to
become clear-headed, large-minded, able to take a
just and accurate view of any subject which comes
before you, and to cast away every old prejudice and
every hasty judgment in the face of truth and of
duty : and it will be better for you and for them.

But why ? What need for the soldier and the
man of science to fraternise just now ? This need :
the two classes which will have an increasing, it may
be a preponderating, influence on the fate of the
human race for some time, will be the pupils of
Aristotle and those of Alexander — the men of science
and the soldiers. In spite of all appearances, and all
declamations to the contrary, that is my firm con-
viction. They, and they alone, will be left to rule;
because they alone, each in his own sphere, have
learnt to obey. It is therefore most needful for the
welfare of society that they should pull with, and not
against each other ; that they should understand each
other, respect each other, take counsel with each

198 THE STUDY OF NATURAL HISTORY. [vin.

other, supplement each other's defects, bring out each
other's higher tendencies, counteract each other's
lower ones. The scientific man has something to
learn of you, gentlemen, which I doubt not that he
will learn in good time. You, again, have — as I have
been hinting to you to-night — something to learn of
him, which you, I doubt not, will learn in good time
likewise. Repeat, each of you according to his powers,
the old friendship between Aristotle and Alexander;
and so, from your mutual sympathy and co-operation,
a class of thinkers and actors may yet arise which
can save this nation, and the other civilised nations
of the world, from that of which I had rather not
speak, and wish that I did not think too often and
too earnestly.

I may be a dreamer; and I may consider, in my
turn, as wilder dreamers than myself, certain persons
who fancy that their only business in life is to make
money, the scientific man's only business is to show
them how to make money, and the soldier's only
business to guard their money for them. Be that as it
may, the finest type of civilised man which we are
likely to see for some generations to come, will be
produced by a combination of the truly military with
the truly scientific man. I say — I may be a dreamer ;
but you at least, as well as my scientific friends, will
bear with me ; for my dream is to your honour.

SUPERSTITION.

SUPERSTITION;

HAVING accepted the very great honour of being
allowed to deliver here two lectures, I have chosen as
my subject Superstition and Science. It is with
Superstition that this first lecture will deal.

The subject seems to me especially fit for a clergy-
man ; for he should, more than other men, be able to
avoid trenching on two subjects rightly excluded from
this Institution; namely, Theology — that is, the know-
ledge of God; and Religion — that is, the knowledge of
Duty. If he knows, as he should, what is Theology,
and what is Religion, then he should best know what is
not Theology, and what is not Religion.

For my own part, I entreat you at the outset to
keep in mind that these lectures treat of matters
entirely physical ; which have in reality, and ought to
have in our minds, no more to do with Theology and
Religion than the proposition that theft is wrong, has
to do with the proposition that the three angles of a
triangle are equal to two right angles.

* A Lecture delivered at the Royal Institution, London, 1867.

202 SUPERSTITION. [«.

It is necessary to premise this, because many are of
opinion that superstition is a corruption of religion ;
and though they would agree that as such, " corruptio
optimi pessima," yet they would look on religion as
the state of spiritual health, and superstition as one of
spiritual disease.

Others again, holding the same notion, but not con-
sidering that " corruptio optimi pessima," have been in
all ages somewhat inclined to be merciful to super-
stition, as a child of reverence ; as a mere accidental
misdirection of one of the noblest and most wholesome
faculties of man.

This is not the place wherein to argue with either
of these parties : and I shall simply say that supersti-
tion seems to me altogether a physical affection, as
thoroughly material and corporeal as those of eating
or sleeping, remembering or dreaming.

After this, it will be necessary to define supersti-
tion, in order to have some tolerably clear under-
standing of what we are talking about. I beg leave to
define it as — Fear of the unknown.

Johnson, who was no dialectician, and, moreover,
superstitious enough himself, gives eight different
definitions of the word; which is equivalent to con-
fessing his inability to define it at all :

"1. Unnecessary fear or scruples in religion; ob-
servance of unnecessary and uncommanded rites or
practices ; religion without morality.

"2. False religion; reverence of beings not proper
objects of reverence ; false worship.

"3. Over nicety; exactness too scrupulous."

Eight meanings; which, on the principle that eight
eighths, or indeed eight hundred, do not make one

ix.] WHAT IS SUPERSTITION? 203

whole, may "be considered as no definition. His first
thought, as often happens, is the best — " Unnecessary
fear." But after that he wanders. The root-meaning
of the word is still to seek. But, indeed, the popular
meaning, thanks to popular common sense, will
generally be found to contain in itself the root-
meaning.

Let us go back to the Latin word Superstitio.
Cicero says that the superstitious element consists in
"a certain empty dread of the gods" — a purely
physical affection, if you will remember three things :

1. That dread is in itself a physical affection.

2. That the gods who were dreaded were, with the
vulgar, who alone dreaded them, merely impersona-
tions of the powers of nature.

3. That it was physical injury which these gods
were expected to inflict.

But he himself agrees with this theory of mine;
for he says shortly after, that not only philosophers,
but even the ancient Romans, had separated super-
stition from religion; and that the word was first
applied to those who prayed all day ut liberi sui sibi
superstites essent, might survive them. On the ety-
mology no one will depend who knows the remarkable
absence of any etymological instinct in the ancients,
in consequence of their weak grasp of that sound in-
ductive method which has created modern criticism.
But if it be correct, it is a natural and pathetic form
for superstition to take in the minds of men who saw
their children fade and die; probably the greater
number of them beneath diseases which mankind
could neither comprehend nor cure.

The best exemplification of what the ancients <

204 SUPERSTITION. [ix.

meant by superstition is to be found in the lively
and dramatic words of Aristotle's great pupil Theo-
phrastus.

The superstitious man, according to him, after
having washed his hands with lustral water — that is,
water in which a torch from the altar had been
quenched — goes about with a laurel-leaf in his mouth,
to keep off eyil influences, as the pigs in Devonshire
used, in my youth, to go about with a withe of moun-
tain ash round their necks to keep off the evil eye.
If a weasel crosses his path, he stops, and either
throws three pebbles into the road, or, with the innate
selfishness of fear, lets someone else go before him,
and attract to himself the harm which may ensue. He
has a similar dread of a screech-owl, whom he com-
pliments in the name of its mistress, Pallas Athene.
If he finds a serpent in his house, he sets up an altar
to it. If he pass at a four-cross-way an anointed
stone, he pours oil on it, kneels down, and adores it.
If a rat has nibbled one of his sacks he takes it for a
fearful portent — a superstition which Cicero also men-
tions. He dare not sit on a tomb, because it would
be assisting at his own funeral. He purifies endlessly
his house, saying that Hecate — that is, the moon — has
exercised some malign influence on it; and many
other purifications he observes, of which I shall only
say that they are by their nature plainly, like the last,
meant as preservatives against unseen malarias or con-
tagions, possible or impossible. He assists every
month with his children at the mysteries of the Orphic
priests; and finally, whenever he sees an epileptic
patient, he spits in his own bosom to avert the evil
omen.

ix.] RATIONAL AND IRRATIONAL FEAR. 205

I have quoted, I believe, every fact given by
Theophrastus ; and you will agree, I am sure, that the
moving and inspiring element of such a character is
mere bodily fear of unknown evil. The only super-
stition attributed to him which does not at first sight
seem to have its root in dread is that of the Orphic
mysteries. But of them Miiller says that the Dionusos
whom they worshipped " was an infernal deity, con-
nected with Hades, and was the personification, not
merely of rapturous pleasure, but of a deep sorrow for
the miseries of human life." The Orphic societies of
Greece seem to have been peculiarly ascetic, taking no
animal food save raw flesh from the sacrificed ox of
Dionusos. And Plato speaks of a lower grade of
Orphic priests, Orpheotelestai, " who used to come
before the doors of the rich, and promise, by sacrifices
and expiatory songs, to release them from their own
sins, and those of their forefathers ; " and such would
be but too likely to get a hearing from the man who
was afraid of a weasel or an owl.

Now, this same bodily fear, I verily believe,
will be found at the root of all superstition what-
soever.

But be it so. Fear is a natural passion, and a
wholesome one. Without the instinct of self-pre-
servation, which causes the sea-anemone to contract
its tentacles, or the fish to dash into its hover,
species would be extermined wholesale by involuntary
suicide.

Yes; fear is wholesome enough, like all other
faculties, as long as it is controlled by reason. But
what if the fear be not rational, but irrational ? What
if it be, in plain homely English, blind fear; fear of

206 SUPERSTITION. [ix.

the unknown, simply because it is unknown ? Is it
not likely, then, to be afraid of the wrong object ? to
be hurtful, ruinous to animals as well as to man ? Any
one will confess that, who has ever seen a horse inflict
on himself mortal injuries, in his frantic attempts to
escape from a quite imaginary danger. I have good
reasons for believing that not only animals here and
there, but whole flocks and swarms of them, are often
destroyed, even in the wild state, by mistaken fear ;
by such panics, for instance, as cause a whole herd of
buffaloes to rush over a bluff, and be dashed to pieces.
And remark that this capacity of panic, fear — of
superstition, as I should call it — is greatest in those
animals, the dog and the horse for instance, which
have the most rapid and vivid fancy. Does not the
unlettered Highlander say all that I want to say, when
he attributes to his dog and his horse, on the strength
of these very manifestations of fear, the capacity of
seeing ghosts and fairies before he can see them
himself ?

But blind fear not only causes evil to the coward
himself : it makes him a source of evil to others ; for it
is the cruellest of all human states. It transforms the
man into the likeness of the cat, who, when she is
caught in a trap, or shut up in a room, has too low an
intellect to understand that you wish to release her :
and, in the madness of terror, bites and tears at the
hand which tries to do her good. Yes ; very cruel is
blind fear. When a man dreads he knows not what, he
will do he cares not what. When he dreads desperately,
he will act desperately. When he dreads beyond all
reason, he will behave beyond all reason. He has no
law of guidance left, save the lowest selfishness. No

ix.] PHYSICAL AND SPIRITUAL FEAR. 20?

law of guidance : and yet his intellect, left unguided,
may "be rapid and acute enough to lead him into terrible
follies. Infinitely more imaginative than the lowest
animals, he is for that very reason capable of being
infinitely more foolish, more cowardly, more super-
stitious. He can — what the lower animals, happily for
them, cannot — organise his folly ; erect his superstitions
into a science ; and create a whole mythology out of his
blind fear of the unknown. And when he has done
that — Woe to the weak ! For when he has reduced his
superstition to a science, then he will reduce his cruelty
to a science likewise, and write books like the " Malleus
Maleficarum," and the rest of the witch literature of the
fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries; of
which Mr. Lecky has of late told the world so much,
and told it most faithfully and most fairly.

But, fear of the unknown ? Is not that fear of the
nnseen world ? And is not that fear of the spiritual
world ? Pardon me : a great deal of that fear — all of
it, indeed, which is superstition — is simply not fear
of the spiritual, but of the material ; and of nothing
else.

The spiritual world — I beg you to fix this in your
minds — is not merely an invisible world which may
become visible, but an invisible world which is by its
essence invisible ; a moral world, a world of right and
wrong. And spiritual fear — which is one of the noblest
of all affections, as bodily fear is one of the basest — is,
if properly defined, nothing less or more than the fear
of doing wrong ; of becoming a worse man.

But what has that to do withniere fear of the unseen?
The fancy which conceives the fear is physical, not
spiritual. Think for yourselves. What difference is

208 SUPERSTITION. [ix.

there between a savage's fear of a demon, and a hunter's
fear of a fall ? The hunter sees a fence. He does not
know what is on the other side, but he has seen fences
like it with a great ditch on the other side, and suspects
one here likewise. He has seen horses fall at such, and
men hurt thereby. He pictures to himself his horse
falling at that fence, himself rolling in the ditch, with
possibly a broken limb ; and he recoils from the picture
he himself has made; and perhaps with very good
reason. His picture may have its counterpart in fact ;
and he may break his leg. But his picture, like the
previous pictures from which it was compounded, is
simply a physical impression on the brain, just as much
as those in dreams.

Now, does the fact of the ditch, the fall, and the
broken leg, being unseen and unknown, make them a
spiritual ditch, a spiritual fall, a spiritual broken leg ?
And does the fact of the demon and his doings, being
as yet unseen and unknown, make them spiritual, or
the harm that he may do, a spiritual harm ? What
does the savage fear ? Lest the demon should appear ;
that is, become obvious to his physical senses, and pro-
duce an unpleasant physical effect on them. He fears
lest the fiend should entice him into the bog, break the
hand-bridge over the brook, turn into a horse and ride
away with him, or jump out from behind a tree and
wring his neck — tolerably hard physical facts, all of
them ; the children of physical fancy, regarded with
physical dread. Even if the superstition proved true ;
even if the demon did appear ; even if he wrung the
traveller's neck in sound earnest, there would be no
more spiritual agency or phenomenon in the whole
tragedy than there is in the parlour-table, when

ii.l FEAR, THE CAUSE OF SUPERSTITION. 209

spiritual something's make spiritual raps upon spiritual
wood ; and human beings, who are really spirits — and
would to heaven they would remember that fact, and
what it means — believe that anything has happened
beyond a clumsy juggler's trick.

You demur ? Do you not see that the demon, by the
mere fact of having produced physical consequences,
would have become himself a physical agent, a member
of physical Nature, and therefore to be explained, he
and his doings, by physical laws ? If you do not see
that conclusion at first sight, think over it till you do.

It may seem to some that I have founded my theory
on a very narrow basis ; that I am building up an
inverted pyramid; or that, considering the number-
less, complex, fantastic shapes which superstition has
assumed, bodily fear is too simple to explain them all.

But if those persons will think a second time, they
must agree that my base is as broad as the phenomena
which it explains ; for every man is capable of fear.
And they will see, too, that the cause of superstition
must be something like fear, which is common to all
men : for all, at least as children, are capable of super-
stition ; and that it must be something which, like fear,
is of a most simple, rudimentary, barbaric kind; for
the lowest savage, of whatever he is not capable, is still
superstitious, often to a very ugly degree. Superstition
seems, indeed, to be, next to the making of stone-
weapons, the earliest method of asserting his supe-
riority to the brutes which has occurred to that utterly
abnormal and fantastic lusus naturce called man.

Now let us put ourselves awhile, as far as we can,
in the place of that same savage ; and try whether my
theory will not justify itself ; whether or not super-

210 SUPERSTITION". [ix.

stition, with all its vagaries, may have been, indeed
must have been, the result of that ignorance and fear
which he carried about with him, every time he prowled
for food through the primeval forest.

A savage's first division of nature would be, I should
say, into things which he can eat and things which
can eat him : including, of course, his most formidable
enemy, and most savoury food — his fellow-man. In
finding out what he can eat, we must remember, he
will have gone through much experience which will
have inspired him with a serious respect for the hidden
wrath of nature ; like those Himalayan folk, of whom
Hooker says, that as they know every poisonous plant,
they must have tried them all — not always with
impunity.

So he gets at a third class of objects — things which
he cannot eat, and which will not eat him ; but will only
do him harm, as it seems to him, out of pure malice,
like poisonous plants and serpents. There are natural
accidents, too, which fall into the same category,
stones, floods, fires, avalanches. They hurt him or kill
him, surely for ends of their own. If a rock falls from
the cliff above him, what more natural than to suppose
that there is some giant up there who threw it at him ?
If he had been up there, and strong enough, and had
seen a man walking underneath, he would certainly
have thrown the stone at him and killed him. For
first, he might have eaten the man after ; and even if
he were not hungry, the man might have done him a
mischief ; and it was prudent to prevent that by doing
him a mischief first. Besides, 'the man might have a
wife ; and if he killed the man, then the wife would,
by a very ancient law common to man and animals,

ix.] THE TERRORS OF NATURE. 211

become the prize of the victor. Such is the natural
man, the carnal man, the soulish man, the avOpconos
^VXIKOS of St. Paul, with five tolerably acute senses,
which are ruled by five very acute animal passions —
hunger, sex, rage, vanity, fear. It is with the working
of the last passion, fear, that this lecture has to do.

So the savage concludes that there must be a giant
living in the cliff, who threw stones at him, with evil
intent ; and he concludes in like wise concerning most
other natural phenomena. There is something in them
which will hurt him, and therefore likes to hurt him ;
and if he cannot destroy them, and so deliver himself,
his fear of them grows quite boundless. There are
hundreds of natural objects on which he learns to look
with the same eyes as the little boys of Teneriffe look
on the useless and poisonous Euphorbia canariensis. It
is to them — according to Mr. Piazzi Smyth — a demon
who would kill them, if it could only run after them j
but as it cannot, they shout Spanish curses at it,
and pelt it with volleys of stones, " screeching with
elfin joy, and using worse names than ever, when the
poisonous milk spurts out from its bruised stalks."

And if such be the attitude of the uneducated man
towards the permanent terrors of nature, what will it
be towards those which are sudden and seemingly
capricious ? — towards storms, earthquakes, floods,
blights, pestilences ? We know too well what it has
been — one of blind, and therefore often cruel, fear.
How could it be otherwise ? Was Theophrastus's
superstitious man so very foolish for pouring oil on
every round stone ? I think there was a great deal to
be said for him. This worship of Baetyli was rational
enough. They were aerolites, fallen from heaven.

p 2

212 SUPERSTITION. [ix.

Was it not as well to be civil to such messengers from
above ? — to testify by homage to them due awe of the
being who had thrown them at men, and who though
he had missed his shot that time might not miss it the
next ? I think if we, knowing nothing of either gun-
powder, astronomy, or Christianity, saw an Armstrong
bolt fall within five miles of London, we should be
inclined to be very respectful to it indeed. So the
aerolites, or glacial boulders, or polished stone
weapons of an extinct race, which looked like
aerolites, were the children of Ouranos the heaven,
and had souls in them. One, by one of those strange
transformations in which the logic of unreason in-
dulges, the image of Diana of the Ephesians, which
fell down from Jupiter ; another was the Ancile, the
holy shield which fell from the same place in the days
of Numa Pompilius, and was the guardian genius of
Borne ; and several more became notable for ages.

Why not ? The uneducated man of genius, un-
acquainted alike with metaphysics and with biology,
sees, like a child, a personality in every strange and
sharply- defined object. A cloud like an angel may be
an angel ; a bit of crooked root like a man may be a
man turned into wood — perhaps to be turned back
again at its own will. An erratic block has arrived
where it is by strange unknown means. Is not that an
evidence of its personality ? Either it has flown hither
itself, or some one has thrown it. In the former case,
it has life, and is proportionally formidable ; in the
latter, he who had thrown it is formidable.

I know two erratic blocks of porphyry — I believe
there are three — in Cornwall, lying one on serpentine,
one, I think, on slate, which — so I was always informed

ix.] THE SAVAGE A CHILD. 213

as a boy — were the stones which St. Kevern threw
after St. Just when the latter stole his host's chalice
and paten, and ran away with them to the Land's End.
Why not ? Before we knew anything about the action
of icebergs and glaciers, that is, until the last eighty
years, that was as good a story as any other ; while
how lifelike these boulders are., let a great poet
testify ; for the fact has not escaped the delicate eye
of Wordsworth :

As a huge stone is sometimes seen to lie
Couched on the bald top of an eminence ;
Wonder to all who do the same espy,
By what means it could thither come, and whence,
So that it seems a thing endued with sense;
Like a sea-beast crawled forth, that on a shelf
Of rock or sand reposeth, there to sun itself.

To the civilised poet, the fancy becomes a beautiful
simile ; to a savage poet, it would have become a ma-
terial and a very formidable fact. He stands in the
valley, and looks up at the boulder on the far-off fells.
He is puzzled by it. He fears it. At last he makes
up his mind. It is alive. As the shadows move over
it, he sees it move. May it not sleep there all day, and
prowl for prey all night ? He had been always afraid
of going up those fells ; now he will never go. There
is a monster there.

Childish enough, no doubt. But remember that the
savage is always a child. So, indeed, are millions, as
well clothed, housed, and policed as ourselves — children
from the cradle to the grave. But of them I do not
talk ; because, happily for the world, their childishness
is so overlaid by the result of other men's manhood ;

214 SUPERSTITION. [ix.

by an atmosphere of civilisation and Christianity which
they have accepted at second-hand as the conclusions
of minds wiser than their own, that they do all manner
of reasonable things for bad reasons, or for no reason
at all, save the passion of imitation. Not in them, but
in the savage, can we see man as he is by nature, the
puppet of his senses and his passions, the natural slave
of his own fears.

But has the savage no other faculties, save his five
senses and five passions ? I do not say that. I should
be most unphilosophical if I said it ; for the history of
mankind proves that he has infinitely more in him
than that. Yes : but in him that infinite more, which
is not only the noblest part of humanity, but, it may
be, humanity itself, is not to be counted as one of the
roots of superstition. For in the savage man, in whom
superstition certainly originates, that infinite more is
still merely in him ; inside him; a faculty : but not yet
a fact. It has not come out of him into consciousness,
purpose, and act ; and is to be treated as non-existent :
while what has come out, his passions and senses, is
enough to explain all the vagaries of superstition ; a
vera causa for all its phenomena. And if we seem to
have found a sufficient explanation already, it is un-
philosophical to look farther, at least till we have tried
whether our explanation fits the facts.

