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TOWN?

=GEOLOGY

CHARLES KINGSLEY, F.L.S., F.G.S.

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9

TOWN CiEOLOGY

BY THE

REV. CHARLES KINGSLEY, F.L.S., F.G.S.,

CANON OF CHESTER.

PREFACE.

This little book, including the greater
part of this preface, has shaped itself out
of lectures given to the young men of the
citv of Chester. But it does not deal, in
its present form, with the geology of the
neighborhood of Chester only. I have tried
so to recast it that any townsman, at least
in the manufacturing districts of England
and Scotland, may learn from it to judge,
roughly perhaps, but on the whole accu¬
rately, of the rocks and soils of his own
neighborhood. He will find, it is true, in
these pages, little or nothing about those
“Old Red Sandstones,” so interesting to
a Scotsman ; 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 Scot¬
land, 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 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 cer¬
tain, 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 hand-book of geologi¬
cal facts. Such a guide (and none better)
the young man will find in Sir Charles
LyelFs “ Student’s Elements of Geology.”
1 have tried rather to teach the method of
geology than its facts ; to furnish the stu¬
dent with a key to all geology, rough in¬
deed 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

39A

TOWN GEOLOGY.

book nor all the books in the world will
make them geologists. 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 ob¬
served. 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 near¬
est 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 be¬
lieve anything, even on the highest scientific
authority, till he has either seen it, or some¬
thing 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 acquire that
haliit of mind by which alone he can judge
fairly and wisely of facts of any kind what¬
soever.

I say, facts of any kind whatsoever. If
any of my 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, pro¬
vided 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 wliich 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 sci¬
ences. 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 sci¬
ence. 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 ?

In the first place, they need, I presume,
occupation after their hours of work. If
any of them answer, “We do not -want oc¬
cupation, we want amusement. Work is
very dull, and we want something which

will excite our fancy, imagination, sense of
humor. 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 for playing is generally the man who
can work most heartily when lie must work.

But there is certainly nothing in the
study of physical science to interfere with
genial hilarity. Indeed, some solemn per¬
sons have been wont to reprove the members
of the British Association, and specially
that Red Lion Club, where all the philoso¬
phers are expected to lash their tails and
roar, of being somewhat to 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 imagina¬
tion, 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 ray
readers.

Another argument, and a very strong
one, in favor of studying some branch of
natural science just now is this — that with-
out it you can hardly keep pace with the
thought of the world around you.

Over and above the solid gain of a sci¬
entific habit of mind, of which I shall speak
presently, the gain of mere facts, the in¬
creased knowledge of this planet on which
we live, is very valuable just now — valu¬
able 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 Uni¬
versity, the public schools, one after an¬
other, are taking up the subject in earnest ;
so are the middle-class schools ; so, I trust,
will all primary schools throughout the
country ; and I hope that my children at
least, if not I myself, wdll see the day when
ignorance of the primary law"s and facts of
science wdll 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

TOWN GEOLOGY.

325

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 whole¬
somely as they can, they and tlieir children
aftor them — it seems strange, I say, that
such people should in general be so careless
about tlie constitution of this same planet,
and of the laws and facts on which depend,
not merely their comfort and their wealth,
but tlieir liealth and their very lives, and
the health and the lives of their children
and descendants.

I know some will say, at least, to them¬
selves, “ What need for us to study science ?
Tlu're 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 discov< ries wi en you do not
pay for them — to let c^hei ; labor in the
hope of entering into thoir labors, 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 him¬
self by eating the ox, the scientific man can¬
not repay himself by eating you ; and so
never gets paid, in most cases, at all.