Nevertheless, there is another faculty in the savage,
to which I have already alluded, common to him and
to at least the higher vertebrates — fancy ; the power
of reproducing internal images of external objects,
whether in its waking form of physical memory — if,
indeed, all memory be not physical — or in its sleeping
form of dreaming. Upon this last, which has played

ix.] POWER OF DREAMS. 215

so very important a part in superstition in all ages, I
beg you to think a moment. Recollect your own
dreams during childhood ; and recollect again that the
savage is always a child. Recollect how difficult it was
for you in childhood, how difficult it must be always for
the savage, to decide whether dreams are phantasms or
realities. To the savage, I doubt not, the food he eats,
the foes he grapples with, in dreams, are as real as any
waking impressions. But, moreover, these dreams will
be very often, as children's dreams are wont to be, of a
painful and terrible kind. Perhaps they will be always
painful ; perhaps his dull brain will never dream, save
under the influence of indigestion, or hunger, or an
uncomfortable attitude. And so, in addition to his
waking experience of the terrors of nature, he will
have a whole dream-experience besides, of a still more
terrific kind. He walks by day past a black cavern
mouth, and thinks, with a shudder — Something ugly
may live in that ugly hole : what if it j uinped out
upon me? He broods over the thought with the
intensity of a narrow and unoccupied mind; and a
few nights after, he has eaten — but let us draw a veil
before the larder of a savage — his chin is pinned down
on his chest, a slight congestion of the brain comes on ;
and behold he finds himself again at that cavern's
mouth, and something ugly does jump out upon him :
and the cavern is a haunted spot henceforth to him
and to all his tribe. It is in vain that his family tell
him that he has been lying asleep at home all the
while. He has the evidence of his senses to prove the
contrary. He must have got out of himself, and gone
into the woods. When we remember that certain wise
Greek philosophers could find no better explanation

216 SUPERSTITION. [ix.

of dreaming than that the soul left the body, and
wandered free, we cannot condemn the savage for his
theory.

Now, I submit that in these simple facts we have a
group of " true causes " which are the roots of all the
superstitions of the world.

And if any one shall complain that I am talking
materialism : I shall answer, that I am doing exactly
the opposite. I am trying to eliminate and get rid of
that which is material, animal, and base ; in order that
that which is truly spiritual may stand out, distinct
and clear, in its divine and eternal beauty.

To explain, and at the same time, as I think, to
verify my hypothesis, let me give you an example —
fictitious, it is true, but probable fact nevertheless ;
because it is patched up of many fragments of actual
fact : and let us see how, in following it out, we
shall pass through almost every possible form of
superstition.

Suppose a great hollow tree, in which the formidable
wasps of the tropics have built for ages. The average
savage hurries past the spot in mere bodily fear ; for
if they come out against him, they will sting him to
death ; till at last there comes by a savage wiser than
the rest, with more observation, reflection, imagination,
independence of will — the genius of his tribe.

The awful shade of the great tree, added to his
terror of the wasps, weighs on him, and excites his
brain. Perhaps, too, he has had a wife or a child stung
to death by these same wasps. These wasps, so small,
yet so wise, far wiser than he : they fly, and they
sting. Ah, if he could fly and sting ; how he would
kill and eat, and live right merrily. They build great

fx.] THE WASP-KING. 217

towns ; they rob far and wide ; they never quarrel with
each other : they must have some one to teach them,
to lead them — they must have a king. And so he
gets the fancy of a Wasp-King ; as the western Irish
still believe in the Master Otter ; as the Red Men
believe in the King of the Buffaloes, and find the bones
of his ancestors in the Mammoth remains of Big-bone
Lick ; as the Philistines of Ekron — to quote a notorious
instance — actually worshipped Baal-zebub, lord of the
flies.

If they have a king, he must be inside that tree, of
course. If he, the savage, were a king, he would not
work for his bread, but sit at home and make others
feed him ; and so, no doubt, does the wasp- king.

And when he goes home he will brood over this
wonderful discovery of the wasp-king ; till, like a child,
he can think of nothing else. He will go to the tree,
and watch for him to come out. The wasps will get
accustomed to his motionless figure, and leave him
unhurt; till the new fancy will rise in his mind that
he is a favourite of this wasp-king : and at last he will
find himself grovelling before the tree, saying — " Oh
great wasp-king, pity me, and tell your children not
to sting me, and I will bring you honey, and fruit, and
flowers to eat, and I will flatter you, and worship you,
and you shall be my king."

And then he would gradually boast of his discovery ;
of the new mysterious bond bet ween him and the wasp-
king ; and his tribe would believe him, and fear him ;
and fear him still more when he began to say, as he
surely would, not merely — " I can ask the wasp-king,
and he will tell his children not to sting you:" but —
" I can ask the wasp-king, and he will send his children,

218 SUPERSTITION, [ix.

and sting you all to death." Vanity and ambition will
have prompted the threat : but it will not be altogether
a lie. The man will more than half believe his own
words; he will quite believe them when he has repeated
them a dozen times.

And so he will become a great man, and a king,
under the protection of the king of the wasps ; and he
will become, and it may be his children after him,
priest of the wasp-king, who will be their fetish, and
the fetish of their tribe.

And they will prosper, under the protection of the
wasp-king. The wasp will become their moral ideal,
whose virtues they must copy. The new chief will
preach to them wild eloquent words. They must sting
like wasps, revenge like wasps, hold altogether like
wasps, build like wasps, work hard like wasps, rob like
wasps ; then, like the wasps, they will be the terror of
all around, and kill and eat all their enemies. Soon
they will call themselves The Wasps. They will boast
that their king's father or grandfather, and soon that
the ancestor of the whole tribe was an actual wasp ;
and the wasp will become at once their eponym hero,
their deity, their ideal, their civiliser ; who has taught
them to build a kraal of huts, as he taught his children
to build a hive.

Now, if there should come to any thinking man of
this tribe, at this epoch, the new thought — Who made
the world ? he will be sorely puzzled. The conception
of a world has never crossed his mind before. He never
pictured to himself anything beyond the nearest ridge
of mountains; and as for a Maker, that will be a greater
puzzle still. What makers or builders more cunning-
than those wasps of whom his foolish head is full ? Of

ix.] WORSHIP FROM FEAR. 219

course, lie sees it now. A Wasp made the world ; which
to him entirely new guess might become an integral
part of his tribe's creed. That would be their cos-
mogony. And if, a generation or two after, another
savage genius should guess that the world was a globe
hanging in the heavens, he would, if he had imagination
enough to take the thought in at all, put it to himself
in a form suited to his previous knowledge and concep-
tions. It would seem to him that The Wasp flew about
the skies with the world in his mouth, as he carries a
bluebottle fly ; and that would be the astronomy of his
tribe henceforth. Absurd enough : but — as every man
who is acquainted with old mythical cosmogonies must
know — no more absurd than twenty similar guesses on
record. Try to imagine the gradual genesis of such
myths as the Egyptian scaraba3us and egg, or theHindoo-
theory that the world stood on an elephant, the elephant
on a tortoise, the tortoise on that infinite note of in-
terrogation which, as some one expresses it, underlies
all physical speculations, and judge : must they not
have arisen in some such fashion as that which I have
pointed out ?

This, I say, would be the culminating point of the
wasp -worship , which had sprung up out of bodily fear
of being stung.

But times might come for it in which it would go
through various changes, through which every super-
stition in the world, I suppose, has passed or is doomed
to pass.

The wasp-men might be conquered, and possibly
eaten, by a stronger tribe than themselves. What
would be the result ? They would fight valiantly at
first, like wasps. But what if they began to fail ?

220 SUPERSTITION. [ix.

Was not the wasp-king angry with them ? Had not
he deserted them ? He must be appeased ; he must
have his revenge. They would take a captive, and
offer him to the wasps. So did a North American
tribe, in their need, some forty years ago ; when,
because their maize-crops failed, they roasted alive a
captive girl, cut her to pieces, and sowed her with
their corn. I would not tell the story, for the horror
of it, did it not bear with such fearful force on my
argument. What were those Eed Men thinking of ?
What chain of misreasoning had they in their heads
when they hit on that as a device for making the crops
grow ? Who can tell ? Who can make the crooked
straight, or number that which is wanting ? As said
Solomon of old, so must we — "The foolishness of fools
is folly." One thing only we can say of them, that
they were horribly afraid of famine, and took that
means of ridding themselves of their fear.

But what if the wasp tribe had no captives ? They
would offer slaves. What if the agony and death of
slaves did not appease the wasps ? They would offer
their fairest, their dearest, their sons and their
daughters, to the wasps ; as the Carthaginians, in like
strait, offered in one day 200 noble boys to Moloch,
the volcano-god, whose worship they had brought out
of Syria ; whose original meaning they had probably
forgotten ; of whom they only knew that he was a
dark and devouring being, who must be appeased with
the burning bodies of their sons and daughters. And
so the veil of fancy would be lifted again, and the
whole superstition stand forth revealed as the mere
offspring of bodily fear.

But more : the survivors of the conquest might,

ix.J FETISH WOKSHIP. 221

perhaps, escape, and carry their wasp-fetish into a new
land. But if they became poor and weakly, their
brains and imagination, degenerating with their bodies,
would degrade their wasp-worship till they knew not
what it meant. Away from the sacred tree, in a
country the wasps of which were not so large or for-
midable, they would require a remembrancer of the
wasp-king ; and they would make one — a wasp of wood,
or what not. After a while, according to that strange
law of fancy, the root of all idolatry, which you may
see at work in every child who plays with a doll, the
symbol would become identified with the thing
symbolised ; they would invest the wooden wasp with
all the terrible attributes which had belonged to the
live wasps of the tree ; and after a few centuries, when
all remembrance of the tree, the wasp-prophet and
chieftain, and his descent from the divine wasp — ay,
even of their defeat and flight — had vanished from
their songs and legends, they would be found bowing
down in fear and trembling to a little ancient wooden
wasp, which came from they knew not whence, and
meant they knew not what, save that it was a very
" old f etish," a " great medicine," or some such other
formula for expressing their own ignorance and dread.
Just so do the half-savage natives of Thibet, and the
Irishwomen of Kerry, by a strange coincidence — unless
the ancient Irish were Buddhists, like the Himalayans
— tie just the same scraps of rag on the bushes round
just the same holy wells, as do the Negros of Central
Africa upon their " Devil's Trees ; " they know not
why, save that their ancestors did it, and it is a charm
against ill-luck and danger.

And the sacred tree ? That, too, might undergo a

232 SUPERSTITION. [ix.

metamorpliosis in the minds of men. The conquerors
would see their aboriginal slaves of the old race still
haunting the tree, making stealthy offerings to- it by
night: and they would ask the reason. But they
would not be told. The secret would be guarded ; such
secrets were guarded, in Greece, in Italy, in medieval
France, by the superstitious awe, the cunning, even
the hidden self-conceit, of the conquered race. Then
the conquerors would wish to imitate their own slaves.
They might be in the right. There might be some-
thing magical, uncanny, in the hollow tree, which
might hurt them ; might be jealous of them as intruders.
They, too, would invest the place with sacred awe. If
they were gloomy, like the Teutonic conquerors of
Europe and the Arabian conquerors of the East, they
would invest it with unseen terrors. They would say,
like them, a devil lives in the tree. If they were of a
sunny temper, like the Hellenes, they would invest it
with unseen graces. What a noble tree ! What a fair
fountain hard by its roots ! Surely some fair and
graceful being must dwell therein, and come out to
bathe by night in that clear wave. What meant the
fruit, the flowers, the honey, which the slaves left there
by night ? Pure food for some pure nymph. The
wasp-gods would be forgotten ; probably smoked out
as sacrilegious intruders. The lucky seer or poet who
struck out the fancy would soon find imitators ; and it
would become, after a while, a common and popular
superstition that Hamadryads haunted the hollow f orast
trees, Naiads the wells, and Oreads the lawns. Some-
what thus, I presume, did the more cheerful Hellenic
myths displace the darker superstitions of the Pelasgis
and those rude Arcadian tribes who offered, even as

ix.] OKIGIN OF SORCERY. 223

late as the Roman Empire, human sacrifices to gods
•whose original names were forgotten.

But even the cultus of nymphs would be defiled
after awhile by a darker element. However fair, they
might be capricious and revengeful, like other women.
Why not ? And soon, men going out into the forest
would be missed for awhile. They had eaten narcotic
berries, got sun-strokes, wandered till they lost their
wits. At all events, their wits were gone. Who had
done it ? Who but the nymphs ? The men had seen
something they should not have seen ; done something
they would not have done; and the nymphs had
punished the unconscious rudeness by that frenzy.
Fear, everywhere fear, of Nature — the spotted panther
as some one calls her, as fair as cruel, as playful as
treacherous. Always fear of Nature, till a Divine light
arise, and show men that they are not the puppets of
Nature, but her lords ; and that they are to fear God,
and fear naught else.

And so ends my true myth of the wasp-tree. No,
it need not end there ; it may develop into a yet
darker and more hideous form of superstition, which
Europe has often seen ; which is common now among
the Negros ;* which we may hope, will soon be exter-
minated.

This might happen. For it, or something like it,
has happened too many times already.

That to the ancient women who still kept up the
irrational remnant of the wasp-worship, beneath the
sacred tree, other women might resort ; not merely

* For an account of Sorcery and Fetishism among the African
Negros, see Barton's "Lake Regions of Central Africa," vol. ii.
pp. 341-60.

224 SUPERSTITION. [ix.

from curiosity, or an excited imagination, but from
jealousy and revenge. Oppressed, as woman has
always been under the reign of brute force ; beaten,
outraged, deserted, at best married against her will,
she has too often gone for comfort and help — and
those of the very darkest kind — to the works of
darkness ; and there never were wanting — there are
not wanting, even now, in remote parts of these isles
— wicked old women who would, by help of the old
superstitions, do for her what she wished. Soon
would follow mysterious deaths of rivals, of husbands,
of babes ; then rumours of dark rites connected
with the sacred tree, with poison, with the wasp and
his sting, with human sacrifices; lies mingled with
truth, more and more confused and frantic, the more
they were misinvestigated by men mad with fear : till
there would arise one of those witch-manias, which
are too common still among the African Negros,
which were too common of old among the men of our
race.

I say, among the men. To comprehend a witch-
mania, you must look at it as — what the witch-litera-
ture confesses it unblushingly to be — man's dread of
Nature excited to its highest form, as dread of
woman.

She is to the barbarous man — she should be more
and more to the civilised man — not only the most
beautiful and precious, but the most wonderful and
mysterious of all natural objects, if it be only as the
author of his physical being. She is to the savage a
miracle to be alternately adored and dreaded. He
dreads her more delicate nervous organisation, which
often takes shapes to him demoniacal and miraculous ;

IX.] THE WITCH MANIA. 225

her quicker instincts, her readier wit, which seem to
him to have in them somewhat prophetic and super-
human, which entangled him as in an invisible net,
and rule him against his will. He dreads her very
tongue, more crushing than his heaviest club, more
keen than his poisoned arrows. He dreads those
habits of secrecy and falsehood, the weapons of the
weak, to which savage and degraded woman always
has recourse. He dreads the very medicinal skill
which she has learnt to exercise, as nurse, comforter,
and slave. He dreads those secret ceremonies, those
mysterious initiations which no man may witness,
which he has permitted to her in all ages, in so many
— if not all — barbarous and semi-barbarous races,
whether Negro, American, Syrian, Greek, or Roman,
as a homage to the mysterious importance of her who
brings him into the world. If she turns against him
— she, with all her unknown powers, she who is the
sharer of his deepest secrets, who prepares his very
food day by day — what harm can she not, may she
not, do ? And that she has good reason to turn
against him, he knows too well. What deliverance is
there from this mysterious house-fiend, save brute
force ? Terror, torture, murder, must be the order of
the day. Woman must be crushed, at all price, by the
blind fear of the man.

I shall say no more. I shall draw a veil, for very
pity and shame, over the most important and most
significant facts of this, the most hideous of all human
follies. I have, I think, given you hints enough to
show that it, like all other superstitions, is the child —
the last born and the ugliest child — of blind dread of
the unknown.

SC. Q

SCIENCE.

SCIENCE/

I SAID, that Superstition was the child of Fear, and
Fear the child of Ignorance ; and you might expect me
to say antithetically, that Science was the child of
Courage, and Courage the child of Knowledge.

But these genealogies — like most metaphors — do
not fit exactly, as you may see for yourselves.

If fear be the child of ignorance, ignorance is also
the child of fear ; the two react on, and produce each
other. The more men dread Nature, the less they
wish to know about her. Why pry into her awful
secrets ? It is dangerous ; perhaps impious. She says
to them, as in the Egyptian temple of old — "I am
Isis, and my veil no mortal yet hath lifted." And
why should they try or wish to lift it ? If she will
leave them in peace, they will leave her in peace. It
is enough that she does not destroy them. So as
ignorance bred fear, fear breeds fresh and willing
ignorance.

And courage ? We may say, and truly, that courage
is the child of knowledge. But we may say as truly,
* A Lecture delivered at the Royal Institution.

230 SCIENCE. [x.

tliat knowledge is the child of courage. Those Egyp-
tian priests in the temple of Isis would have told you
that knowledge was the child of mystery, of special
illumination, of reverence, and what not; hiding under
grand words their purpose of keeping the masses
ignorant, that they might be their slaves. Eeverence ?
I will yield to none in reverence for reverence. I will
all but agree with the wise man who said that reverence
is the root of all virtues. But which child reverences
his father most ? He who conies joyfully and trust-
fully to meet him, that he may learn his father's
mind, and do his will ; or he who at his father's
coming runs away and hides, lest he should be beaten
for he knows not what? There is a scientific reverence,
a reverence of courage, which is surely one of the
highest forms of reverence. That, namely, which so
reveres every fact, that it dare not overlook or falsify
it, seem it never so minute ; which feels that because
it is a fact it cannot be minute, cannot be unimportant;
that it must be a fact of God ; a message from God ;
a voice of God, as Bacon has it, revealed in things ;
and which therefore, just because it stands in solemn
awe of such paltry facts as the Scolopax feather in a
snipe's pinion, or the jagged leaves which appear
capriciously in certain honeysuckles, believes that
there is likely to be some deep and wide secret under-
lying them, which is worth years of thought to solve.
That is reverence; a reverence which is growing,
thank God, more and more common ; which will
produce, as it grows more common still, fruit which
generations yet unborn shall bless.

But as for that other reverence, which shuts its eyes
and ears in pious awe — what is it but cowardice decked

x.J REVEKEXCE AND COWARDICE. 231

out in state robes, putting on the sacred TJrim and
Thummim, not that men may ask counsel of the Deity,
but that they may not ? What is it but cowardice,
very pitiable when unmasked ; and what is its child
but ignorance as pitiable, which would be ludicrous
were it not so injurious ? If a man comes up to Nature
as to a parrot or a monkey, with this prevailing thought
in his head — Will it bite me ? — will he not be pretty
certain to make up his mind that it may bite him, and
had therefore best be left alone ? It is only the man
of courage — few and far between — who will stand the
chance of a first bite, in the hope of teaching the parrot
to talk, or the monkey to fire off a gun. And it is only
the man of courage — few and far between — who will
stand the chance of a first bite from Nature, which
may kill him for aught he knows — for her teeth, though
clumsy, are very strong — in order that he may tame
her and break her in to his use by the very same
method by which that admirable inductive philosopher,
Mr. Rarey, used to break in his horses ; first, by not
being afraid of them ; and next, by trying to find out
what they were thinking of. But after all, as with
animals, so with Nature ; cowardice is dangerous. The
surest method of getting bitten by an animal is to be
afraid of it; and the surest method of being injured by
Nature is to be afraid of it. Only as far as we under-
stand Nature are we safe from it ; and those who in
any age counsel mankind not to pry into the secrets of
the universe, counsel them not to provide for their
own life and well-being, or for their children after
them.

But how few there have been in any age who have
not been afraid of Nature. How few have set them-

232 SCIENCE. [x.

selves, like Rarey, to tame her by finding out what she
is thinking of. The mass are glad to have the results
of science, as they are to buy Mr. Rarey's horses after
they are tamed; but for want of courage or of wit,
they had rather leave the taming process to someone
else. And therefore we may say that what knowledge
of Nature we have — and we have very little — we owe
to the courage of those men — and they have been very
few — who have been inspired to face Nature boldly ;
and say — or, what is better, act as if they were saying
— " I find something in me which I do not find in you;
which gives me the hope that I can grow to understand
you, though you may not understand me ; that I may
become your master, and not as now, you mine. And
if not, I will know ; or die in the search."

It is to those men, the few and far between, in a
very few ages and very few countries, who have thus
risen in rebellion against Nature, and looked it in the
face with an un quailing glance, that we owe what we
call Physical Science.

There have been four races — or rather a very few
men of each four races — who have faced Nature after
this gallant wise.

First, the old Jews. I speak of them, be it re-
membered, exclusively from an historical, and not a
religious point of view.

These people, at a very remote epoch, emerged from
a country highly civilised, but sunk in the supersti-
tions of nature-worship. They invaded and mingled
with tribes whose superstitions were even more de-
based, silly, and foul than those of the Egyptians from
whom they escaped. Their own masses were for cen-
turies given up to nature-worship. Now, among those

x.] JEWISH SAGES AND NATURE-WOESHIP. 233

Jews arose men — a very few — sages — prophets — call
them what you will, the men were inspired heroes and
philosophers — who assumed towards nature an attitude
utterly different from the rest of their countrymen and
the rest of the then world ; who denounced superstition
and the dread of nature as the parent of all manner of
vice and misery ; who for themselves said boldly that
they discerned in the universe an order, a unity, a per-
manence of law, which gave them courage instead of
fear. They found delight and not dread in the thought
that the universe obeyed a law which could not be
broken ; that all things continued to that day accord-
ing to a certain ordinance. They took a view of Nature
totally new in that age; healthy, human, cheerful,
loving, trustful, and yet reverent — identical with that
which happily is beginning to prevail in our own day.
They defied those very volcanic and meteoric phe-
nomena of their land, to which their countrymen were
slaying their own children in the clefts of the rocks,
and, like Theophrastus's superstitious man, pouring
their drink-offerings on the smooth stones of the valley;
and declared that, for their part, they would not fear,
though the earth was moved, and though the hills were
carried into the midst of the sea; though the waters
raged and swelled, and the mountains shook at the
tempest.

The fact is indisputable. And you must pardon me
if I express my belief that these men, if they had felt
it their business to found a school of inductive physical
science, would, owing to that temper of mind, have
achieved a very signal success. I ground that opinion
on the remarkable, but equally indisputable fact, that
no nation has ever succeeded in perpetuating a school

234 SCIENCE. [x.

of inductive physical science, save those whose minds
have been saturatedwith this sameviewof Nature, which
they have — as an historic fact — slowly but thoroughly
learnt from the writings of these Jewish sages.

Such is the fact. The founders of inductive phy-
sical science were not the Jews ; but first the Chal-
dasans, next the Greeks, next their pupils the Romans
— or rather a few sages among each race. But what
success had they? The Chaldasau astronomers
made a few discoveries concerning the motions of
the heavenly bodies, which, rudimentary as they were,
still prove them to have been men of rare intellect.
For a great and a patient genius must he have been,
who first distinguished the planets from the fixed
stars, or worked out the earliest astronomical calcula-
tion. But they seem to have been crushed, as it were,
by their own discoveries. They stopped short. They
gave way again to the primeval fear of Nature. They
sank into planet-worship. They invented, it would
seem, that fantastic pseudo-science of astrology, which
lay for ages after as an incubus on the human in-
tellect and conscience. They became the magicians
and quacks of the old world ; and mankind owed them
thenceforth nothing but evil. Among the Greeks and
Romans, again, those sages who dared face Nature
like reasonable men, were accused by the superstitious
mob as irreverent impious atheists. The wisest of
them all, Socrates, was actually put to death on that
charge; and finally, they failed. School after school,
in Greece and Rome, struggled to discover, and to
get a hearing for, some theory of the universe which
was founded on something like experience, reason,
common sense. They were not allowed to prosecute

x.J SCIENCE OF THE OLD WOELD. 235

their attempt. The mud-ocean of ignorance and fear
in which they struggled so manfully was too strong for
them ; the mud- waves closed over their heads finally,
as the age of the Antonines expired] and the last
effort of GrEeco-Roman thought to explain the universe
was Neoplatonism — the muddiest of the muddy — an
attempt to apologise for, and organise into a system,
all the nature-dreading superstitions of the Roman
world. Porphyry, Plotinus, Proclus, poor Hypatia
herself, and all her school — they may have had
themselves no bodily fear of Nature; for they were
noble souls. Yet they spent their time in justifying
those who had; in apologising for the superstitions of
the very mob which they despised : just as — it some-
times seems to me — some folk in these days are like to
end in doing ; begging that the masses might be
allowed to believe in anything, however false, lest
they should believe in nothing at all : as if believing
in lies could do anything but harm to any human
being. And so died the science of the old world, in a
true second childhood, just where it began.

The Jewish sages, I hold, taught that science was
probable; the Greeks and Romans proved that it was
possible. It remained for our race, under the teaching
of both, to bring science into act and fact.

Many causes contributed to give them this power.
They were a personally courageous race. This earth
has yet seen no braver men than the forefathers of
Christian Europe, whether Scandinavian or Teuton,
Angle or Frank. They were a practical hard-headed
race, with a strong appreciation of facts, and a strong
determination to act on them. Their laws, their society,
their commerce, their colonisation, their migrations by

236 SCIENCE. [x.

land and sea, proved that they were such. They were
favoured, moreover, by circumstances, or — as I should
rather put it — by that divine Providence which deter-
mined their times, and the bounds of their habitation.
They came in as the heritors of the decaying civilisa-
tion of Greece and Rome ; they colonised territories
which gave to man special fair play, but no more, in
the struggle for existence, the battle with the powers
of Nature ; tolerably fertile, tolerably temperate ; with
boundless means of water communication ; freer than
most parts of the world from those terrible natural
phenomena, like the earthquake and the hurricane,
before which man lies helpless and astounded, a child
beneath the foot of a giant. Nature was to them not
so inhospitable as to starve their brains and limbs, as
it has done for the Esquimaux or Fuegian ; and not
so bountiful as to crush them by its very luxuriance,
as it has crushed the savages of the tropics. They
saw enough of its strength to respect it ; not enough
to cower before it : and they and it have fought it out ;
and it seems to me, standing either on London Bridge
or on a Holland fen-dyke, that they are winning at last.
But they had a sore battle : a battle against their
own fear of the unseen. They brought with them, out
of the heart of Asia, dark and sad nature-superstitions,
some of which linger among our peasantry till this day,
of elves, trolls, nixes, and what not. Their Thor and
Odin were at first, probably, only the thunder and the
wind : but they had to be appeased in the dark marches
of the forest, where hung rotting on the sacred oaks,
amid carcases of goat and horse, the carcases of human
victims. No one acquainted with the early legends
and ballads of our race, but must perceive throughout

*.] MYSTERIES AND MAGIC. 237

them all the prevailing tone of fear and sadness. And
to their own superstitions they added those of the
Rome which they conquered. They dreaded the Roman
she-poisoners and witches, who, like Horace's Canidia,
still performed horrid rites in graveyards and dark
places of the earth. They dreaded as magical the
delicate images engraved on old Greek gems. They
dreaded the very Roman cities they had destroyed.
They were the work of enchanters. Like the ruins of
St. Albans here in England, they were all full of devils,
guarding the treasures which the Romans had hidden.
The Caesars became to them magical man-gods. The
poet Virgil became the prince of necromancers. If the
secrets of Nature were to be known, they were to be
known by unlawful means, by prying into the mysteries
of the old heathen magicians, or of the Mohammedan
doctors of Cordova and Seville ; and those who dared
to do so were respected and feared, and often came to
evil ends. It needed moral courage, then, to face and
interpret fact. Such brave men as Pope Gerbert,
Roger Bacon, Galileo, even Kepler, did not lead happy
lives ; some of them found themselves in prison. All
the medieval sages — even Albertus Magnus — were
stigmatised as magicians. One wonders that more of
them did not imitate poor Paracelsus, who, unable to
get a hearing for his coarse common sense, took — vain
and sensual — to drinking the laudanum which he
himself had discovered, and vaunted as a priceless
boon to men ; and died as the fool dieth, in spite of
all his wisdom. For the " Romani nominis umbra,"
the shadow of the mighty race whom they had
conquered, lay heavy on our forefathers for centuries.
And their dread of the great heathens was really a

238 SCIENCE. [x.

dread of Nature, and of the powers thereof. For
when the authority of great names has reigned un-
questioned for many centuries, those names become,
to the human mind, integral and necessary parts of
Nature itself. They are, as it were, absorbed into it ;
they become its laws, its canons, its demiurges, and
guardian spirits; their words become regarded as
actual facts ; in one word, they become a superstition,
and are feared as parts of the vast unknown; and
to deny what they have said is, in the minds of the
many, not merely to fly in the face of reverent wisdom,
but to fly in the face of facts. During a great part of
the Middle Ages, for instance, it was impossible for
an educated man to think of nature itself, without
thinking first of what Aristotle had said of her.
Aristotle's dicta were Nature ; and when Benedetti, at
Venice, opposed in 1585 Aristotle's opinions on violent
and natural motion, there were hundreds, perhaps, in the
universities of Europe — as there certainly were in the
days of the immortal "Epistolse Obscurorum Virorum"
— who were ready, in spite of all Benedetti's professed
reverence for Aristotle, to accuse him of outraging not
only the father of philosophy, but Nature itself and its
palpable and notorious facts. For the restoration of
letters in the fifteenth century had not at first mended
matters, so strong was the dread of Nature in the
minds of the masses. The minds of men had sported
forth, not toward any sound investigation of facts,
but toward an eclectic resuscitation of Neoplatonism ;
which endured, not without a certain beauty and use
— as let Spenser's " Faerie Queen " bear witness — till
the latter half of the seventeenth century.

After that time a rapid change began. It is marked

x.] INFLUENCE OF JEWISH LITERATURE. 239

by — it has been notably assisted by — the foundation of
our own Royal Society. Its causes I will not enter
into ; they are so inextricably mixed, I hold, with
theological questions, that they cannot be discussed
here. I will only point out to you these facts : that,
from the latter part of the seventeenth century, the
noblest heads and the noblest hearts of Europe con-
centrated themselves more and more on the brave and
patient investigation of physical facts, as the source
of priceless future blessings to mankind ; that the
eighteenth century which it has been the fashion of
late to depreciate, did more for the welfare of mankind,
in every conceivable direction, than the whole fifteen
centuries before it ; that it did this good work by
boldly observing and analysing facts ; that this bold-
ness towards facts increased in proportion as Europe
became indoctrinated with the Jewish literature ; and
that, notably, such men as Kepler, Newton, Berkeley,
Spinoza, Leibnitz, Descartes, in whatsoever else they
differed, agreed in this, that their attitude towards
Nature was derived from the teaching of the Jewish
sages. I believe that we are not yet fully aware how
much we owe to the Jewish mind, in the gradual eman-
cipation of the human intellect. The connection may
not, of course, be one of cause and effect; it may be a
mere coincidence. I believe it to be a cause ; one of
course of very many causes : but still an integral cause.
At least the coincidence is too remarkable a fact not to
be worthy of investigation.

I said, just now — The emancipation of the human
intellect. I did not say — Of science or of the scientific
intellect ; and for this reason :

That the emancipation of science is the emancipation

2 10 SCIENCE. [x.

of the common mind of all men. All men can partake
of the gains of free scientific thought, not merely
by enjoying its physical results, but by becoming more
scientific men themselves.

Therefore it was, that though I began my first lecture
by defining superstition, I did not begin my second
by defining its antagonist, science. For the word
" science " defines itself. It means simply knowledge ;
that is, of course, right knowledge, or such an approxi-
mation as can be obtained ; knowledge of any natural
object, its classification, its causes, its effects; or in
plain English, what it is, how it came where it is, and
what can be done with it.

And scientific method, likewise, needs no definition;
for it is simply the exercise of common sense. It is
not a peculiar, unique, professional, or mysterious
process of the understanding : but the same which all
men employ, from the cradle to the grave, in forming
correct conclusions.

Every one who knows the philosophic writings of
Mr. John Stuart Mill, will be familiar with this opinion.
But to those who have no leisure to study him, I should
recommend the reading of Professor Huxley's third
lecture on the origin of species.

In that he shows, with great logical skill, as well
as with some humour, how the man who, on rising in
the morning finds the parlour- window open, the spoons
and teapot gone, the mark of a dirty hand on the
window-sill, and that of a hob-nailed boot outside, and
comes to the conclusion that someone has broken open
the window, and stolen the plate, arrives at that hypo-
thesis— for it is nothing more — by a long and complex
train of inductions and deductions of just the same

x.] SCIENCE AND COMMON SENSE. 24,1

kind as those which, according to the Baconian philo-
sophy, are to be used for investigating the deepest
secrets of Nature.

This is true, even of those sciences which involve
long mathematical calculations. In fact, the stating
of the problem to be solved is the most important
element in the calculation ; and that is so thoroughly
a labour of common sense that an utterly uneducated
man may, and often does, state an abstruse problem
clearly and correctly; seeing what ought to be proved,
and perhaps how to prove it, though he may be unable
to work the problem out for want of mathematical
knowledge.

But that mathematical knowledge is not — as all
Cambridge men are surely aware — the result of any
special gift. It is merely the development of those
conceptions of form and number which every human
being possesses ; and any person of average intellect
can make himself a fair mathematician if he will only
pay continuous attention; in plain English, think
enough about the subject.

There are sciences, again, which do not involve
mathematical calculation; for instance, botany, zoology,
geology, which are just now passing from their old
stage of classificatory sciences into the rank of organic
ones. These are, without doubt, altogether within the
scope of the merest common sense. Any man or woman
of average intellect, if they will but observe and think
for themselves, freely, boldly, patiently, accurately, may
judge for themselves of the conclusions of these sciences,
may add to these conclusions fresh and important dis-
coveries; and if I am asked for a proof of what I assert,
I point to "Rain and Rivers/' written by no professed
sc. B

212 SCIENCE. [*.

scientific man, but by a colonel in the Guards, known
to fame only as one of the most perfect horsemen in the
world.

Let me illustrate my meaning by an example. A
man — I do not say a geologist, but simply a man,
squire or ploughman — sees a small valley,, say one of
the side-glens which open into the larger valleys in
the Windsor forest district. He wishes to ascertain
its age-.

He has, at first sight, a very simple measure — that
of denudation. He sees that the glen is now being
eaten out by a little stream, the product of innumer-
able springs which arise along its sides, and which are
fed entirely by the rain on the moors above. He finds,
on observation, that this stream brings down some
ten cubic yards of sand and gravel, on an average,
every year. The actual quantity of earth which has
been removed to make the glen may be several million
cubic yards. Here is an easy sum in arithmetic.
At the rate of ten cubic yards a-year, the stream
has taken several hundred thousand years to make
the glen.

You will observe that this result is obtained by
mere common sense. He has a right to assume that
the stream originally began the glen, because he finds
it in the act of enlarging it ; just as much right as he
has to assume, if he find a hole in his pocket, and his
last coin in the act of falling through it, that the rest
of his money has fallen through the same hole. It is
a sufficient cause, and the simplest. A number of
observations as to the present rate of denudation, and
a sum which any railroad contractor can do in his head,
to determine the solid contents of the valley, are all

i.] DREAD OF SIZE. 243

that are needed. The method is that of science : but
it is also that of simple common sense. You will re-
member, therefore, that this is no mere theory or
hypothesis, but a pretty fair and simple conclusion
from palpable facts ; that the probability lies with the
belief that the glen is some hundreds of thousands of
years old ; that it is not the observer's business to
prove it further, but other persons' to disprove it, if
they can.

But does the matter end here ? No. And, for
certain reasons, it is good that it should not end
here.

The observer, if he be a cautious man, begins to
see if he can disprove his own conclusions ; moreover,
being human, he is probably somewhat awed, if not
appalled, by his own conclusion. Hundreds of thousands
of years spent in making that little glen ! Common
sense would say that the longer it took to make, the less
wonder there was in its being made at last : but the
instinctive human feeling is the opposite. There is in
men, and there remains in them, even after they are
civilised, and all other forms of the dread of Nature have
died out in them, a dread of size, of vast space, of vast
time; that latter, mind, being always imagined as space,
as we confess when we speak instinctively of a space of
time. They will not understand that size is merely a
relative, not an absolute term; that if we were a
thousand times larger than we are, the universe would
be a thousand times smaller than it is ; that if we could
think a thousand times faster than we do, time would
be a thousand times longer than it is; that there is
One in whom we live, and move, and have our being, to
whom one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand

B 2

J44 SCIENCE. [x.

years as one day. I believe this dread of size to be
merely, like all other superstitions, a result of bodily
fear; a development of the instinct which makes a
little dog run away from a big dog. Be that as
it may, every observer has it ; and so the man's
conclusion seems to him strange, doubtful : he will
reconsider it.

Moreover, if he be an experienced man, he is well
aware that first guesses, first hypotheses, are not always
the right ones ; and if he be a modest man, he will
consider the fact that many thousands of thoughtful
men in all ages, and many thousands still, would say,
that the glen can only be a few thousand, or possibly
a few hundred, years old. And he will feel bound to
consider their opinion ; as far as it is, like his own,
drawn from facts, but no further.

So he casts about for all other methods by which
the glen may have been produced, to see if any one of
them will account for it in a shorter time.

1. Was it made by an earthquake ? No; for the
strata on both sides are identical, at the same level,
and in the same plane.

2. Or by a mighty current ? If so, the flood must
have run in at the upper end, before it ran out at the
lower. But nothing has run in at the upper end. All
round above are the undisturbed gravel-beds of the
horizontal moor, without channel or depression.

3. Or by water draining off a vast flat as it was
upheaved out of the sea ? That is a likely guess. The
valley at its upper end spreads out like the fingers of a
hand, as the gullies in tide-muds do.

But that hypothesis will not stand. There is no
vast unbroken flat behind the glen. Eight and left of

x.] THEORY OF DEXUDATION. 245

it are other similar glens, parted from it by long
narrow ridges : these also must be explained on the
same hypothesis ; but they cannot. For there could
not have been surface-drainage to make them all, or a
tenth of them. There are no other possible hypotheses ;
and so he must fall back on the original theory — the
rain, the springs, the brook ; they have done it all,
even as they are doing it this day.

Bat is not that still a hasty assumption ? May not
their denuding power have been far greater in old
times than now ?

Why should it ? Because there was more rain then
than now ? That he must put out of court ; there is
no evidence of it whatsoever.

Because the land was more friable originally ?
Well, there is a great deal to be said for that. The
experience of every countryman tells him that bare or
fallow land is more easily washed away than land under
vegetation. And no doubt, when these gravels and
sands rose from the sea, they were barren for hundreds
of years. He has some measure of the time required,
because he can tell roughly how long it takes for sands
and shingles left by the sea to become covered with
vegetation. But he must allow that the friability of
the land must have been originally much greater than
now, for hundreds of years.

But again, does that fact really cut off any great
space of time from his hundreds of thousands of years?
For when the land first rose from the sea, that glen
was not there. Some slight bay or bend in the shore
determined its site. That stream was not there. It
was split up into a million little springs, oozing side by
side from the shore, and having each a very minute

2i6 SCIENCE. [x.

denuding power, which, kept continually increasing by
combination as the glen ate its way inwards, and the
rainfall drained by all these little springs was collected
into the one central stream. So that when the ground
being bare was most liable to be denuded, the water
was least able to do it ; and as the denuding power of
the water increased, the land, being covered with vege-
tation, became more and more able to resist it. All
this he has seen, going on at the present day in the
similar gullies worn in the soft strata of the South
Hampshire coast ; especially round Bournemouth.

So the two disturbing elements in the calculation
may be fairly set off against each other, as making a
difference of only a few thousands or tens of thousands
of years either way; and the age of the glen may
fairly be, if not a million years, yet such a length of
years as mankind still speak of with bated breath, as if
forsooth it would do them some harm.

I trust that every scientific man in this room will
agree with me, that the imaginary squire or plough-
man would have been conducting his investigation
strictly according to the laws of the Baconian philo-
sophy. You will remark, meanwhile, that he has not
used a single scientific term, or referred to a single
scientific investigation ; and has observed nothing and
thought nothing, which might not have been observed
and thought by any one who chose to use his common
sense, and not to be afraid.

But because he has come round, after all this further
investigation, to something very like his first conclusion,
was all that further investigation useless ? No — a thou-
sand times, no. It is this very verification of hypotheses
which makes the sound ones safe, and destroys the

x.] SCIENCE OPEN TO ALL. 247

unsound. It is this struggle with all sorts of super-
stitions which makes science strong and sure, and her
march irresistible, winning ground slowly, but never
receding from it. It is this buffeting of adversity
which compels her not to rest dangerously upon the
shallow sand of first guesses, and single observations j
but to strike her roots down, deep, wide, and interlaced,
into the solid ground of actual facts.

It is very necessary to insist on this point. For
there have been men in all past ages — I do not say
whether there are any such now, but I am inclined to
think that there will be hereafter — men who have tried
to represent scientific method as something difficult,
mysterious, peculiar, unique, not to be attained by the
unscientific mass ; and this not for the purpose of
exalting science, but rather of discrediting her. For
as long as the masses, educated or uneducated, are
ignorant of what scientific method is, they will look on.
scientific men, as the middle age looked on necro-
mancers, as a privileged, but awful and uncanny caste,
possessed of mighty secrets ; who may do them great
good, but may also do them great harm. Which
belief on the part of the masses will enable these
persons to instal themselves as the critics of science,
though not scientific men themselves : and — as
Shakespeare has it — to talk of Robin Hood, though
they never shot in his bow. Thus they become
mediators to the masses between the scientific and the
unscientific worlds, They tell them — You are not to
trust the conclusions of men of science at first hand.
You are not fit judges of their facts or of their methods.
It is we who will, by a cautious eclecticism, choose out
for you such of their conclusions as are safe for you ;

248 SCIENCE. [x.

and them we will advise you to believe. To tlie
scientific man, on the other hand, as often as anything
is discovered unpleasing to them, they will say,
imperiously and e cathedra — Your new theory contra-
dicts the established facts of science. For they will
know well that whatever the men of science think of
their assertion, the masses will believe it ; totally un-
aware that the speakers are by their very terms show-
ing their ignorance of science ; and that what they call
established facts scientific men call merely provisional
conclusions, which they would throw away to-morrow
without a pang were the known facts explained better
by a fresh theory, or did fresh facts require one.

This has happened too often. It is in the interest
of superstition that it should happen again ; and the
best way to prevent it surely is to tell the masses —
Scientific method is no peculiar mystery, requiring a
peculiar initiation. It is simply common sense, com-
bined with uncommon courage, which includes uncom-
mon honesty and uncommon patience ; and if you will
be brave, honest, patient, and rational, you will need no
mystagogues to tell you what in science to believe and
what not to believe ; for you will be just as good judges
of scientific facts and theories as those who assume
the right of guiding your convictions. You are men
and women : and more than that you need not be.

And let me say that the man of our days whose
writings exemplify most thoroughly what I am going
to say is the justly revered Mr. Thomas Carlyle.

As far as I know he has never written on any scien-
tific subject. For aught I am aware of, he may know
nothing of mathematics or chemistry, of comparative
anatomy or geology. For aught I am aware of, he

x.l WRITINGS OF THOMAS CARLYLE. 249

may know a great deal about them all, and, like a wise
man, hold his tongue, and give the world merely the
results in the form of general thought. Bat this I
know; that his writings are instinct with the very
spirit of science ; that he has taught men, more than
any living man, the meaning and end of science ; that
he has taught men moral and intellectual courage ; to
face facts boldly, while they confess the divineness of
facts ; not to be afraid of Nature, and not to worship
Nature ; to believe that man can know truth ; and that
only in as far as he knows truth can he live worthily
on this earth. And thus he has vindicated, as no other
man in our days has done, at once the dignity of Nature
and the dignity of spirit. That he would have made a
distinguished scientific man, we may be as certain from
his writings as we may be certain, when we see a fine
old horse of a certain stamp, that he would have made
a first-class hunter, though he has been unfortunately
all his life in harness. Therefore, did I try to train a
young man of science to be true, devout, and earnest,
accurate and daring, I should say — Eead what you.
will : but at least read Carlyle. It is a small matter
to me — and I doubt not to him — whether you will
agree with his special conclusions : but his premises
and his method are irrefragable ; for they stand on
the "voluntatem Dei in rebus revelatam" — on fact
and common sense.