But as for mankind thriving by common-
sense — the> 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 dis¬
eases, poverty, waste — waste incalculable,
and now too often irremediable — waste of
life, of labor, of capital, of raw material, of
soil, of manure, of every bounty which God
has bestowed on man, till, as in the eastern
Mediterranean, 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 uni¬
verse which (whether we be conscious of
them or not) are all around us, like w’alls
of iron and of adamant — say, rather, like
some vast machine, ruthless though benefi¬
cent, among the wheels of which if we en¬
tangle 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 civilized nations of Europe and
America are aAvakening, slowly but surely,
to this truth. The civilized wmrld is learn¬
ing, thank God, more and more of the im¬
portance of physical science ; year hy year,
thank God, it is learning to live more and
more according to those law's 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 w’hat the study of
physical 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 be¬
yond our highest expectations. Or look at
the actual fresh amount of employn^ent, 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 w’ho wish to help them¬
selves, and, in so doing, to help their fel¬
low-men. Let me quote to you a passage
from an essay urging the institution of
schools of physical science for artisans,
which says all wdiich I wish to say and
more :

“ The discoveries of voltaic electricity,
electro-magnetism, and magnetic electri¬
city, by Volta, CErsted, and Faraday, led to
the invention of electric telegraphy by
Wheatstone and others, and to the great
manufactures of telegraph cables and tele¬
graph 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 ])ounds 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

326

TOWN GEOLOGY.

vapors, the properties of water, the me¬
chanical effect of heat, etc., resulted in the
development of steam-engines and 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 Brit¬
ain. The various original investigations
on the chemical effects of light led to the
invention of photography, and have given
employment to thousands of j)ersons who
practise that process, or manufacture and
pre})are the various material and articles ’’ . •
quired in it. The discovery of chlorine by
Scheele led to the invention of the modern
processes of bleaching, and to various im¬
provements in the dyeing of the te.>:tile
fabrics, and has given employment to a very
large number of our Lancashire operatives.
The discovery of chlorine has also con¬
tributed to the employment of thousands of
printers, by enabling esparto grass to be
bleached and formed into paper for the use
of our dailj' press. The numerous experi¬
mental investigations 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 con¬
nected with its manufacture. The dis¬
covery of the alkaline metals by Dav^q of
cyanide of potassium, of nickel, phos¬
phorus, the common acids, and a multitude
of other substances, have led to the em¬
ployment of a whole army of workmen in
the conversion of those substances into ar¬
ticles of utility. The foregoing examples
might be greatly enlarged upon, and a great
many others might be selected from the sci¬
ences 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, in increasing the employment
for workmen and others. ” — Nature, No. 25.

“ 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
und wisdom, emigrate you will, some of
YOU, instead of stopping here to scramble
over each other’s backs for the scraps, like
black bettles 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 exhausted
than its mineral wealth. Exhausted ! Not
half of it — I believe not a tenth of it — is yet
known. Could 1 show you the wealth which
I have seen in a single Tropic island, not
sixty miles square — precious timbers, glims,
i.^uits, what not, enough to give employ

ment and wealth to thousands and tens of
thousands, wasting for want of being
known and w'orked — then you would see
what a man wdio emigrates may do, by a
little sound knowledge of botany alone.

And if not. Suppose that any one of
you, learning a little sound natural history,
should abide here in Britain to your life’s
end, and observe nothing but the hedge¬
row plants : he would find that there is
much more to be seen in those mere hedse-
row plants than he fancies now. The mi¬
croscope will reveal to him in the tissues of
any wood, of any seed, wonders which wdll
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 farther still.
Suppose that he extended his researches
somewhat to those minuter vegetable forms,
the mosses, fungi, lichens ; suppose that he
went a little farther still, and tried what
the microscope would show^ him in any
stagnant pool, wffiether fresh water or salt,
of desmidise, diatoms, and all those wmn-
drous atomies which seem as yet to defy
our classification into plants or animals.
Suppose he learned 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 valu¬
able 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 poli¬
tics, 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 Brother¬
hood. 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, somewhen,
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 practis¬
ing them ourselves, when and where we
can. And I tell you, that in becoming sci¬
entific men, in studying science and acquir¬
ing the scientific habit of mind, vou will
find yourselves enjoying a freedom, an

TOWN GKOLOGY.