And Mr. Carlyle's writings, if I am correct in my
estimate of them, will afford a very sufficient answer
to those who think that the scientific habit of mind
tends to irreverence.

Doubtless this accusation will always be brought-
against science by those who confound reverence with

250 SCIENCE. [x.

fear. For from blind fear of the unknown, science does
certainly deliver man. She does by man as he does
by an unbroken colt. The colt sees by the road side
some quite new object — a cast-away boot, an old kettle,
or what not. What a fearful monster ! What unknown
terrific powers may it not possess ! And the colt shies
across the road, runs up the bank, rears on end ;
putting itself thereby, as many a man does, in real
danger. What cure is there ? But one ; experience.
So science takes us, as we should take the colt, gently
by the halter ; and makes us simply smell at the new
monster ; till after a few trembling sniffs, we discover,
like the colt, that it is not a monster, but a kettle.
Yet I think, if we sum up the loss and gain, we shall
-find the colt's character has gained, rather than lost,
by being thus disabused. He learns to substitute a
very rational reverence for the man who is breaking
him in, for a totally irrational reverence for the kettle;
and becomes thereby a much wiser and more useful
member of society, as does the man when disabused of
his superstitions.

From which follows one result. That if science
proposes — as she does — to make men brave, wise, and
independent, she must needs excite unpleasant feelings
in all who desire to keep men cowardly, ignorant, and
slavish. And that too many such persons have existed
in all ages is but too notorious. There have been from
all time, goetai, quacks, powwow men, rain-makers, and
necromancers of various sorts, who having for their
own purposes set forth partial, ill-grounded, fantastic,
and frightful interpretations of nature, have no love
for those who search after a true, exact, brave, and
hopeful one. And therefore it is to be feared, or hoped,

x.] FEAR OF SCIENCE. 251

that science and superstition will to the world's end
remain irreconcilable and internecine foes.

Conceive the feelings of an old Lapland witch, who
has had for the last fifty years all the winds in a seal-
skin bag, and has been selling fair breezes to northern
skippers at so much a puff, asserting her powers so
often, poor old soul, that she has got to half believe
them herself — conceive, I say, her feelings at seeing
her customers watch the Admiralty storm-signals, and
con the weather reports in The Times. Conceive the
feelings of Sir Samuel Baker's African friend, Katchiba,
the rain-making chief, who possessed a whole houseful
of thunder and lightning — though he did not, he con-
fessed, keep it in a bottle as they do in England — if
Sir Samuel had had the means, and the will, of giving
to Katchiba's Negros a course of lectures on electricity,
with appropi-iate experiments, and a real bottle full of
real lightning among the foremost.

It is clear that only two methods of self-defence
would have been open to the rain-maker : namely, either
to kill Sir Samuel, or to buy his real secret of bottling
the lightning, that he might use it for his own ends.
The former method — that of killingthe man of science —
was found more easy in ancient times ; the latter in
these modern ones. And there have been always those
who, too good-natured to kill the scientific man, have
patronised knowledge, not for its own sake, but for the
use which may be made of it ; who would like to keep
a tame man of science, as they would a tame poet, or a
tame parrot ; who say — Let us have science by all
means, but not too much of it. It is a dangerous
thing; to be doled out to the world, like medicine,
in small and cautious doses. You, the scientific man,

252 SCIENCE. [x.

will of course freely discover what you choose. Only
do not talk too loudly about it : leave that to us. We
understand the world, and are meant to guide and
govern it. So discover freely : and meanwhile hand
over your discoveries to us, that we may instruct and
edify the populace with so much of them as we think
safe, while we keep our position thereby, and in many
cases make much money by your science. Do that,
and we will patronise you, applaud you, ask you to our
houses ; and you shall be clothed in purple and fine
linen, and fare sumptuously with us every day. I
know not whether these latter are not the worst enemies
which science has. They are often such excellent,
respectable, orderly, well-meaning persons. They desire
so sincerely that everyone should be wise : only not
too wise. They are so utterly unaware of the mischief
they are doing. They would recoil with horror if they
were told they were so many Iscariots, betraying Truth
with a kiss.

But science, as yet, has withstood both terrors and
blandishments. In old times she endured being im-
prisoned and slain. She came to life again. Perhaps
it was the will of Him in whom all things live, that
she should live. Perhaps it was His spirit which gave
her life.

She can endure, too, being starved. Her votaries
have not as yet cared much for purple and fine linen,
and sumptuous fare. There are a very few among
them who, joining brilliant talents to solid learning,
have risen to deserved popularity, to titles, and to
wealth. But even their labours, it seems to me, are
never rewarded in any proportion to the time and the
intellect spent on them, nor to the benefits which they

x.] SOLDIERS OF SCIENCE. 253

bring to mankind ; while the great majority, unpaid
and unknown, toil on, and have to find in science her
own reward. Better, perhaps, that it should be so.
Better for science that she should be free, in holy
poverty, to go where she will and say what she knows,
than that she should be hired out at so much a year to
say things pleasing to the many, and to those who
guide the many. And so, I verily believe, the majority
of scientific men think. There are those among them
who have obeyed very faithfully St. Paul's precept :
" No man that warreth entangleth himself with the
affairs of this life." For they have discovered that
they are engaged in a war — a veritable war — against
the rulers of darkness, against ignorance and its twin
children, fear and cruelty. Of that war they see
neither the end nor even the plan. But they are
ready to go on; ready, with Socrates, " to follow reason
whithersoever it leads ; " and content, meanwhile,
like good soldiers in a campaign, if they can keep
tolerably in a line, and use their weapons, and see a few
yards ahead of them through the smoke and the woods.
They will come out somewhere at last ; they know not
where nor when : but they will come out at last, into
the daylight and the open field; and be told then —
perhaps to their own astonishment — as many a gallant
soldier has been told, that by simply walking straight
on, and doing the duty which lay nearest them, they
have helped to win a great battle, and slay great
giants, earning the thanks of their country and of
mankind.

And, meanwhile, if they get their shilling a- day of
fighting-pay, they are content. I had almost said, they
ought to be content. For science is, I verily believe,

254 SCIENCE. [x,

like virtue, its own exceeding great reward. I can
conceive few human states more enviable than that of
the man to whom, panting in the foul laboratory, or
watching for his life under the tropic forest, Isis shall
for a moment lift her sacred veil, and show him, once
and for ever, the thing he dreamed not of ; some law,
or even mere hint of a law, explaining one fact ; but
explaining with it a thousand more, connecting them
all with each other and with the mighty whole, till
order and meaning shoots through some old Chaos of
scattered observations.

Is not that a 307, a prize, which wealth cannot give,
nor poverty take away ? What it may lead to, he
knows not. Of what use it may become, he knows not.
But this he knows, that somewhere it must lead; of
some use it will be. For it is a truth; and having
found a truth, he has exorcised one more of the ghosts
which haunt humanity. He has left one object less
for man to fear; one object more for man to use.
Yes, the scientific man may have this comfort, that
whatever he has done, he has done good ; that he is
following a mistress who has never yet conferred aught
but benefits on the human race.

What physical science may do hereafter I know not;
but as yet she has done this :

She has enormously increased the wealth of the
human race; and has therefore given employment,
food, existence, to millions who, without science, would
either have starved or have never been born. She
has shown that the dictum of the early political
economists, that population has a tendency to increase
faster than the means of subsistence, is no law of
humanity, but merely a tendency of the barbaric and

x.] VICTORIES OF SCIENCE. 255

ignorant man, •which can be counteracted by increasing
manifold by scientific means his powers of producing
food.' She has taught men, during the last few years,
to foresee and elude the most destructive storms ; and
there is no reason for doubting, and many reasons for
hoping, that she will gradually teach men to elude
other terrific forces of nature, too powerful and too
seemingly capricious for them to conquer. She has
discovered innumerable remedies and alleviations for
pains and disease. She has thrown such light on the
causes of epidemics, that we are able to say now that
the presence of cholera — and probably of all zymotic
diseases — in any place, is usually a sin and a shame, for
which the owners and authorities of that place ought to
be punishable by law, as destroyers of their fellow-men;
while for the weak, for those who, in the barbarous and
semi-barbarous state — and out of that last we are only
just emerging — how much has she done ; an earnest of
much more which she will do ? She has delivered the
insane — I may say by the scientific insight of one man,
more worthy of titles and pensions than nine-tenths of
those who earn them — I mean the great and good
Pinel — from hopeless misery and torture into com-
parative peace and comfort, and at least the possibility
of cure. For children, she has done much, or rather
might do, would parents read and perpend such books
as Andrew Combe's and those of other writers on
physical education. We should not then see the
children, even of the rich, done to death piecemeal by
improper food, improper clothes, neglect of ventilation
and the commonest measures for preserving health.
We should not see their intellects stunted by Pro-
crustean attempts to teach them all the same accom-

256 SCIENCE. [x.

plishments, to the neglect, most often, of any sound
practical training of their faculties. We should not
see slight indigestion, or temporary rushes of blood to
the head, condemned and punished as sins against Him
who took up little children in His arms and blessed
them.

But we may have hope. When we compare edu-
cation now with what it was even forty years ago,
much more with the stupid brutality of the monastic
system, we may hail for children, as well as for grown
people, the advent of the reign of common sense.

And for woman — What might I not say on that
point ? But most of it would be fitly discussed only
among physicians and biologists : here I will say only
this : Science has exterminated, at least among civilised
nations, witch-manias. Women — at least white women
— are no longer tortured or burnt alive from man's blind
fear of the unknown. If science had done no more
than that, she would deserve the perpetual thanks and
the perpetual trust, not only of the women whom she
has preserved from agony, but the men whom she has
preserved from crime.

These benefits have already accrued to civilised
men, because they have lately allowed a very few of
their number peaceably to imitate Mr. Rarey, and find
out what nature — or rather, to speak at once reverently
and accurately, He who made nature — is thinking of;
and obey the " voluntatem Dei in rebus revelatam."
This science has done, while yet in her infancy. What
she will do in her maturity, who dare predict ? At
least, in the face of such facts as these, those who bid
us fear, or restrain, or mutilate science, bid us commit
an act of folly, as well as of ingratitude, which can

x.] BLESSINGS OF SCIENCE. 257

only harm ourselves. For science has as yet done
nothing but good. Will any one tell me what harm it
has ever done ? When any one will show me a single
result of science, of the knowledge of and use of
physical facts, which has not tended directly to the
benefit of mankind, moral and spiritual, as well as
ohysical and economic — then I shall be tempted to
believe that Solomon was wrong when he said that
the one thing to be sought after on earth, more
precious than all treasure, she who has length of days
in her right hand, and in her left hand riches and
honour, whose ways are ways of pleasantness and all
her paths are peace, who is a tree of life to all who lay
hold on her, and makes happy every one who retains
her, is — as you will see if you will yourselves consult
the passage — that very Wisdom — by which God has
founded the earth ; and that very Understanding — by
which He has established the heavens.

THOUGHTS IN A GRAVEL- PIT.

THOUGHTS IN A GRAVEL-PIT;

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, we may of course think of
anything which we choose in a gravel-pit, as we may
anywhere else. Thought is free : at least so we
fancy.

But the most right sort of thought, after all, is
thought about what lies nearest us ; not always, but
surely once in a way, that we may understand some-
thing of everyday objects. And therefore it may be
well worth our while to go once into a gravel-pit,
and think about it, till we have learnt what a gravel-
pit is.

Learnt what a gravel-pit is ? Everybody knows.

If it be so, everybody knows more than I know.
We all know a gravel- pit when we see one; but we do
not all know what we see. I do not know. I know
a little ; a few scraps of fact about these pits round
here, though about no others. Were I to go into a
pit a hundred miles, even fifty miles off, I could tell
you nothing certain about it ; perhaps might make a
dozen mistakes. But what I know, with tolerable

* A Lecture delivered at the Mechanics' Institute, Odiham, 1857.

2G2 THOUGHTS IN A GRAVEL-PIT, [xi.

certainty, about the pits round here, I wish to tell you
to-night.

But why ? You do not need, one in ten of you, to
know anything about gravel, unless you be highway
surveyor, or have a garden-walk to make ; and then
someone will easily tell you where the best gravel is
to be got, at so much a load.

Very true ; but you come here to-night to instruct
yourselves ; that is, to learn, if you can, something
more about the world you live in ; something more
about God who made the world.

And you come here to educate yourselves ; to educe
and bring out your own powers of perceiving, judging,
reasoning ; to improve yourselves in the art of all
arts, which is, the art of learning. That is mental
education.

Now if a gravel-pit will teach you a little about
these things, you will surely call it a rich gravel-pit.
If it helps you to wisdom, which is worth more than
gold ; which is the only way to get gold wisely, and
spend it wisely ; then we will call our pit no more a
gravel-pit, but a wisdom-pit, a mine of wisdom.

Let us go out, then, in fancy (for it is too cold to
go out in person) to Hook Common, scramble down
into the first gravel-pit we come to, and see what we
can see.

The first thing we see is a quantity of stones, more
or less rounded, lying in gravel and poor clay.

Well— what do those stones tell us ?

These stones, as I told you when I addressed you
last, are ancient and venerable worthies. They have
seen a great deal in their time. They have had a
great deal of knocking about, and have stood it

xi.] THKEE WOELDS. 263

manfully. They have stood the knocking about of
three worlds already ; and have done their duty there-
in ; and they are ready (if you choose to mend the road
with them) to stand the knocking about of this fourth
world, and being most excellent gravel, to do their
duty in this world likewise; which is more, I fear,
than either you or I can say for ourselves.

Three worlds ?

Yes. Standing there in the gravel-pit, I see three
old worlds, in each of which these stones played their
part ; and this world of man for the fourth, and the
best of all — for man if not for the stones. I speak
sober truth. Let me explain it step by step.

You know the chalk-hills to the south; and the
sands of Crooksbury and the Hind Head beyond them.
There is one world.

You know the clays and sands of Hook and
Newnham, Dogmersfield and Shapley Heath, and all
the country to the north as far as Beading. There is
a second world.

You know the gravel-pit itself ; and all the upper
soils and gravels, which are spread over the length
and breadth of the country to the north. There is a
third world.

Let us take them one by one.

First, the chalk.

The chalk-hills rise much higher than the surround-
ing country ; but you must not therefore suppose that
they were made after it, and laid on the top of it.
That guess would be true, if you went south-east from
here toward the Hind Head. The chalk lies on the top
of the sands of Crooksbury Hill, and the clays of Holt
Forest ; but it dips underneath the sands of Shapley

264 THOUGHTS IN A GRAVEL-PIT. [zi.

Heath, and the clays of Dogmersfield, and reappears
from underneath them again at Eeading.

Thus you at Odiham stand on the edge of a chalk
basin ; of what was once a sea, or estuary, with shores
of chalk, which begins at the foot of the High Clere
Hills, and runs eastward, widening as it goes, past
London, into the Eastern Sea. Everywhere under this
great basin is the floor of chalk, covered with clays and
sands, which , for certain reasons, are called by geologists
Tertiary strata.

But what has this to do with a gravel-pit ?

This first. That all the flints in this pit have come
out of the chalk. They are coloured, most of them,
with iron, which has turned them brown ; but they are
exactly the same flints as those gray ones in the
chalk-pit on the other side of the town.

How do I know that ?

I think our own eyes will prove it : they are the
same shapes, and of the same substance ; but as a still
surer proof, we find exactly the same fossils in them ;
sponges, choanites (which were something like our
modern sea- anemones), corals, and "shepherds' crowns"
as the boys call the fossil sea-urchins. The species of
all these, and of other fossils, in the chalk-pit and in
the gravel-pit, are absolutely identical. The natural
conclusion is, then, that the gravel has been formed
from the washings of the chalk. The white lime of
the chalk has been carried away in water by some
flood or floods ; the heavier flints have been left
behind.

Stop now one moment, and think. You all know
how very few flints there are in the chalk-pit, in pro-
portion to the mass of chalk. You all know what vast

«.] THE WORLD OF CHALK. 265

gravel-beds cover the country to the north, and often
to the thickness of many feet. Try and conceive, then,
what a much more vast mass of chalk must have been
washed away, to leave that vast mass of gravel behind
it. — Conceive ? It is past conception. I will but
give you two hints as to its probable size.

The chalk to the eastward, between here and Farn-
ham, is a far narrower and shallower band than any-
where else in England. Its narrowest point is, I believe,
beneath the bishop's palace at Farnham, where it may
be a hundred feet thick, instead of several hundred, as
it usually is in other parts of England. The cause of
this is, that the whole of the upper chalk has been
washed away, to form the gravel-beds to the north and
east of us.

Again. Some of you may have been on the Hind
Head or on Leith Hill, and have looked southward
over the glorious prospect of the rich Weald, spread
out five hundred feet below — a sight to make an
Englishman proud of his native land. Now, the mass
of chalk which has been carried away began behind
you, at the Hogsback, and the line of chalk-hills which
runs to Boxhill, and stretched hundreds of feet above
your head as you stand on Hind Head or Leith Hill,
right over the old Weald of Sussex to the chalk of the
South Downs. And out of the scourings of that vast
mass of chalk was our gravel-pit made.

Of that, and also of the Hind Head sands below it.

For you will find a great deal of sharp sand in our
gravel-pits, which has not, I believe, come from the
grinding of chalk flints ; for if it had been ground, it
would not be the sharp sand it is ; the particles would
be rounded off at the edges. This is probably sand

266 THOUGHTS IN A GKAVEL-PIT. [XL

from the Hind Head ; from what geologists term the
greensands, below the chalk.

And I have a better proof of this — at least I should
have in every gravel-pit at Eversley — in a few pieces
of a stone which is not chalk-flint at all ; flattish and
oblong, not more than two or three inches in diameter ;
of a grayish colour, and a porous worm-eaten surface,
which no chalk-flint ever has. They are chert, which
abound in the greensand formation ; and insignificant
as they look, are a great token of a most important
fact ; that the currents which formed our sands and
gravels set from the south during a long series of ages,
first till they had washed away all the chalk off the
Weald, and next till they had washed away a great part
of the sands, which then became exposed, the remains
whereof form great commons over a wide tract of
Surrey.

Now let me pause, and ask you to observe one
thing. How, in inductive science, we arrive, by patient
and simple observation of the things around us, at the
most grand and surprising results. Of course I am
not giving you the whole of the facts which have made
this argument certain. I am only giving you enough
to make it probable to you. Its certainty has been
proved by many different men, labouring in many dif-
ferent parts of England, and of the Continent also,
and then comparing their discoveries together; often,
of course, making mistakes ; but each working on
patiently, and correcting their early mistakes by fresh
facts, till they have at last got hold of the true key to
the mystery, and are as certain of the existence of the
great island of the Weald, and its gradual destruction
by the waves and currents of an ancient sea, as if they

xi.] HOW CHALK WAS MADE. 267

had seen it with, their bodily eyes. You must take all
this, of course, as truth from me to-night; but you
may go and examine for yourselves ; and see how far
your own common sense and observations agree with
those of learned geologists.

The history of this great Wealden island to the
south-east of us is obscure enough; but a few
general facts, which bear upon our gravel-pit, I can
give you.

I must begin, however, ages before the Wealden
island existed ; when the chalk of which its mass was
composed was at the bottom of a deep ocean.

We know now what chalk is, and how it was made.
We know that it was deposited as white lime mud, at
a vast sea- depth, seemingly undisturbed by winds or
currents. We know that not only the flint, but the
chalk itself, is made up of shells; the shell of little
microscopic animalcules smaller than a needle's point,
in millions of millions, some whole, some broken, some
in powder, which lived, and died, and decayed for ages
in the great chalk sea.

We know this, I say. We had suspected it long
ago, and become more and more certain of it as the
years went on. But now we seem to have a proof of it
which is past gainsaying.

In the late survey of the bottom of the Atlantic
Ocean, with a view to laying down the electric tele-
graph between England and America, by Lieutenant
Maury of the American navy, a great discovery was
made. It was found that the floor of the Atlantic
Ocean, after you have left the land a few hundred
miles, is one vast plain of mud, of some thirteen
hundred miles in breadth. But here is the wonder;

:268 THOUGHTS IN A GEAVEL-PIT. [xi.

it was found that at a depth averaging 1,600 fathoms
— 9,600 feet — in utter darkness, the sea floor is covered
"with countless millions of animalcule- shells, of the same
families, though not of the same species, as those which
compose the chalk.

At the bottom of a still ocean, then, the chalk was
deposited. But it took many an age to raise it to
where Odiham chalk-pit now stands.

But how was it raised ?

By the upheaving force of earthquakes. Or rather,
-by the upheaving force which causes earthquakes,
when it acts in a single shcck, cracking the earth's
crust by an explosion ; but which acts, too, slowly and
quietly, uplifting day by day, and year by year, some
portions of the earth's surface, and letting others sink
down ; as in the case of the valley of the Jordan and
the Dead Sea, which is now 1,300 feet below the level
of the Mediterranean.

That these upheaving forces were much more violent
than now, in the earlier epochs of our planet, we have
some reason to believe : but the subject is too long a
one to enter on now; and all I can say is, that you
must conceive for yourself the chalk gradually brought
up to the surface, worn away along a shifting shore-
line by the waves of the sea, and covered in shallow
water by the clays and sands on which Odiham stands j
and which compose the earliest part of our second
world.

A second world ; a new world. We can use no
weaker expression. When we compare the chalk with
the strata which lie upon it, we can only call them a
•complete new creation.

For not only were they deposited in shallow water ;

xi.] SEA- ACTION ON CHALK. 269^

a great deal of them, probably, near river-mouths, and
by the force of violent currents, as the irregularity of
their lower bed proves : but there is hardly a plant or
animal found in the chalk itself, which is found in the
gravels, sands, or clays above it. The shells are all
new species ; unseen before in this planet. The vege-
tables, as far as we know them, are all different from
anything found in the chalk, or in the beds below it.
God Almighty, for His own good pleasure, has made
all things new. It is a very awful fact; but it is a
very certain one. Several times, in the history of our
planet, has the Lord God fulfilled the words of the
Psalmist :

" Thou takest away their breath, they die, and
return again to their dust.

" Thou sendest forth thy breath, they are made :
and thou renewest the face of the earth."

But in no instance, perhaps, is the gulf so vast ; is
the leap from one world to another so sheer, as that
between the chalk and the London clay above it.

But how do I know that there was a shore-line here ?
And how do I know that the chalk was covered with
sand-beds ?

I know that there was a shore-line here, from this
fact. If you will look at the surface of the chalk,
where the sands and clays lie on it, you will find that
it is not smooth ; that the beds do not rest conform-
ably on each other, as if they had been laid down
quietly by successive tides, while the chalk below was
still soft mud. So far from it, the chalk must have
become hard rock, and have been exposed to the action
of the sea waves, for centuries, perhaps, before the
sands began to cover it. For you find the surface of

270 THOUGHTS IN A GRAVEL-PIT. [xi.

the chalk farrowed, worn into deep pits, which are
often filled with sand, and gravel, and rounded lumps
of chalk. You may see this for yourselves, in the
topmost layer of any chalk -pit round here. You may
see, even, in some places, the holes which boring shells,
such as work now close to the tide-level, have made in
it ; all the signs, in fact, of the chalk having been a
rocky sea-beach for ages.

The first bed which you will generally find upon the
water-worn surface of the chalk is a layer of green-
sand and green-coated flints. Among these are met
with in many places beds of a great oyster, now un-
known in life. I cannot say whether there are any
here; but at Reading, to the east of Farnham, at
Croydon, and under London, they are abundant.
There must have been miles and miles of oyster-bed at
the bottom of that Eocene sea ; among the oyster-beds,
beds of a peculiar pebble, which we shall see in our
gravel-pit.

They are flints ; but very small, dark, often almost
black, and quite round and polished. Compare them
with the average flints of the pit, and you see that
while the average flints are fresh from the chalk, these
have plainly been rolled and rounded for years. They
are (except in their dark colour) exactly such shingle
as forms the south-coast beach about Hastings and
Brighton. They are the shingle beaches of the Eocene
sea, part of which are preserved under the London clay.
To the north a vast bed of them remains in its original
place, on Blackheath near London ; while part, in the
district to the south, which the London clay has not
covered, have been washed away, and carried into our

XL] SUGAR SANDSTONES. 271

gravel-pit, to mingle with other flints fresh from the
chalk.

I said jusfc now that I had proof that a great tract
of the chalk-hills which are now bare, was once covered
with sand and gravel. Here, in the presence of these
dark pebbles, is a proof. But I have another, and a
yet more curious one.

For our gravel-pit, if it be, will possibly yield us
another, and a more curious object. You most of you
have seen, I dare say, large stones, several feet long,
taken out of these pits. In the gravels and sands at
Pirbright they are so plentiful that they are quarried
for building-stone. And good building-stone they
make; being exceedingly hard, so that no weather
will wear them away. They are what is called saccha-
rine (that is, sugary) sandstone. If you chip off a bit,
you find it exactly like fine whity-brown sugar, only
intensely hard. Now these stones have become very
famous ; for two reasons. First, the old Druids used
them to build their temples. Second, it is a most
puzzling question where they came from.

First. They were used to build Druid temples.

If you go to the further lodge of Dogmersfield Park,
which opens close to the Barley-mow Inn, you will see
there several of them, about five feet high each, set
up on end. They run in a line through the plantation
past the lodge, along the park palings ; one or two are
in an adjoining field. They are the remains of a double
line ; an avenue of stones, which has formed part of an
ancient British temple.

I know no more than that : of that I am certain.

But if you go to the Chalk Downs of Wiltshire,

272 THOUGHTS IN A GRAVEL-PIT. [xi.

you see these temples in their true grandeur. You
have all heard of Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain.
Some of you may have heard of the great Druid
temple at Abury in Wilts, which, were it not all but
destroyed, would be even grander than Stonehenge.
These are made of this same sugar-sandstone.

But where did the sandstone come from ? You may
say, it "grew " of itself in our sands and gravels ; but
it certainly did not " grow " on the top of a bare chalk
down. The Druids must have brought the stones
thither, then, from neighbouring gravel-pits. They
brought them, no doubt : but not from gravel-pits.
The stones are found loose on the downs on the top of
the bare chalk, in places where they plainly have not
been put by man.

For instance, near Marlborough is a long valley in
the chalk, which, for perhaps half a mile, is full of
huge blocks of this sandstone, lying about on the turf.
The " gray wethers " the shepherds call them. One
look at them would show you that no man's hand had
put them there. They look like a river of stone, if I
may so speak; as if some mighty flood had rolled
them along down the valley, and there left them behind
as it sunk.

Now, whence did they come ?

Many answers have been given to that question.
It was supposed by many learned men that they had
been brought from the sandstone mountains of Wales,
like the rolled pebbles of which I spoke just now.
But the answer to that was, that these great stones
are not rolled : they are all squarish, more or less ;
their edges are often sharp and fresh, instead of being
polished almost into balls, as they would have been in

XL] ICE ACTION. 273

rolling two hundred miles along a sea-bottom, before
such, a tremendous current as would have been needed
to carry them.

Then rose a very clever guess. They must have
been carried by icebergs, as much silt and stones (we
know) has been carried, and have dropped, like them,
to the bottom, when the icebergs melted.

There is great reason in that ; but we have cause
now to be certain that they did not come from Wales.
That they are not pieces of a rock older than the
chalk, but much younger; that they were very
probably formed close to where they now lie.

Now — how do we know that ?

If you are not tired with all this close reasoning, I
will tell you. — If you are, say so : but as I said at
first, I want to show you what steady and sharp head-
work this same geology requires, even in the nearest
gravel- pit.

Well, then. I do not think our gravel-pit will tell
us what we want : but I know one which will.

You have all heard of Lady Grenville's lovely place,
Dropmore, beyond Maidenhead ; where the taste of
that good and great man, the late Lord Grenville., con-
verted into a paradise of landscape-gardening art a
barren common, full of clay and gravel-pits. Lord
Grenville wanted stones for rockwork; in those pits
he found some blocks, of the same substance as those
of Stonehenge or Pirb right. And they contain the
answer. The upper surface of most of them is the
usual clear sugar-sandstone: but the under surface
of many has round pebbles imbedded in it, looking
just like plums in a pudding; the smaller above and
the larger below, as if they had sunk slowly through

274 THOUGHTS IN A GEAVEL.PIT. [xi.

the fluid sand, before the whole mass froze, as it were,
suddenly together. And these pebbles are nothing
else than rolled chalk flints.

That settles the matter. The pebbles could not
come from Wales; there are no flints there. They
could not have been made before the chalk ; for out
of the chalk they came; and the only explanation which
is left to us, I believe, is, that over the tops of the chalk
downs; over our heads where we stand now, there once
stretched layers of sand and gravel, " Tertiary strata,"
as I have been calling them to you ; and among them
layers of this same hard sandstone.

When the floods came they must have swept away
all these soft sands and gravels (possibly to make the
Bagshot sands, of which I shall speak presently), and
left the chalk downs bare; but while they had strength
to move the finer particles, they had not generally
strength to move these sandstone blocks, but let them
drop through, and remain upon the freshly-bared floor
of chalk, as the only relics of a tertiary land long since
swept away ; while some were carried off, possibly by
icebergs, as far as Pirbright, and dropped, as the ice-
bergs melted, both there, at Dogmersfield, and also,
though few and small, in Eversley and the neighbour-
hood.

But how came these tertiary sandstones to be so
very hard, while the strata around them are so soft ?

Ladies and gentlemen, I know no more than you.
Experience seems to say that stone will not harden
into that sugary crystalline state, save under the influ-
ence of great heat : but I do not know how the heat
should have got to that layer in particular. Possibly
there may have been eruptions of steam, of boiling

II.] LONDON CLAY BED. 275

water holding silex (flint) in solution — a very rare
occurrence : but something similar is still going on in
the famous Geysers or boiling springs of Iceland.
However, I have no proof that this was the cause. I
suppose we shall find out some day how it happened ;
for we must never despair of finding out anything
which depends on facts.

Part of the town of Odiham, and of North Warn-
borough, stands, I believe, upon these lower beds,
which are called by geologists the Woolwich and Read-
ing beds, and the Plastic clays, from the good brick
earth which is so often found among them. But as
soon as you get to Hook Common, and to Dogmersfield
Park, you enter on a fresh deposit ; the great bed of
the London clay.

I give you a rough section, from a deep well at
Dogmersfield House ; from which you may see how
steeply the chalk dips down here under the clay, so
that Odiham stands, as it were, on the chalk beach of
the clay sea.

In boring that well there were pierced :

Forty feet of the upper sands (the Bagshot sands),
of which I shall speak presently.

Three hundred and thirty feet of London clay.

Then about forty feet of mottled clays and sands.

Whether the chalk was then reached, I do not
know. It must have been close below. But these
mottled clays and sands abound in water (being indeed
the layer which supplies the great breweries in London,
and those soda-water bottles on dumb-waiters which
squirt in Trafalgar Square) ; and (I suppose) the water
being reached, the boring ceased.

Now, this great bed of London clay, even more

T 2

276 THOUGHTS IN A GRAVEL-P1T. [xi.

than the sands below it, deserves the title of a new
creation.

As a proof — some of you may recollect, when the
South- Western Railway was in making, seeing shells
— some of them large and handsome ones — Nautili,
taken out of the London clay cutting near Wiuchfield.

Nautili similar to them (but not the same) are now
only found in the hottest parts of the Indian seas; and
what is more, not one of those shells is the same as
the shells you find in the chalk. Throughout this
great bed of London clay, the shells, the remains of
plants and animals, are altogether a new creation. If
you look carefully at the London clay shells, you will
be struck with their general likeness to fresh East
Indian shells ; and rightly so. They do approach our
modern live shells in form, far more than any which
preceded them ; and indeed, a few of the London clay
shells exist still in foreign seas ; in the beds, again,
above the clay, you will meet with still more species
which are yet alive ; while in the chalk, and below the
chalk, you never meet, I believe, with a single recent
shell. It is for this reason that the London clay is said
to be Eocene, that is, the dawn of the new creation.

The chalk, I told you, seems to have been deposited
at the bottom of a still and deep ocean. But the
London clay, we shall find, was deposited in a com-
paratively shallow sea, least in depth toward High
Clere on the west, and deepening towards London and
the mouth of the Thames.

For not only is the clay deeper as you travel east-
ward, but — and this is a matter to which geologists
attach great importance — the character of the shells
differs in different parts of the clay.

xi.] CHANGES OF CLIMATE. 277

You must know that certain sorts of shells live in
deep water, and certain in shallow. You may prove
this to yourselves, on a small scale, whenever you go
to the seaside. You will find that the shell which crawl
on the rocks about high-water mark are different from
those which you find at low-tide mark ; and those again
different from the shells which are brought up by the
oyster- dredgers from the sea outside. Now, the lower
part of the clay, near here, contains shallow-water
shells : but if you went forty miles to the eastward,
you would find in the corresponding lower beds of the
clay, deep-water shells, and far above them, shallow-
water shells such as you find here : a fact which shows
plainly that this end of the clay sea was shallowest,
and therefore first filled up.

But again — and this is a very curious fact — between
the time of the Plastic clays and sands, with their
oyster-beds and black pebbles, and that of the London
clay, great changes had taken place. The Plastic clay
and sands were deposited during a period of earth-
quake, of upheaval and subsidence of ancient lands ;
and therefore of violent currents and flood waves,
seemingly rushing down from, or round the shores of
that Wealden island to the south of us, on the shore of
which island Odiham once stood. We know this from
the great irregularity of the beds : while the absence
of that irregularity proves to us that the London clay
was deposited in a quiet sea.

But more. A great change in the climate of this
country had taken place meanwhile ; slowly perhaps :
but still it had taken place.

In the lowest clay above the chalk are found at
Beading many leaves, and buds, and seeds of trees,

278 THOUGHTS IN A GRAVEL-PIT. [xi.

showing that there was dry land near ; and these trees,
as far as the best botanists can guess, were trees like
those we have in England now. Not of the same
species, of course : but still trees belonging to a tem-
perate climate, which had its regular warm summer
and cold winter.

But before the London clay had been all deposited,
this temperate climate had changed to a tropical one ;
and the plants and animals of the upper part of the
London clay had begun to resemble rather those o£
the mouths of the African slave-rivers.

Extraordinary as this is, it is certainly true.

We know that the country near the mouth of the
Thames, and probably the land round us here, was low
rich soil, some half under water, some overflowed by
rivers; some by fresh or brackish pools. We know
all this ; for we find the shells which belong to a shal-
low sea, mixed with fresh-water ones. We know, too,
that the climate of this rich lowland was a tropical
one. We know that the neighbourhood of the Isle of
Sheppey, at the mouth of the Thames, was covered
with rich tropic vegetation; with screw pines and
acacias, canes and gourds, tenanted by opossums, bats,
and vultures : that huge snakes twined themselves
along the ground, tortoises dived in the pools, and
crocodiles basked on the muds, while the neighbouring
seas swarmed with sharks as huge and terrible as those
of a West Indian shore.

It is all very wonderful, ladies and gentlemen : but
so it is : and all we can say is, with the Mussulman —
" God is great."

And then — when, none knows but God — there came

XL] EOCENE SANDS. 279

a time in which some convulsion of nature changed tli9
course of the sea currents, and probably destroyed a
vast tract of land between England and France, and
probably also, that sunken island of Atlantis of which
old Plato dreamed — the vast tract which connected for
ages Ireland, Cornwall, Brittany, and Portugal. That
convulsion covered up the rich clays with those barren
sands and gravels, which now rise in flat and dreary
steppes, on the Beacon Hill, Aldershot Moors, Hart-
ford Bridge Flat, Frimley ridges, and Windsor Forest.
That rich old world was all swept away, and instead of
it desolation and barrenness, piling up slowly on its
ruins a desert of sand and shingle, rising inch by inch
out of a lifeless sea. There is something very awful
to me in the barrenness of those Bagshot sands, after
the rich tropic life of the London clay. Not a fossil is
to be found in them for miles. Save a few shells, I
believe, near Pirbright, there is not a hint that a living
being inhabited that doleful sea.

Bat do not suppose, gentlemen and ladies, that we
have yet got our gravel-pit made, or that the way-worn
pebbles of which it is composed are near the end of
their weary journey. Poor old stones ! Driven out of
their native chalk, rolled for ages on a sea-beach, they
have tried to get a few centuries' sleep in the Eocene
sands on the top of the chalk hills behind us, while the
London clay was being deposited peacefully in the
tropic sea below ; and behold, they are swept out, once
more, and hurled pell-mell upon the clay, two hundred
feet over our heads.

Over our heads, remember. We have come now to
a time when Hartford Bridge Flats stretched away to

280 THOUGHTS IN A GKAVEL-PIT. [xi.

the Beacon Hill, and many a mile to the south-east-
ward— even down into Kent, and stretched also over
Winchfield and Dogmersfield hither.

What broke them up ? What furrowed out their
steep side-valleys ? What formed the magnificent
escarpment of the Beacon Hill, or the lesser one of
Finchamstead Ridges ? What swept away all but a
thin cap of them on the upper part of Dogmersfield
Park, another under Winchfield House ; another at
Bearwood, and so forth ?

The convulsions of a third world ; more fertile in
animal life than those which preceded it : but also,
more terrible and rapid, if possible, in its changes.

Of this third world, the one which (so to speak)
immediately preceded our own, we know little yet.
Its changes are so complicated that geologists have as
yet hardly arranged them. But what we can see, I will
sketch for you shortly.

A great continent to the south — England, probably
an island at the beginning of the period, united to the
continent by new beds — the Mammoth ranging up to
where we now stand.

Then a period of upheaval. The German Ocean
becomes dry land. The Thames, a far larger river
than now, runs far eastward to join the Seine, and the
Rhine, and other rivers, which altogether flow north-
ward, in one enormous stream, toward the open sea
between Scotland and Norway.

And with this, a new creation of enormous quad-
rupeds, as yet unknown. Countless herds of elephants
pastured by the side of that mighty river, where now
the Norfolk fisherman dredges their teeth and bones
far out in open sea. The hippopotamus floundered in

xi.] PEEIODS OF UPHEAVAL. 281

the Severn, the rhinoceros ranged over the south-
western counties ; enormous elk and oxen, of species
now extinct, inhabited the vast fir and larch forests
which stretched from Norfolk to the farthest part of
Wales ; hyenas and bears double the size of our
modern ones, and here and there the sabre-toothed
tiger, now extinct, prowled out of the caverns in the
limestone hills, to seek their bulky prey.

We see, too, a period — whether the same as this, or
after it, I know not yet — in which the mountains of
Wales and Cumberland rose to the limits of eternal
frost, and Snowdon was indeed Snowdon, an alp down
whose valleys vast glaciers spread far and wide ; while
the reindeer of Lapland, the marmot of the Alps, and
the musk ox of Hudson's Bay, fed upon alpine plants,
a few of whose descendants still survive, as tokens of
the long past age of ice. And at every successive up-
heaval of the western mountains the displaced waters
of the ocean swept over the lower lands, filling the
valley of the Thames and of the Wey with vast beds
of drift gravel, containing among its chalk flints,
fragments of stone from every rock between here
and Wales, teeth of elephants, skulls of ox and musk
ox ; while icebergs, breaking away from the glaciers
of the Welsh Alps, sailed down over the spot where
we now are, dropping their imbedded stones and silt,
to confuse more utterly than before the records of a
world rocking and throbbing above the shocks of the
nether fire.

At last the convulsions get weak. The German
Ocean becomes sea once more; the north-western Alps
sink again to a level far lower even than their present
one ; only to rise again, but not so high as before ;

282 THOUGHTS IN A GRAVEL-PIT. [XL

sea-beaches and sea-shells fill many of our lower
valleys ; whales by hundreds are stranded (as in the
Farnham vale) where is now dry land. Gradually the
sunken land begins to rise again, and falls perhaps
again, and rises again after that, more and more
gently each time, till as it were the panting earth,
worn out with the fierce passions of her fiery youth,
has sobbed herself to sleep once more, and this new
world of man is made. And among it, I know not
when, or by what diluvial wave out of hundreds which
swept the Pleistocene earth, was deposited our little
gravel-pit, from which we started on our journey
through three worlds.

When?

Enough for us that He knows when, in whose
hand are the times and the seasons — God the Father
of the spirits of all flesh.

And now, ladies and gentlemen, take from hence a
lesson. I have brought you a long and a strange road.
Starting from this seemingly uninteresting pit, we have
come upon the records of three older worlds, and on
hints of worlds far older yet. We have come to them
by no theories, no dreams of the fancy, but by plain
honest reasoning, from plain honest facts. That won-
derful things had happened, we could see: but why they
had happened, we saw not. When we began to ask
the reason of this thing or of that, remember how we
had to stop, and laying our hands upon our mouths,
only say with the Mussulman : " God is great." We
pick our steps, by lanthorn light indeed, and slowly,
but still surely and safely, along a dark and difficult
road: but just as we are beginning to pride ourselves
on having found our way so cleverly, we come to an

xi.] REVERENCE AND HUMILITY. 283

edge of darkness ; and see before our feet a bottomless
abyss, down which our feeble lanthorn will not throw
its light a yard.

Such is true science. Is it a study to make men
conceited and self-sufficient ? Believe it not. If a
scientific man, or one who calls himself so, be con-
ceited, the conceit was there before the science ; part
of his natural defects : and if it stays there long after
he has really given himself to the patient study of
nature, then is he one of those of whom Solomon has
said : " Though you pound a fool in a mortar among
wheat with a pestle, yet will not his folly depart from
him."

For what more fit to knock the conceit out of a
student, than being pounded by these same hard facts
— which tell him just enough to let him know — how
little he knows ? What more fit to make a man
patient, humble, reverent, than being stopped short,
as every man of science is, after each half-dozen steps,
by some tremendous riddle which he cannot explain —
which he may have to wait years to get explained — •
which as far as he can see will never be explained
at all ?

The poet says : " An undevout astronomer is mad,"
and he says truth. It is only those who know a little
of nature, who fancy that they know much. I have
heard a young man say, after hearing a few popular
chemical lectures, and seeing a few bottle and squirt
experiments : Oh, water — water is only oxygen and
hydrogen ! — as if he knew all about it. While the true
chemist would smile sadly enough at the youth's
hasty conceit, and say in his heart : " Well, he is a
lucky fellow. If he knows all about it, it is more

284, THOUGHTS IN A GRAVEL-PIT. [xi.

than I do. I don't know what oxygen is, or hydrogen,
either. I don't even know whether there are any
such things at all. I see certain effects in my experi-
ments which I must attribute to some cause, and I call
that cause oxygen, because I must call it something ;
and other effects which I must attribute to another
cause, and I call that hydrogen. But as for oxygen,
I don't know whether it really exists. I think it very
possible that it is only an effect of something else —
another form of a something, which seems to make
phosphorus, iodine, bromine, and certain other sub-
stances : and as for hydrogen — I know as little about
it. I don't know but what all the metals, gold, silver,
iron, tin, sodium, potassium, and so forth, are not
different forms of hydrogen, or of something else which
is the parent of hydrogen. In fact, I know but very
little about the matter ; except this, that I do know
very little ; and that the more I experiment, and the
more I analyse, the more unexpected puzzles and
wonders I find, and the more I expect to find till my
dying day. True, I know a vast number of facts and
laws, thank God ; and some very useful ones among
them : but as to the ultimate and first causes of those
facts and laws, I know no more than the shepherd-boy
outside ; and can say no more than he does, when he
reads in the Psalms at school : " I, and all around me,
are fearfully and wonderfully made ; marvellous are
Thy works, and that my soul knoweth right well."

And so, my friends, though I have seemed to talk
to you of great matters this night ; of the making and
the destruction of world after world : yet what does all
I have said come to? I have not got one step beyond
what the old Psalmist learnt amid the earthquakes and

«.] MOEAL LESSON OF ALL SCIENCE. 285

volcanoes of the pastures and the forests of Palestine,
three thousand years ago. I have not added to his
words ; I have only given you new facts to prove that
he had exhausted the moral lesson of the subject, when
he said :

These all wait upon thee, that thou mayest give
them their meat in due season.

Thou givest, and they gather : thou openest thy
hand, and they are filled with good.

Thou hidest thy face, they are troubled; thou
takest away their breath ; they die and return to their
dust.

Thou sendest forth thy spirit, they are created; and
thou renewest the face of the earth.

But — The glory of the Lord shall endure for ever.
The Lord shall rejoice in his works. Amen.

HOW TO STUDY NATUKAL HISTORY.

HOW TO STUDY NATURAL HISTORY/

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, I speak to you to-night as
to persons assembled, somewhat, no doubt, for amuse-
ment, but still more for instruction. Institutions such
as this were originally founded for the purpose of
instruction ; to supply to those who wish to educate
themselves some of the advantages of a regular course
of scholastic or scientific training, by means of classes-
and of lectures.

I myself prize classes far higher than I do lectures.
From my own experience, a lecture is often a very
dangerous method of teaching; it is apt to engender in
the mind of men ungrounded conceit and sciolism, or
the bad habit of knowing about subjects without really
knowing the subject itself. A young man hears an
interesting lecture, and carries away from it doubtless a
great many new facts and results : but he really must
not go home fancying himself a much wiser man ; and
why ? Because he has only heard the lecturer's side of
the story. He has been forced to take the facts and
the results on trust. He has not examined the facts for
* Lecture delivered at Reading, 184.6.

290 HOW TO STUDY NATURAL HISTORY. [xn.

himself. He has had no share in the process by
which the results were arrived at. In short, he has
not gone into the real scientia, that is, the " knowing1 3>
of the matter. He has gained a certain quantity of
second-hand information : but he has gained nothing in
mental training, nothing in the great " art of learning,"
the art of finding out things for himself, and of
discerning truth from falsehood. Of course, where the
lecture is a scientific one, illustrated by diagrams, this
defect is not so extreme : but still the lecturer who
shows you experiments, is forced to choose those
which shall be startling and amusing, rather than im-
portant ; he is seldom or never able, unless he is a man
of at once the deepest science and the most extraordinary
powers of amusing, to give you those experiments in
the proper order which will unfold the subject to you
step by step; and after all, an experiment is worth
very little to you, unless you perform it yourself, ask
questions about it, or vary it a little to solve difficulties
which arise in your own mind.

Now mind — I do not say all this to make you give up
attending lectures. Heaven forbid. They amuse, that
is, they turn the mind off from business ; they relax it,
and as it were bathe and refresh it with new thoughts,
after the day's drudgery or the day's commonplaces ;
they fill it with pleasant and healthful images for after-
thought. Above all, they make one feel what a fair,
wide, wonderful world one lives in ; how much there is
to be known, and how little one knows ; and to the
earnest man suggest future subjects of study. I only
ask you not to expect from lectures what they can
never give ; but as to what they can give, I consider,
I assure you, the lecturer's vocation a most honourable

xii.] TEE AET OP LEARNING. 291

one in the present day, even if we look on Mm as on a
mere advertiser of nature's wonders. As such. I appear
here to-night ; not to teach you natural history ; for
that you can only teach yourselves : but to set before
you the subject and its value, and if possible, allure
some of you to the study of it.

I have said that lectures do not supply mental
training; that only personal study can do that. The
next question is, What study ? And that is a question
which I do not answer in a hurry, when I say, The
study of natural history. It is not, certainly, a study
which a young man entering on the business of self-
education would be likely to take up. To him, naturally,
man is the most important subject. His first wish is to
know the human world ; to know what men are, what
they have thought, what they have done. And there-
fore, you find that poetry, history, politics, and
philosophy are the matters which most attract the
self-guided student. I do not blame him, but he seems
to me to be beginning at the middle, rather than at
the beginning. I fell into the same fault myself more
than once, when I was younger, and meddled in
matters too high for me, instead of refraining my soul,
and keeping it low ; so I can sympathise with others
who do so. But I can assure them that they will find
such lofty studies do them good only in proportion as
they have first learnt the art of learning. Unless
they have learnt to face facts manfully, to discriminate
between them skilfully, to draw conclusions from them
rigidly ; unless they have learnt in all things to look,
not for what they would like to be true, but for what
is true, because God has done it, and it cannot be un-
done— then they will be in danger of taking up only the

u 2

292 HOW TO STUDY NATURAL HISTORY. [xff.

books which suit their own prejudices — and every one
has his prejudices — and using them, not to correct their
own notions, but to corroborate and pamper them ; to
confirm themselves in their first narrow guesses, instead
of enlarging those guesses into certainty. The son of
a Tory turn will read Tory books, the son of a Radical
turn Radical books ; and the green spectacles of party
and prejudice will be deepened in hue as he reads on,
instead of being thrown away for the clear white glass
of truth, which will show him reason in all honest sides,
and good in all honest men.

But, says the young man, I wish to be wide-minded
and wide-hearted — I study for that very purpose. I
will be fair, I will be patient,. I will hear all sides ere
I judge. And I doubt not that he speaks honestly.
But (I quote with all reverence) though the spirit be
willing, the flesh is weak. Studies which have to do
with man's history, man's thoughts, man's feelings,
are too exciting, too personal, often, alas, too tragical,
to allow us to read them calmly at first. The men and
women of whom we read are so like ourselves (for the
human heart is the same in every age), that we uncon-
sciously begin to love or hate them in the first five
minutes, and read history as we do a novel, hurrying
on to see when the supposed hero and heroine get
safely married, and the supposed villain safely hanged,
at the end of the chapter, having forgotten all the
while, in our haste, to ascertain which is the hero and
which is the villain. Mary Queen of Scots was "beau-
tiful and unfortunate " — what heart would not bleed
for a beautiful woman in trouble ? Why stop to ask
whether she brought it on herself? She was seventeen
years in prison. Why stop to ascertain what sort of a

XIL] FACTS OR SENTIMENT. 293

prison it was ? And as for her guilt, the famous Casket
Letters were, of course, a vile forgery. Impossible that
they could be true. Hoot down the cold-hearted, and
disagreeable, and troublesome man of facts, who will
persist in his stupid attempt to disenchant you, and
repeat — But the Casket Letters were not a forgery, and
we can prove it, if you will but listen to the facts. Her
prison, as we will show you (if you will be patient and
listen to facts), consisted in greater pomp and luxury
than that of most noblemen, with horses, hounds, books,
music, liberty to hunt and amuse herself in every way,
even in intriguing with every court of Europe, as we
can show you again, if you will be patient and listen
to facts. And she herself was a very wicked and false
woman, an adulteress and a murderess (though fearfully
ill-trained in early youth), who sowed the wind, poor
wretch, from girlhood to old age, and therefore reaped
the whirlwind, receiving the just reward of her deeds.
Catherine of Russia, meanwhile, instead of being
beautiful and unfortunate, was only handsome and
successful. Brand her as a disgrace to human nature.
The morals and ways of the two were pretty much on a
par, with these exceptions in Catherine's favour — that
she had strong passions, Mary none; that she lived in
outer darkness and practical heathendom, while Mary
had the light shining all round her, and refused it
deliberately again and again. What matter to the
sentimentalist ? Hiss the stupid hard-hearted man of
facts, by all means. What if he be right ? He has
no business to be right; we will consider him wrong
accordingly, of our own sovereign will and pleasure.
For after all, if we had the facts put before us (says the
conscience of many a hearer), we could not judge of

294 HOW TO STUDY NATUEAL HISTORY. [xii.

them; we read to be amused and instructed, not to
study cases like so many barristers. So is history read.
And so, alas, is history written, too often, for want of a
steady and severe training which would enable people
to judge dispassionately of facts. In politics the case
is the same. In poetry, which appeals more directly
to the feelings, it must needs be still worse ; as has
been shown sadly enough of late by the success of
several poems, in which every possible form of bad
taste has only met with unbounded admiration from
the many who have not had their senses exercised to
discern between good and evil.

Now what seems to me to be wanted for young
minds, is a study in which no personal likes or dislikes
shall tempt them out of. the path of mental honesty; a
study in which they shall be free to look at facts
exactly as they are, and draw their conclusions
patiently and dispassionately. And such a study I
have found in that of natural history.

Do not fancy it, I beg you, an easy thing to judge
fairly of facts ; even to discover the facts at all, when
they are staring you in the face ; and to see what it is
that you do see. Any lawyer will tell you, that if you
ask three honest men to bear testimony concerning an
event which happened but yesterday, none of them, if
he be at all an interested party, will give you exactly
the same account of it : not that he wishes to say what
is untrue ; but that different parts of the whole matter
having struck each man with different force, a different
picture has been left on each man's memory. I have
been utterly astounded of late, in investigating these
strange stories of table-turning and spirit-rapping, to
find how even clear-headed and well-instructed persona

xii.] MODERN PHARISEES AND SADDUCEES. 295

(as one had fancied them) become unable to examine
fairly into a thing, the moment the desire to believe
has entered the heart; and how no amount of mere
cultivation, if the scientific habit of mind be wanting1,
can prevent people from finding (as in table-turning)
miracles in the most simple mechanical accidents ; or
from becoming (as in spirit-rapping) the dupes of the
most clumsy, palpable, and degrading impostures,
even after they have been exposed over and over
again in print. Humiliating, indeed, it is, in this so
self-confident and boastful nineteenth century, amid
steam-engines, railroads, electric telegraphs, and all
the wonders of our inductive science, to find exploded
superstitions leaping back into life even more mon-
strous and irrational than in past ages, and to see our
modern Pharisees and Sadducees, like those in Judea
of old, seeking after a sign of an unseen world ; and
beiug unable to find one either in the heaven above or
in the earth beneath, discovering it at last (I am
almost ashamed to speak the words) under the parlour-
table.

Against such extravagances, and against the loose
sentimental tone of mind which begets them, hardly
anything would be a better safeguard than the habitual
study of nature. The chemist, the geologist, the
botanist, the zoologist, has to deal with facts which
will make him master of them, and of himself, only in
proportion as he obeys them. Many of you doubtless
know Lord Bacon's famous apothegm, Nature is only
conquered by obeying her ; and will understand me
when I say, that you cannot understand, much less
use for scientific purposes, the meanest pebble, unless
you first obey that pebble. Paradoxical; but true.

296 HOW TO STUDY NATURAL HISTORY. [xir.

See this pebble which I hold in my hand, picked up
out of the street as I came along ; it shall be my only
object to-night. There the thing is ; and is as it is,
and in no other way; and such it will be, and so it
will behave and act, in spite of me, and all my fancies
about it, and notions of what it ought to have been
like, and what it ought to have done. It is a thought
of God's; and strong by the eternal laws of matter,
which are the will of God. It has the whole universe,
sun, and stars, and all, backing it by God's appoint-
ment, to keep it where it is and what it is ; and till (as
Lord Bacon has it) I have discovered and obeyed the
will of God revealed in that pebble, it is to me a riddle
more insoluble than the Sphinx's, a fortress more im-
pregnable than Sevastopol. I may crush it : but
destroying is not conquering : but I cannot even mend
the road with it prudently, until I have discovered
whether Almighty God has made it fit to mend roads
with. I may have the genius of a Plato or of a Shake-
speare, but all my genius will not avail to penetrate
that pebble, or see anything in it but a little round
dirty stone, until I have treated the pebble with
reverence, as a thing independent of my likes and dis-
likes, fancies, and aspirations; and have asked it
humbly to tell me its story, taking counsel meanwhile
of hundreds of kindred pebbles, each as silent and re-
served as this one ; and watched and listened patiently,
through many mistakes and misreadings, to what it has
to say for itself, and what God has made it to be. And
then at last that little black rounded pebble, from the
street outside, may, and will surely, if I be patient and
honest enough, tell me a tale wilder and grander than
any which I could have dreamed for myself; will

xi!.] THE STOEY OF A PEBBLE. 297

shame the meanness of my imagination, by the awful
magnificence of God's facts, and say to me :

" Ages and ^Eons since, thousands on thousands of
years before there was a man to till the ground, I the
little pebble was a living sponge, in the milky depths
of the great chalk ocean; and hundreds of living
atomies, each more fantastic than a ghost-painter's
dreams, swam round me, and grew on me, and multi-
plied, till I became a tiny hive of wonders, each one of
which would take you a life to understand. And then,
I cannot yet tell you how, and till I tell you you will
never know, the delicate flint-needles in my skin
gathered other particles of flint to them, and I and all
my inhabitants became a stone; and the chalk-mud
settled round us, I know not how, and covered us in ;
and for ages on ages I lay buried in the nether dark,
and felt the glow of the nether fires, and was cracked
and tossed by a hundred earthquakes. Again and again
I have been part of an island, and then again sunk
beneath the sea, to be upheaved again after long
centuries, till I saw the light once more, and dropped
from the face of some chalk cliff far away among high
hills which have long since been swept off the face of
the earth, and was tossed by currents till I became a
pebble on the beach, while Reading was a sand-bank
in a shallow sea. There I lay and rolled till I was
rounded, for many a century more ; till flood after
flood past over me, and a new earth was made ; and I
was mixed up with fresh flints from wasting chalk-
hills, and with freestones from the Gloucestershire
wolds, and with quartz-boulders from the mountains
of Wales, while over me swept the carcases of drowned
elephants and bisons, and many a monstrous beast;

298 HOW TO STUDY NATUBAL HISTORY. [xiu

and above me floated uprooted palms, and tropic fruits-
and seeds, and the wrecks of a dying world. And then
there came another age —

And it grew wondrous cold ;

And ice mast-high came floating by,

As green as emerald ;

and as the icebergs melted in the sun, the stones and
the silt fell out of them, and covered me up ; and I
was in darkness once more, vexed by many an earth-
quake, till I became part of this brave English land.
And now I am a pebble here in Reading street, to be-
ground beneath the wheels of busy men : and yet you
cannot kill me, or hinder my fulfilling the law which
cannot be broken. This year I am a pebble in the
street ; and next year I shall be dust upon the fields
above ; and the year after that I shall be alive again,
and rise from the ground as fair green wheat-stems,
bearing up food for the use of man. And even after
that you cannot kill me. The trampled and sodden
straw will rot only to enter into a new life ; and I
shall pass through a fresh cycle of strange adventures,
age after age, till time shall be no more; doing my
work in my generation, and fulfilling to the last the
will of God, as faithfully as when I was the water-
breathing sponge in the abysses of the old chalk sea."
All this and more, gentlemen and ladies, the pebble
could tell to you, and will : but ne is old and venerable,
and like old men, he wishes 10 be approached with
respect, and does not like to be questioned too much
or too rapidly ; so that you must not be offended if you
meet with more than one rebuff from him ; or if he-
keeps stubborn silence, till he has seen that you are a

xii.] VALUE OF IMAGINATION. 229

modest and attentive person, to whom it is worth while
to open a little of his forty or fifty thousand years'
experience.

Second only to the good effect of this study on the
logical faculty, seems to me to be its effect on the
imagination. Not merely in such objects as the pebble,
whose history I have so hastily, but I must add faith-
fully, sketched ; but in the tiniest piece of mould on a-
decayed fruit, the tiniest animalcule from the stagnant
pool, will imagination find inexhaustible wonders, and
fancy a fairy-land. And I beg my elder hearers not
to look on this as light praise. Imagination is a valuable
thing ; and even if it were not, it is a thing, a real
thing, a faculty which every one has, and with whick
you must do something. You cannot ignore it ; it will
assert its own existence. You will be wise not to
neglect it in young children ; for if you do not provide
wholesome food for it, it will find unwholesome food
for itself. I know that many, especially men of busi-
ness, are inclined to sneer at it, and ask what is the
use of it ? The simple answer is, God has made it ;
and He has made nothing in vain. But you will find
that in practice, in action, in business, imagination is
a most useful faculty, and is so much mental capital,
whensoever it is properly trained. Consider but this
one thing, that without imagination no man can pos-
sibly invent even the pettiest object ; that it is one of
the faculties which essentially raises man above the
brutes, by enabling him to create for himself; that
the first savage who ever made a hatchet must have
imagined that hatchet to himself ere he began it ; that
every new article of commerce, every new opening for
trade, must be arrived at by acts of imagination; by

SCO HOW TO STUDY NATUKAL HISTORY. [xn.

the very same faculty which the poet or the painter
employs, only on a different class of objects ; remember
that this faculty is present in some strength in every
mind of any power, in every mind which can do more
than follow helplessly in the beaten track, and do
nothing but what it has seen others do already : and
then see whether it be not worth while to give the
young a study which above all others is fitted to keep
this important and universal faculty in health. Now,
from fifty to five-and-twenty years ago, under the
influence of the Franklin and Edgeworth school of
education, imagination was at a discount. That school
was a good school enough : but here was one of its
faults. It taught people to look on imagination as
quite a useless, dangerous, unpractical, bad thing, a
sort of mental disease. And now, as is usual after an
unfair depreciation of anything, has come a revolu-
tion; and an equally unfair glorifying of the imagina-
tion ; the present generation have found out suddenly
that the despised faculty is worth something, and
therefore are ready to believe it worth everything ; so
that nowadays, to judge from the praise heaped on
some poets, the mere possession of imagination, how-
ever ill regulated, will atone for every error of false
taste, bad English, carelessness for truth; and even
for coarseness, blasphemy, and want of common
morality ; and it is no longer charity, but fancy, which
is to cover the multitude of sins.

The fact is, that youth will always be the period of
imagination ; and the business of a good education will
always be to prevent that imagination from being
thrown inward, and producing a mental fever, diseasing
itself and the whole character by feeding on its own

xn.] THE FAIRY-LAND OP SCIENCE. 301

fancies, its own day dreams, its own morbid feelings,
its likes and dislikes ; even if it do not take at last to
viler food, to French novels, and lawless thoughts,
which are but too common, alas ! though we will not
speak of them here.

To turn the imagination not inwards, but outwards j
to give it a class of objects which may excite wonder,
reverence, the love of novelty and of discovering, with-
out heating the brain or exciting the passions — this is
one of the great problems of education ; and I believe
from experience that the study of natural history
supplies in great part what we want. The earnest
naturalist is pretty sure to have obtained that great
need of all men, to get rid of self. He who, after the
hours of business, finds himself with a mind relaxed
and wearied, will not be tempted to sit at home dream-
ing over impossible scenes of pleasure, or to go for
amusement to haunts of coarse excitement, if he have
in every hedge-bank, and woodland, and running stream,
in every bird among the boughs, and every cloud above
his head, stores of interest which will enable him to
forget awhile himself, and man, and all the cares, even
all the hopes of life, and to be alone with the inexhaus-
tible beauty and glory of Nature, and of God who made
her. An hour or two every day spent after business-
hours in botany, geology, entomology, at the telescope
or the microscope, is so much refreshment gained for
the mind for to-morrow's labour, so much rest for
irritated or anxious feelings, often so much saved from
frivolity or sin. And how easy this pursuit. How
abundant the subjects of it ! Look round you here.
Within the reach of every one of you are wonders
beyond all poets' dreams. Not a hedge-bank but has

302 HOW TO STUDY NATURAL HISTORY. [xn.

its hundred species of plants, each different and each
beautiful ; and when you tire of them — if you ever can
tire — a trip into the meadows by the Thames, with the
rich vegetation of their dikes, floating flower-beds of
every hue, will bring you as it were into a new world,
new forms, new colours, new delight. You ask why this
is ? And you find yourself at once involved in questions
of soil and climate, which lead you onward, step by step,
into the deepest problems of geology and chemistry. In
entomology, too, if you have any taste for the beauties
of form and colour, any fondness for mechanical and
dynamical science, the insects, even to the smallest,
will supply endless food for such likings ; while their
instincts and their transformations, as well as the
equally wondrous chemical transformation of salts and
gases into living plants, which agricultural chemistry
teaches you, will tempt you to echo every day Mephi-
stopheles's magic song, when he draws wine out of the
table in Auersbach's cellar :

Wine is grapes, and grapes are wood —
The wooden board yields wine as good:
It is but a deeper glance
Into Nature's countenance.
All is plain to him who seeth ;
Lift the veil and look beneath,
And behold, the wise man saith,
Miracles, if you have faith.

Believe me you need not go so far to find more than
you will ever understand. An hour's summer walk,
in the company of some one who knows what to look
for and how to look for it, by the side of one of those
stagnant dikes in the meadows below, would furnish
you with subjects for a month's investigation, in the

xir.] NATURE IS NEVER DEAD. 803

form of plants, shells, and animalcules, on each of
which a whole volume might be written. And even at
this seemingly dead season of the year, fancy not that
nature is dead — not even that she sleeps awhile.
Every leaf which drops from the bough, to return again
into its gases and its dust, is working out chemical
problems which have puzzled a Boyle and a Lavoisier,
and about which a Liebig and a Faraday will now tell
you that they have but some dim guess, and that they
stand upon the threshold of knowledge like (as Newton
said of himself) children gathering a few pebbles, upon
the shore of an illimitable sea. In every woodland,
too, innumerable fungi are at work, raising from the
lower soil rich substances, which, strewed on the
surface by quick decay, will form food for plants
higher than themselves ; while they, by their variety
and beauty, both of form and colour, might well form
studies for any painter, and by the obscure laws of
their reproduction, studies for any philosopher. Why,
there is not a heap of dead leaves among which by
picking it through carefully you might not find some
twenty species of delicate and elegant land-shells ;
hardly a tree-foot at which, among the moss and mould,
you might not find the chrysalides of beautiful moths,
where caterpillars have crawled down the trunk in
autumn, to lie there self-buried and die to live again
next spring in a new and fairer shape. And if you
cannot reach even there, go to the water-but in the
nearest yard, and there, in one pinch of green scum,
in one spoonful of water, behold a whole "Divina
Commedia " of living forms, more fantastic a thousand
times than those with which Dante peopled his unseen
world: and then feel, as you should feel, abashed at the

304 HOW TO STUDY NATURAL HISTORY. [xn.

ignorance and weakness of mortal man ; abashed still
more at that rash conceit of his, which makes him
fancy himself the measure of all things ; and say with
me : " Oh Lord, thy works are manifold ; thy ways are
very deep. In wisdom hast thou made them all, the
earth is full of thy riches. Thou openest thy hand,
and fillest all things living with plenteousness ; they
continue this day according to thine ordinance, for all
things serve thee. Thou hast made them fast for ever
and ever ; thou hast given them a law which shall not
be broken. Let them praise the name of the Lord ;
for he spake the word and they were made, he com-
manded, and they were created."

This I shall say, but little more than this, on the
religious effect of the study of natural history. I do
not wish to preach a sermon to you. I can trust
God's world to bear better witness than I can, of the
Loving Father who made it. I thank him from my own
experience for the testimony of His Creation, only next
to the testimony of His Bible. I have watched scien-
tific discoveries which were supposed in my boyhood
to be contrary to revelation, found out one by one to
confirm and explain revelation, as crude and hasty
theories were corrected by more abundant facts, and
men saw more clearly what both the Bible and Nature
really did say; and I can trust that the same process
will go on for ever, and that God's earth and God's
word will never contradict each other. I have found
the average of scientific men, not less, but more, godly
and righteous men than the average of their neigh-
bours; and I can trust that this will be more and
more the case as science deepens and widens. And
therefore I can trust that every patient, truthful, and

xii.] PRACTICAL VALUE OF SCIENCE. 305

healthful mind will, the more it contemplates the works
of God, re-echo St. Paul's great declaration that the
Invisible things of God are clearly seen from the foun-
dation of the world, being understood by the things
which are made, even His eternal power and Godhead.
And so trusting, I pass on to a lower view of the
subject, and yet not an unnecessary one.

In an industrial country like this, the practical
utility of any study must needs be always thrown into
the scale ; and natural history seems at first sight
somewhat unpractical. What money will it earn for
a man in after life? — is a question which will be
asked; and which it is folly to despise. For if the
only answer be : " None at all/' a man has a right to
rejoin : " Then let me take up some pursuit which will
train and refresh my mind as much as this one, and
yet be of pecuniary benefit to me some day." If you
can find such a study, by all means follow it : but I
say that this study too may be of great practical
benefit in after life. How much money have I, young
as I am, seen wasted for want of a little knowledge of
botany, geology, or chemistry. How many a clever
man becomes the dupe of empirics for want of a little
science. How many a mine is sought for where no
mine could be; or crop attempted to be grown, where
no such crop could grow. How many a hidden trea-
sure, on the other hand, do men walk over unheeding.
How many a new material, how many an improved
process in manufacture is possible, yet is passed over,
for want of a little science. And for the man who
emigrates, and comes in contact with rude nature
teeming with unsuspected wealth, of what incalculable
advantage to have if it be but the rudiments of those

306 HOW TO STUDY NATURAL HISTORY. [xn.

sciences, which will tell him the properties, and there-
fore the value, of the plants, the animals, the minerals,
the climates with which he meets ? True — home-
learnt natural history will not altogether teach him
about these things, because most of them must
needs be new : but it will teach him to compare and
classify them as he finds them, and so by analogy with
things already known to him, to discover their intrinsic
worth.

For natural history stands to man's power over
Nature, that is, to his power of being useful to himself
and to mankind, in the same relation as do geography,
grammar, arithmetic, geometry, political economy ;
none of them, perhaps, bearing directly on his future
business in life; but all training his mind for his
business, all giving him the rudiments of laws which he
will hereafter work out and apply to his profession.
And even at home, be sure that such studies will bear
fruit in after life. The productive wealth of England
is not exhausted, doubt it not ; our grandchildren may
find treasures in this our noble island of which we
never dreamed, even as we have found things of which
our forefathers dreamed not. Recollect always that a
great market town like this is not merely a commercial
centre ; not perhaps even a commercial centre at all :
but that she is an agricultural centre, and one of the
most important in England ; that the increase of
science here will be sure more or less to extend itself
to the neighbourhood : and then lay to heart this one
fact. A friend of mine, and one whom I am proud to
call my friend, succeeding to an estate, thought good
to cultivate it himself. And being a man of common
sense, he thought good to know something of what

in.] SCIENCE ON A COUNTRY ESTATE. 307

he was doing. And he said to himself : The soil, and
the rain, and the air are my raw materials. I ought
surely then to find out what soil, and rain, and air are;
so I must become a geologist and a meteorologist.
Vegetable substances are what I am to make. And
I ought surely to know what it is that I am making ;
so I must become a botanist. The raw material does
somehow or other become manufactured into the
produce; the soil into the vegetable. I ought surely
to know a little about the processes of my own
manufacture ; so I must learn chemistry. Chance
and blind custom are not enough for me. At best
they can but leave me where they found me, at
their mercy. Science I need; and science I will
acquire. What was the result ? After many a mis-
take and disappointment, he succeeded in discovering
on his own estate a mine of unsuspected wealth —
not of gold indeed, but of gold's worth — the elements
of human food. He discovered why some parts of his
estate were fertile, while others were barren ; and by
applying the knowledge thus gained, he converted some
of his most barren fields into his most fertile ones ; he
preserved again and again his crops from blight, while
those of others perished all around him ; he won for
himself wealth, and the respect and honour of men of
science; while those around him, slowly opening their
eyes to his improvements, followed his lessons at second-
hand, till the whole agriculture of an important district
has become gradually but permanently improved,
under the auspices of one patient and brave man, who
knew that knowledge was power, and that only by
obeying nature can man conquer her.

Bear in mind both these last great proverbs ; and

308 HOW TO STUDY NATURAL HISTOET. [xn.

combine them in your mind. Remember that while
England is, and ever will be, behindhand in metaphy-
sical and scholastic science, she is the nation which above
all others has conquered nature by obeying her ; that
as it pleased God that the author of that proverb, the
father of inductive science, Bacon Lord Verulam,
should have been an Englishman, so it has pleased
Him that we, Lord Bacon's countrymen, should improve
that precious heirloom of science, inventing, producing,
exporting, importing, till it seems as if the whole
human race, and every land from the equator to the
pole must henceforth bear the indelible impress and
sign manual of English science.

And bear in mind, as I said just now, that this
study of natural history is the grammar of that very
physical science which has enabled England thus to re-
plenish the earth and subdue it. Do you not see, then,
that by following these studies you are walking in the
very path to which England owes her wealth ; that you
are training in yourselves that habit of mind which
God has approved as the one which He has ordained for
Englishmen, and are doing what in you lies toward
carrying out, in after life, the glorious work which God
seems to have laid on the English race, to replenish
the earth and subdue it ?

One word more, and I have done. Unless you are al-
ready tired of hearing me, I would suggest a few practical
hints before we part. , The best way of learning these
matters is by classes, in which men may combine and in-
terchange their thoughts and observations. Thegreatest
savants find this; and have their Microscopic Society,
Linneean, Royal, Geological Societies, British Associa-
tions, and what not, in which all may know what each

xii.] VALUE OF SCIENCE CLASSES. 80S

has done, and each share in the learning of all ; for as
iron sharpeneth iron, so a man sharpens the face of his
friend. Ihavenothingto say against debating societies:
perhaps it was my own fault that whenever I belonged
to one as a young man, I found them inclined to make
me conceited, dictatorial, hasty in my judgments,
trying to state a case before I had investigated it, to
teach others before I had taught myself, to make a fine
speech, not to find out the truth; till in, I think, a
wise moment for me, I vowed at twenty never to set
foot in one again, and kept my vow. Be that as it
may, I wish that side by side with the debating society,
I could see young men joining in natural history
societies; going out in company on pleasant evenings
to search together after the hidden treasures of God's
world, and read the great green book which lies open
alike to peasant and to peer; and then meeting, say
once a week, to debate, not of opinions but of facts ;
to show each what they had found, to classify and
explain, to learn and to wonder together. In such a
class many appliances would be possible. A micro-
scope, for instance, or chemical apparatus, might belong
to the society, which each individual by himself would
not be able to afford ; while as for books — books on
these subjects are now published at a marvellous
cheapness, which puts them within the reach of every
one, and of an excellence which twenty years ago was
impossible. Any working man in this town might
now, especially in a class, consult scientific books, for
which I, as a lad, twenty years ago, was sighing in
vain ; nay, many of which, twenty years ago, the
richest nobleman could not have purchased; for the
simple reason, that, dear or cheap, they did not exist.

310 HOW TO STUDY NATURAL HISTORY. [xir.

Such classes, too, would be the easiest, cheapest, and
pleasantest way of establishing1 what ought to exist, I
think, in connection with every institution like this,
namely, a museum. If the young men were really
ready and willing to collect objects of interest, I doubt
not that public-spirited men would be found, who
would undertake the expense of tnounting them in a
museum. And you cannot imagine, I assure you, how
large and how interesting a museum might be formed
of the natural curiosities of a neighbourhood like this,
I may say, indeed, of any neighbourhood or of any
parish : but your museum need not be confined to the
neighbourhood. Societies now exist in every part of
England, who will be happy to exchange their dupli-
cates for yours. As your collection increased in im-
portance, old members abroad would gladly contribute
foreign curiosities to your stock. Neighbouring gentle-
men would send you valuable objects which had been
lumbering their houses, uncared for, because they
stood alone, and formed no part of a collection ; and I,
for one, would be happy to add something from the
fauna and flora of those moorlands, where I have so
long enjoyed the wonders of nature; never, I can
honestly say, alone ; because when man was not with
me, I had companions in every bee, and flower, and
pebble j and never idle, because I could not pass a
swamp, or a tuft of heather, without finding in it a
fairy tale of which I could but decipher here and there
a line or two, and yet found them more interesting
than all the books, save one, which were ever written
upon earth.

THE NATURAL THEOLOGY OF THE
FUTURE.

THE NATURAL THEOLOGY OF THE
FOTORE.

Read at Sion College, January 10th, 1871.

WHEN I accepted the unexpected and undeserved
honour of being allowed to lecture here, the first
subject which suggested itself to me was Natural
Theology.

It is one which has taken up much of my thought for
some years past,* which seems to me more and more

* Novalis, I think, says that one's own thought gains quite-
infinitely in value as soon as one finds it shared by even one other-
human being. The saying has proved true, at least, to me. The-
morning after this paper was read, I received a book, " The Genesis
of Species, by St. George Mivart, F.K.S." The name of the author
demanded all attention and respect ; and as I read on, I found him,
•to my exceeding pleasure, advocating views which I had long held}
with a learning and ability to which I have no pretensions. The-
book will, doubtless, excite much useful criticism and discussion in
the scientific world. I hope that it may do the same in the clerical
world ; and I earnestly beg those clergymen who heard me with
so much patience and courtesy at Sion College, to ponder well
Mr. Mivart's last chapter, on " Theology and Evolution."

314 THE NATURAL THEOLOGY OF THE FUTURE, [xin.

important, and which is just now somewhat forgotten ;
I therefore determined to say a few words on it to-
night. I do not pretend to teach but only to suggest ;
to point out certain problems of Natural Theology,
the further solution of which ought, I think, to be
«ooii attempted.

I wish to speak, remember, not on natural religion,
but on natural theology. By the first, I understand
what can be learned from the physical universe of
man's duty to God and to his neighbour ; by the latter,
I understand what can be learned concerning God
Himself. Of natural religion I shall say nothing. I
•do not even affirm that a natural religion is possible :
but I do very earnestly believe that a natural theology
is possible; and I earnestly believe also that it is
most important that natural theology should, in
every age, keep pace with doctrinal or ecclesiastical
theology.

Bishop Butler certainly held this belief. His
" Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the
Constitution and Course of Nature" — a book for which
I entertain the most profound respect — is based on a
belief that the God of Nature and the God of Grace
are one ; and that, therefore, the God who satisfies our
conscience ought more or less to satisfy our reason
also. To teach that was Butler's mission, and he
fulfilled it well. But it is a mission which has to be
re-filled again and again, as human thought changes
and human science develops; for if in any age or
•country the God who seems to be revealed by Nature
seems different from the God who is revealed by the
then popular religion, then that God, and the religion

sin.] DUTY OF THE CLERGY. 315

which tells of that God, will gradually cease to
be believed in.

For the demands of Reason (as none knew better
than good Bishop Butler) must be and ought to be
satisfied. And when a popular war arises between the
reason of a generation and its theology, it behoves the
ministers of religion to inquire, with all humility and
godly fear, on which side lies the fault : whether
the theology which they expound is all that it should
be, or whether the reason of those who impugn it is
all that it should be.

For me, as (I trust) an orthodox priest of the
Church of England, I believe the theology of the
National Church of England, as by law established, to
be eminently rational as well as scriptural. It is not,
therefore, surprising to me that the clergy of the
Church of England, since the foundation of the Royal
Society in the seventeenth century, have done more
for sound physical science than the clergy of any other
denomination ; or that the three greatest natural
theologians with which I, at least, am acquainted —
Berkeley, Butler, and Paley — should have belonged to
our Church. I am not unaware of what the Germans
of the eighteenth century have done. I consider
Goethe's claims to have advanced natural theology
very much over-rated : but I do recommend to young
• clergymen Herder's " Outlines of the Philosophy of
the History of Man" as a book (in spite of certain
defects) full of sound and precious wisdom. But it
seems to me that English natural theology in the
•eighteenth century stood more secure than that of
any other nation, on the foundation which Berkeley,

316 THE NATURAL THEOLOGY OF THE FUTURE, [xin.

Butler, and Paley had laid ; and that if our orthodox
thinkers for the last hundred years had followed
steadily in their steps, we should not be deploring now
a wide, and as some think increasing, divorce between
Science and Christianity.

But it was not so to be. The impulse given by
Wesley and Whitfield turned (and not before it was
needed) the earnest mind of England almost ex-
clusively to questions of personal religion ; and that
impulse, under many unexpected forms, has continued
ever since. I only state the fact — I do not deplore it;
God forbid ! Wisdom is justified of all her children,
and as, according to the wise American, " it takes all
sorts to make a world," so it takes all sorts to make a
living Church. But that the religious temper of
England for the last two or three generations has been
unfavourable to a sound and scientific development of
natural theology, there can be no doubt.

We have only, if we need proof, to look at the
hymns — many of them very pure, pious, and beautiful
— which are used at this day in churches and chapels
by persons of every shade of opinion. How often is
the tone in which they speak of the natural world one
of dissatisfaction, distrust, almost contempt. " Disease,
decay, and death around I see/' is their key-note,
rather than " 0 all ye works of the Lord, bless Him,
praise Him, and magnify Him together." There
lingers about them a savour of the old monastic theory,
that this earth is the devil's planet, fallen, accursed,
goblin-haunted, needing to be exorcised at every turn
before it is useful or even safe for man. An age which
has adopted as its most popular hymn a paraphrase of
the mediaeval monk's " Hie breve vivitur," and in

XIH.] SCRIPTURE AND ADVANCED SCIENCE. 317

which stalwart public-school boys are bidden in their
chapel worship to tell the Almighty God of Truth
that they lie awake weeping at night for joy at the
thought that they will die and see Jerusalem the
Golden — is doubtless a pious and devout age ; but not
— at least as yet — an age in which natural theology
is likely to attain a high, a healthy, or a scriptural
development.

Not a scriptural development. Let me press on
you, my clerical brethren, most earnestly this one
point. It is time that we should make up our minds
what tone Scripture does take toward Nature, natural
science, natural theology. Most of you, I doubt not,
have made up your minds already, and in consequence
have no fear of natural science, no fear for natural
theology. But I cannot deny that I find still lingering
here and there certain of the old views of nature of
which I used to hear but too much here in London
some five-and-thirty years ago; not from my own
father, thank God ! for he, to his honour, was one of
those few London clergy who then faced and defended
advanced physical science; but from others — better
men too than I shall ever hope to be — who used to
consider natural theology as useless, fallacious, im-
possible, on the ground that this Earth did not reveal
the will and character of God, because it was cursed
.and fallen; and that its facts, in consequence, were not
to be respected or relied on. This, I was told, was the
doctrine of Scripture, and was therefore true. But
when, longing to reconcile my conscience and my
reason on a question so awful to a young student of
natural science, I went to my Bible, what did I find ?
No word of all this. Much — thank God, I may say

318 THE NATURAL THEOLOGY OF TIJE FUTURE, [xin.

one continuous undercurrent — of the very opposite of
all this. I pray you bear with me, even though I may
seem impertinent. But what do we find in the Bible,,
with the exception of that first curse ? That, remember,
cannot mean any alteration in the laws of nature by
which man's labour should only produce for him hence-
forth thorns and thistles. For, in the first place, any
such curse is formally abrogated in the eighth chapter
and twenty-first verse of the very same document — "I
will not again curse the earth any more for man's sake.
While the earth remaineth, seed-time aiad harvest, cold
and heat, summer and winter, day and night shall not
cease." And next, the fact is not so ; for if you root
up the thorns and thistles, and keep your land clean,,
then assuredly you will grow fruit-trees and not
thorns, wheat and not thistles, according to those laws
of Nature which are the voice of God expressed in
facts.

And yet the words are true. There is a curse upon
the earth, though not one which, by altering the laws
of nature, has made natural facts untrustworthy.
There is a curse on the earth ; such a curse as is
expressed, I believe, in the old Hebrew text, where the
word " adamah " (correctly translated in our version
" the ground ") signifies, as I am told, not this planet*
but simply the soil from whence we get our food ;
such a curse as certainly is expressed by the Septuagint
and the Vulgate versions : " Cursed is the earth " —
ev rols fpyoLs a-ov ; " in opere tuo," as the Vulgate has it
— " in thy works." Man's work is too often the curse
of the very planet which he misuses. None should
know that better than the botanist, who sees whole
regions desolate, and given up to sterility and literal

xin.] VIRGIN SOILS AND WASTE LANDS. 31&

thorns and thistles, on account of man's sin and folly,
ignorance and greedy waste. Well said that veteran
botanist, the venerable Elias Fries, of Lund :

" A broad band of waste land follows gradually in
the steps of cultivation. If it expands, its centre and
its cradle dies, and on the outer borders only do we
find green shoots. But it is not impossible, only
difficult, for man, without renouncing the advantage
of culture itself, one day to make reparation for the
injury which he has inflicted : he is appointed lord of
creation. True it is that thorns and thistles, ill-
favoured and poisonous plants, well named by botanists
rubbish plants, mark the track which man has proudly
traversed through the earth. Before him lay original
Nature in her wild but sublime beauty. Behind him
he leaves the desert, a deformed and ruined land; for
childish desire of destruction, or thoughtless squander-
ing of vegetable treasures, has destroyed the character
of nature; and, terrified, man himself flies from the
arena of his actions, leaving the impoverished earth to-
barbarous races or to animals, so long as yet another
spot in virgin beauty smiles before him. Here again,,
in selfish pursuit of profit, and consciously or un-
consciously following the abominable principle of the
great moral vileness which one man has expressed —
' Apres nous le Deluge ' — he begins anew the work of
destruction. Thus did cultivation, driven out, leave
the East, and perhaps the deserts formerly robbed of
their coverings ; like the wild hordes of old over
beautiful Greece, thus rolls this conquest with fearful
rapidity from East to West through America; and the
planter now often leaves the already exhausted land,
and the eastern climate, become infertile through the

320 THE NATUEAL THEOLOGY OF THE FUTURE, [xm.

demolition of the forests, to introduce a similar revolu-
tion into the Far West/' *

As we proceed, we find nothing in the general tone
of Scripture which can hinder our natural theology
being at once scriptural and scientific.

If it is to be scientific, it must begin by approach-
ing Nature at once with a cheerful and reverent spirit,
as a noble, healthy, and trustworthy thing : and what
is that, save the spirit of those who wrote the 101th,
147th, and 148th Psalms — the spirit, too, of him who
wrote that Song of the Three Children, which is, as it
were, the flower and crown of the Old Testament, the
summing up of all that is most true and eternal in the
old Jewish faith ; and which, as long as it is sung in
our churches, is the charter and title-deed of all
•Christian students of those works of the Lord, which
it calls on to bless Him, praise Him, and magnify Him
for ever ?

What next will be demanded of us by physical
science? Belief, certainly, just now, in the per-
manence of natural laws. Why, that is taken for
granted, I hold, throughout the Bible. I cannot see
how our Lord's parables, drawn from the birds and the
flowers, the seasons and the weather, have any logical
weight, or can be considered as aught but capricious
and fanciful illustrations — which God forbid — unless
we look at them as instances of laws of the natural
world, which find their analogues in the laws of the
spiritual world, the kingdom of God. I cannot con-
ceive a man's writing that 104th Psalm who had not
the most deep, the most earnest sense of the per-

* Quoted from Schleideii's "The Plant, a Biography." — Lecture
XL in fine.

xin.] IS GOD A GOD OF LOVE? 321

manence of natural law. But more : the fact is
expressly asserted again and again. " They continue
this day according to Thine ordinance, for all things
serve Thee." " Thou hast made them fast for ever
and ever. Thou hast given them a law which shall
not be broken "

Let us pass on, gentlemen. There is no more to be
said about this matter.

But next, it will be demanded of us that natural
theology shall set forth a God whose character is con-
sistent with all the facts of nature, and not only with
those which are pleasant and beautiful. That challenge
was accepted, and I think victoriously, by Bishop Butler
as far as the Christian religion is concerned. As far as
the Scripture is concerned, we may answer thus :

It is said to us — I know that it is said : You tell us
of a God of love, a God of flowers and sunshine, of
singing birds and little children. But there are more
facts in nature than these. There is premature death,
pestilence, famine. And if you answer: Man has con-
trol over these ; they are caused by man's ignorance
and sin, and by his breaking of natural laws — what
will you make of those destructive powers over which
he has no control; of the hurricane and the earthquake;
of poisons, vegetable and mineral ; of those parasitic
Entozoa whose awful abundance, and awful destructive-
ness in man and beast, science is just revealing — a new
page of danger and loathsomeness ? How does that
suit your conception of a God of love ?

We can answer : Whether or not it suits our con-
ception of a God of love, it suits Scripture's conception
of Him. For nothing is more clear — nay, is it not urged
again and again, as a blot on Scripture? — that it reveals

322 THE NATURAL THEOLOGY OF THE FUTURE, [xin.

a God not merely of love, but of sternness — a God in
whose eyes physical pain is not the worst of evils, nor
animal life (too often miscalled human life) the most
precious of objects — a God who destroys, when it seems
fit to Him, and that wholesale, and seemingly without
either pity or discrimination, man, woman and child,
visiting the sins of the fathers on the children,
making the land empty and bare, and destroying from
off it man and beast ! This is the God of the Old
Testament. And if any say (as is often too rashly
said) : This is not the God of the New : I answer, but
have you read your New Testament ? Have you read
the latter chapters of St. Matthew ? Have you read
the opening of the Epistle to the Romans ? Have you
read the Book of Revelations ? If so, will you say that
the God of the New Testament is, compared with the
God of the Old, less awful, less destructive, and there-
fore less like the Being — granting always that there
is such a Being — who presides over nature and her
destructive powers ? It is an awful problem. But the
writers of the Bible have faced it valiantly. Physical
science is facing it valiantly now. Therefore natural
theology may face it likewise. Remember Carlyle's
great words about poor Francesca in the Inferno :
" Infinite pity, yet also infinite rigour of law. It is so
Nature is made. It is so Dante discerned that she was
made."

There are two other points on which I must beg
leave to say a few words. Physical science will demand
of our natural theologians that they should be aware of
their importance, and let (as Mr. Matthew Arnold
would say) their thoughts play freely round them. I
mean questions of Embryology and questions of Race.

xiu ] EMBRYOLOGY AND EACE. 323

On the first there may be much, to be said, which is
for the present best left unsaid, even here. I only ask
you to recollect how often in Scripture those two plain
old words, beget and bring forth, occur, and in what
important passages. And I ask you to remember that
marvellous essay on Natural Theology, if I may so call
it in all reverence, the 139th Psalm, and judge for
yourself whether he who wrote that did not consider
the study of Embryology as important, as significant,
as worthy of his deepest attention, as an Owen, a
Huxley, or a Darwin. Nay, I will go farther still, and
say, that in those great words — " Thine eyes did see
my substance, yet being imperfect ; and in Thy book
all my members were written, which in continuance
were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them,"
— in those words, I say, the Psalmist has anticipated
that realistic view of embryological questions to which
our most modern philosophers are, it seems to me,
slowly, half unconsciously, but still inevitably, returning.

Next, as to Race. Some persons now have a
nervous fear of that word, and of allowing any im-
portance to difference of races. Some dislike it,
because they think that it endangers the modern
notions of democratic equality. Others because they
fear that it may be proved that the negro is not a
man and a brother. I think the fears of both parties
groundless. As for the negro, I not only believe
him to be of the same race as myself, but that — if
Mr. Darwin's theories are true — science has proved
that he must be such. I should have thought, as a
humble student of such questions, that the one fact of
the unique distribution of the hair in all races of
human beings, was full moral proof that they had all

T 2

324, THE NATURAL THEOLOGY OP THE FUTURE, [xnr,

had one common ancestor. But this is not matter of
natural theology. What is matter thereof, is this :

Physical science is proving more and more the
immense importance of Race; the importance of
hereditary powers, hereditary organs, hereditary
habits, in all organised beings, from the lowest plant
to the highest animal. She is proving more and more
the omnipresent action of the differences between
races ; how the more favoured race (she cannot avoid
using the epithet) exterminates the less favoured, or at
least expels it, and forces it, under penalty of death,
to adapt itself to new circumstances ; and, in a word,
that competition between every race and every indi-
vidual of that race, and reward according to deserts,
is (as far as we can see) an universal law of living
things. And she says — for the facts of history prove
it — that as it is among the races of plants and animals,
so it has been unto this day among the races of men.

The natural theology of the future must take count
of these tremendous and even painful facts : and she
may take count of them. For Scripture has taken
count of them already. It talks continually — it has
been blamed for talking so much — of races, of families ;
of their wars, their struggles, their exterminations ; of
races favoured, of races rejected, of remnants being
saved to continue the race ; of hereditary tendencies,
hereditary excellences, hereditary guilt. Its sense of the
reality and importance of descent is so intense, that it
speaks of a whole tribe or a whole family by the name
of its common ancestor, and the whole nation of the
Jews is Israel, to the end. And if I be told this is
true of the Old Testament, but not of the New, I must
answer : What ! does not St. Paul hold the identity

xiii.] NATURE AND GRACE. 325

of the whole Jewish race with Israel their forefather,
as strongly as any prophet of the Old Testament ?
And what is the central historic fact, save One, of the
New Testament, but the conquest of Jerusalem — the
dispersion, all but destruction of a race, not by miracle,
but by invasion, because found wanting when weighed
in the stern balances of natural and social law ?

Gentlemen, think of this. I only suggest the
thought; but I do not suggest it in haste. Think
over it — by the light which our Lord's parables, His
analogies between the physical and social constitution
of the world, afford — and consider whether those awful
words, fulfilled then and fulfilled so often since — " The
kingdom of God shall be taken from you, and given to
a nation bringing forth the fruits hereof " — may not
be the supreme instance, the most complex develop-
ment of a law which runs through all created things,
down to the moss which struggles for existence on the
rock !

Do I say that this is all ? That man is merely a
part of Nature, the puppet of circumstances and here-
ditary tendencies ? That brute competition is the one
law of his life ? That he is doomed for ever to be the
slave of his own needs, enforced by an internecine
struggle for existence ? God forbid. I believe not
only in Nature, but in Grace. I believe that this is
man's fate only as long as he sows to the flesh, and of
the flesh reaps corruption. I believe that if he will

Strive upward, working out the beast,
And let the ape and tiger die ;

if he will be even as wise as the social animals ; as the
ant and the bee, who have risen, if not to the virtue of

326 THE NATURAL THEOLOGY OF THE FUTURE, [xur.

all-embracing charity, at least to the virtues of self-
sacrifice and patriotism,* then he will rise towards a
higher sphere ; toward that kingdom of G od of which
it is written : " He that dwelleth in love, dwelleth in
God, and God in him."

Whether that be matter of natural theology, I
cannot tell as yet. But as for all the former questions
— all that St. Paul means when he talks of the law,
and how the works of the flesh bring men under the
law, stern and terrible and destructive, though holy
and just and good, — they are matter of natural
theology; and I believe that on them, as elsewhere,

* I am well aware what a serious question is opened up in these
words. The fact that the great majority of workers among the social
insects are barren females or nuns, devoting themselves to the care
of other individuals' offspring, by an act of self-sacrifice, and that
by rn^ns of that self-sacrifice these communities grow large and
prosperous, ought to be well weighed j ust now ; both by those who
hold that morality has been evolved from perceptions of what was-
useful or pleasurable, and by those who hold as I do that morality is
one, immutable and eternal. Those who take the former view
(confounding, as Mr. Mivart well points out in his Genesis of Species,
''• material" and "formal" morality) have no difficulty in tracing the
germs of the highest human morality in animals ; for self-interest is,
in their eyes, the ultimate ground of morality, and the average animal
is utterly selfish. But certain animals perform acts, as in the case of
working bees and ants, and (as I hold) in the case of mothers working
for and protecting their offspring, which at least seem formally
moral ; because they seem founded on self-sacrifice. I am well aware,
I say again, of the very serious admissions which we clergymen should
have to make if we confessed that these acts really are that which
they seem to be. But I do not see why we should not be as just to
an ant as to a human being ; I am ready, with Socrates, to follow
the Logos whithersoever it leads ; and I hope that Mr. Mivart will
reconsider the two latter paragraphs of p. 196, and let his " thoughts
play freely " round this curious subject. Perhaps, in so doing, he
may lay his hand on an even sharper weapon than those which he
Las already used against the sensationalist theory of morals.

MIL] MARKS OF DESIGN. 327

Scripture and science will be ultimately found to
coincide.

But here we have to face an objection which you
will often hear now from scientific men, and still
oftener from non-scientific men ; who will say : It
matters not to us whether Scripture contradicts or
does not contradict a scientific natural theology ; for
we hold such a science to be impossible and naught.
The old Jews put a God into Nature, and therefore
of course they could see, as you see, what they had
already put there. But we see no God in Nature.
We do not deny the existence of a God ; we merely
say that scientific research does not reveal Him to us.
We see no marks of design in physical phenomena.
What used to be considered as marks of design can
be better explained by considering them as the results
of evolution according to necessary laws ; and you
and Scripture make a mere assumption when you
ascribe them to the operation of a mind like the human
mind.

Now, on this point I believe we may answer fear-
lessly : If you cannot see it we cannot help you. If
the heavens do not declare to you the glory of God,
nor the firmament' show you His handy-work, then
our poor arguments about them will not show it.
"The eye can only see that which it brings with it
the power of seeing." We can only reassert that we
see design every where, and that the vast majority of
the human race in every age and clime has seen it.
Analogy from experience, sound induction (as we
hold) from the works not only of men but of animals,
has made it an all but self-evident truth to us, that
wherever there is arrangement, there must be an

328 THE NATURAL THEOLOGY OF THE FUTURE, [xm.

arranger; wherever there is adaptation of means to
an end, there must be an adapter ; wherever an
organisation, there must be an organiser. The
existence of a designing God is no more demonstrable
from Nature than the existence of other human beings
independent of ourselves, or, indeed, the existence of
our own bodies. But, like the belief in them, the
belief in Him has become an article of our common
sense. And that this designing mind is, in some
respects, similar to the human mind, is proved to us
(as Sir John Herschel well puts it) by the mere fact
that we can discover and comprehend the processes of
Nature.

But here again, if we be contradicted, we can only
reassert. If the old words, " He that made the eye,
shall He not see ? He that planted the ear, shall He not
hear ?" do not at once commend themselves to the
intellect of any person, we shall never convince that
person by any arguments drawn from the absurdity of
conceiving the invention of optics by a blind race, or
of music by a deaf one.

So we will assert our own old-fashioned notion
boldly ; and more : we will say, in spite of ridicule,
that if such a God exists, final causes must exist also.
That the whole universe must be one chain of final
causes. That if there be a Supreme Reason, He must
have a reason, and that a good reason, for every
physical phenomenon.

We will tell the modern scientific man — You are
nervously afraid of the mention of final causes. You
quote against them Bacon's saying, that they are
"barren virgins; that no physical fact was ever dis-
covered or explained by them. You are right as far as

xiii.] FINAL CAUSES. 329

regards yourselves ; you have no business with final
causes, because final causes are moral causes, and you
are physical students only. We, the natural theolo-
gians, have business with them. Your duty is to find
out the How of things ; ours, to find out the Why. If
you rejoin that we shall never find out the Why, unless
we first learn something of the How, we shall not deny
that. It may be most useful, I had almost said neces-
sary, that the clergy should have some scientific train-
ing. It may be most useful, I sometimes dream of a
day when it will be considered necessary, that every
candidate for ordination should be required to have
passed creditably in at least one branch of physical
science, if it be only to teach him the method of sound
scientific thought. But our having learnt the How,
will not make it needless, much less impossible, for us
to study the Why. It will merely make more clear to
us the things of which we have to study the Why;
and enable us to keep the How and the Why more
religiously apart from each other.

But if it be said : After all, there is no Why ; the
doctrine of evolution, by doing away with the theory
of creation, does away with that of final causes — let
us answer, boldly : Not in the least. We might accept
all that Mr. Darwin, all that Professor Huxley, has so
learnedly and so acutely written on physical science,
and yet preserve our natural theology on exactly the
same basis as that on which Butler and Paley left
it. That we should have to develop it, I do not deny.
That we should have to relinquish it, I do.

Let me press this thought earnestly on you. I
know that many wiser and better men than I have
fears on this point. I cannot share in them.

330 THE NATURAL THEOLOGY OF THE FUTURE, [xm.

All, it seems to me, that the-new doctrines of Evolu-
tion demand is this. We all agree, for the fact is
patent, that our own bodies, and indeed the body of
every living creature, are evolved from a seemingly
simple germ by natural laws, without visible action of
any designing wrll or mind, into the full organisation
of a human or other creature. Yet we do not say, on
that account : God did not create me ; I only grew.
We hold in this case to our old idea, and say : If there
be evolution, there must be an evolver. Now the new
physical theories only ask us, it seems to me, to extend
this conception to the whole universe : to believe that
not individuals merely, but whole varieties and races,
the total organised life on this planet, and it may be
the total organisation of the universe, have been
evolved just as our bodies are, by natural laws acting
through circumstance. This may be true, or may be
false. But all its truth can do to the natural theolo-
gian will be to make him believe that the Creator
bears the same relation to the whole universe as that
Creator undeniably bears to every individual human
body.

I entreat you to weigh these words, which have
not been written in haste ; and I entreat you also, if
you wish to see how little the new theory, that species
may have been gradually created by variation, natural
selection, and so forth, interferes with the old theory
of design, contrivance, and adaptation, nay, with the
fullest admission of benevolent final causes — I entreat
you, I say, to study Darwin's " Fertilisation of
Orchids " — a book which (whether his main theory be
true or not) will still remain a most valuable addition
to natural theology.

xiii.] LAW OF NATURAL SELECTION. 331

For suppose, gentlemen, that all the species of
Orchids, and not only they, but their congeners — the
Gingers, the Arrowroots, the Bananas — are all the
descendants of one original form, which was most
probably nearly allied to the Snowdrop and the Iris.
What then ? Would that be one whit more wonderful,
more unworthy of the wisdom and power of God, than
if they were, as most believe, created each and all at
once, with their minute and often imaginary shades of
difference ? What would the natural theologian have
to say, were the first theory true, save that God's
works are even more wonderful than he always
believed them to be ? As for the theory being
impossible : we must leave the discussion of that to
physical students. It is not for us clergymen to limit
the power of God. "Is anything too hard for the
Lord ? " asked the prophet of old : and we have a
right to ask it as long as time shall last. If it be said
that natural selection is too simple a cause to produce
such fantastic variety : that, again, is a question to be
settled exclusively by physical students. All we have
to say on the matter is, that we always knew that God
works by very simple, or seemingly simple, means ;
that the whole universe, 'as far as we could discern it,
was one concatenation of the most simple means ; that
it was wonderful, yea, miraculous in our eyes, that a
child should resemble its parents, that the rain-
drops should make the grass grow, that the grass
should become flesh, and the flesh sustenance for
the thinking brain of man. Ought God to seem less
or more august in our eyes, when we are told that His
means are even more simple than we supposed ? We
held Him to be Almighty and Allwise. Are we to

332 THE NATURAL THEOLOGY OF THE FUTURE, [xm.

reverence Him less or more, if we hear that His might
is greater, His wisdom deeper, than we ever dreamed ?
We believed that His care was over all His works;
that His Providence watched perpetually over the
whole universe. We were taught — some of us at least
— by Holy Scripture, to believe that the whole history
of the universe was made up of special Providences.
Jf, then, that should be true which Mr. Darwin
writes : " It may be metaphorically said that natural
selection is daily and hourly scrutinising throughout
the world, every variation, even the slightest; reject-
ing that which is bad, preserving and adding up that
which is good, silently and incessantly working when-
ever and wherever opportunity offers at the improve-
ment of every organic being" — if that, I say, were
proven to be true, ought God's care and God's provi-
dence to seem less or more magnificent in our eyes ?
Of old it was said by Him without whom nothing is
made : " My Father worketh hitherto, and I work."
Shall we quarrel with Science if she should show how
those words are true ? What, in one word, should we
have to say but this ? — We knew of old that God was
so wise that He could make all things ; but behold, He
is so much wiser than even that, that He can make all
things make themselves.

But it may be said : These notions are contrary to
Scripture. I must beg very humbly, but very firmly,
to demur to that opinion. Scripture says that God
created. But it nowhere defines that term. The
means, the How of Creation, is nowhere specified.
Scripture, again, says that organised beings were
produced each according to their kind. But it no-
where defines that term. What a kind includes,

xin.] THE ABSENT GOD OF A DEAD UNIVERSE. 333

whether it includes or not the capacity of varying
(which is just the question in point), is nowhere
specified. And I think it a most important rule in
scriptural exegesis, to be most cautious as to limiting
the meaning of any term which Scripture itself has not
limited, lest we find ourselves putting into the teaching
of Scripture our own human theories or prejudices.
And consider, Is not man a kind ? And has not man-
kind varied, physically, intellectually, spiritually ? Is
not the Bible, from beginning to end, a history of the
variations of mankind, for worse or for better, from
their original type ?

Let us rather look with calmness, and even with
hope and good will, on these new theories ; for, correct
or incorrect, they surely mark a tendency toward a
more, not a less, scriptural view of nature. Are they
not attempts, whether successful or unsuccessful, to
escape from that shallow mechanical notion of the
universe and its Creator which was too much in vogue
in the eighteenth century among divines as well as philo-
sophers; the theory which Goethe (to do him justice),
and after him Mr. Thomas Carlyle, have treated with
such noble scorn ; the theory, I mean, that God has
wound up the universe like a clock, and left it to tick
by itself till it runs down, never troubling Himself
with it, save possibly — for even that was only half
believed — by rare miraculous interferences with the
laws which He Himself had made ? Out of that chilling
dream of a dead universe ungoverned by an absent God,
the human mind, in Germany especially, tried during
the early part of this century to escape by strange
roads ; roads by which there was no escape, because
they were not laid down on the firm ground of scientific

334 THE NATURAL THEOLOGY OF THE FUTURE, [xin.

facts. Then, in despair, men turned to the facts which
they had neglected, and said : We are weary of philo-
sophy ; we will study you, and you alone. As for God,
who can find Him? And they have worked at the
facts like gallant and honest men ; and their work,
like all good work, has produced, in the last fifty years,
results more enormous than they even dreamed. But
what are they finding, more and more, below their
facts, below all phenomena which the scalpel and the
microscope can show ? A something nameless, in-
visible, imponderable, yet seemingly omnipresent and
omnipotent, retreating before them deeper and deeper,
the deeper they delve : namely, the life which shapes
and makes — that which the old school-men called
" forma formativa," which they call vital force and
what not — metaphors all, or rather counters to mark
an unknown quantity, as if they should call it x or y.
One says : It is all vibrations ; but his reason, unsatis-
fied, asks : And what makes the vibrations vibrate ?
Another : It is all physiological units ; but his reason
asks : What is the " physis/' the nature and " innate
tendency " of the units ? A third : It may be all
caused by infinitely numerous " gemmules ; " but his
reason asks him : What puts infinite order into these
gemmules, instead of infinite anarchy ? I mention
these theories not to laugh at them. No man has a
deeper respect for those who have put them forth.
Nor would it interfere with my theological creed, if
any or all of them were proven to be true to-morrow.
I mention them only to show that beneath all these
theories — true or false — still lies the unknown x.
Scientific men are becoming more and more aware of
it ; I had almost said ready to worship it. More and

xin.] LIFE THE BEEATH OF GOD. 335

more the noblest-minded of them are engrossed by
the mystery of that unknown and truly miraculous
element in Nature, which is always escaping them,
though they cannot escape it. How should they
escape it? Was it not written of old : " Whither
shall I go from Thy presence, or whither shall I flee
from Thy spirit?"

Ah that we clergy would summon up courage to
tell them that ! Courage to tell them — what need not
hamper for a moment the freedom of their investiga-
tions, what will add to them a sanction, I may say a
sanctity — that the unknown x which lies below all
phenomena, which is for ever at work on all phenomena,
on the whole and on every part of the whole, down to
the colouring of every leaf and the curdling of every cell
of protoplasm, is none other than that which the old
Hebrews called — (by a metaphor, no doubt — for how
can man speak of the unseen, save in metaphors drawn
from the seen ? — but by the only metaphor adequate to
express the perpetual and omnipresent miracle) — The
Breath of God ; The Spirit who is The Lord and Giver
of Life.

In the rest, gentlemen, let us think, and let us
observe. For if we are ignorant, not merely of the
results of experimental science, but of the methods
thereof, then we and the men of science shall have no
common ground whereon to stretch out kindly hands
to each other.

But let us have patience and faith; and not suppose
in haste, that when those hands are stretched out it
will be needful for us to leave our standing-ground,
or to cast ourselves down from the pinnacle of the
temple to earn popularity; above all, from earnest

336 THE NATURAL THEOLOGY OF THE FUTURE, [xm,

students who are too high-minded to care for popu-
larity themselves.

True, if we have an intelligent belief in those
Creeds and those Scriptures which are committed to
our keeping, then our philosophy cannot be that which
is just now in vogue. But all we have to do, I believe,
is to wait. Nominalism, and that " Sensationalism **
which has sprung from nominalism, are running fast to
seed ; Comtism seems to me its supreme effort : after
which the whirligig of Time may bring round its
revenges ; and Realism, and we who own the Realist
creeds, may have our turn. Only wait. When a grave,
able, and authoritative philosopher explains a mother's
love of her newborn babe, as Professor Bain has done,
in a really eloquent passage of his book on the
" Emotions and the Will " (Second Edition, pp. 78, 79),
then the end of that philosophy is very near; and
an older, simpler, more human, and, as I hold, more
philosophic explanation of that natural phenomenon,
and of all others, may get a hearing.

Only wait ; and fret not yourselves, else shall you
be moved to do evil. Remember the saying of the
wise man: " Go not after the world. She turns on her
axis ; and if thou stand still long enough she will turn
round to thee."

THE END.

ILACE PEES8.

University of California

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