equality, a brotherhood, such as you will
jjot 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 w^e choose ;
and to say what we choose also, provided we
do not say it rudely or violently, so as to
provoke a breach of the peace. That last
was my poor friend 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. At all events 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 ! some one
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 ? Doubt¬
less. But are vou sure, first, that you think
what you choose, or only what some one
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,
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 opin¬
ions at second hand, from some book or
some newspaper, which, after all, only re¬
flects your own feelings, your own opin¬
ions ? You should ask yourselves that
(juestion, seriously and often : “ Are my

thoughts really free ?” No one values more
highly than I do the advantage of a free
]»ress. 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 be¬
ing, then we must acquire something of
that inductive habit of mind which the
study of natural science gives. It is, aft( i

all, as Professor Huxley says, only common-
sense well regulated. But th.en it is well
regulated ; and how jirecious it is if you
can but get it ! The art of seeing, the art
of knowing what you see ; the art of com¬
paring, of perceiving true likenesses and
true differences, and so of classifying and
arranging what you see ; the art of con¬
necting facts together in your own mind in
chains of cause and effect, and that accu¬
rately, patiently, calmly, without prejudice,
vanity, or temper — this is what is wanted
for true freedom of mind. But accuracy,
patience, freedom from prejudice, careless¬
ness 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, 1 know no study so able to give that
free habit of mind as the study of natural
science.

Equality, too — whatever equality may or
mav not be just or possible : this, at least,
is just, and I hojre possible ; that every
man, every chdd, of every rank, should
have an equal chance of education ; an
equal chance of developing all that is in him
by nature ; an eq,ual chance of acquiring a
fair knowledge of those facts of the uni¬
verse 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
w^ay, I would give the same education to
the child of the collier and to the child of
the 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 handi¬
capping them in their first race. What¬
ever stable they come out of, wdiatever
promise they show, let them all train
alike and start fair, and let the best colt
wdn.

Well ; but there is a branch of educa¬
tion 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 OAvn interest, have
neglected it hitherto in their schools ; so
that they have not the start of the poor
man on that subject wdiich they have on
many. In the next place, natural science
is a subject wdiich 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 owm fault, not his purse’s.
Many shops Have I seen about the world
in which fools could buy articles more or
less hopeful to them ; but never saw' I yet
an observation-shop, nor a common-sense

328

TOWN GEOLOGY,

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 tlie books did not ex¬
ist, 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 microscope or a])paratus 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 observa¬
tions, general mutual help and mutual in¬
struction ? 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 you want to mix with men, and
men, too, eminently worth mixing witn,
on the simple ground that “ a man’s a man
for a’ that if you want to become the
acquaintances 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¬
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 bet¬
ter 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 free¬
masonry, 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 free¬
masonry in which Hugh Miller, the poor
Cromarty stonemason, in which Michael
Faraday, the poor bookbinder’s boy, be¬
came 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 discoverers.

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. Dc
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.

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. 1
used to think one could get perfect free¬
dom, 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 grind
ing it all down, and regenerating it sc
And that something can be done by im
proved 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 wmuld do very little toward grinding
them right, however well and amazingly it
was made. I began to see that what sort
of fiour 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, mod¬
est men. Men who are aware of their own
vast ignorance compared with the vast
amount that there is to be learned in sue!
a universe as this. Men who are accus
tomed to look at both sides of a question ,
who, instead of making up their minds in
haste like bigots anci fanatics, wait, like
wise men, for more facts, and more
thought 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 wdto has not got that habit of

I

TOWN GEOLOGY.

329

Blind, 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.

4.nd when I saw that I said to myself, I
will train myself, by natural science, to tht
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 Englisnman over whom I can get in¬
fluence in tne 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 ques¬
tions — therefore, I say, I entreat you to
cultivate the scientific spirit by which
alone you can judge justly of those (p]es-
tions. 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 honor ” — to use Mr. Carlyle’s
famous parable — because they are accord¬
ing 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 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 philoso¬
phers of the seventeenth century left for
the use of future generations, and specially
of the Teutonic race.

For the rest, events seem but toe likely
to repeat themselves again and again all
over the world, in the same hopeless cir¬
cle. 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 spout-
ers, 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
organized brute force and military desjK)t-
ism. And, after that, what can come save

anarchy, and decay, and social death ?

Wliat else, unless there be left in the
nation, in the society, as the salt of the
land, to keep it all from rotting, a suffi¬
cient 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 civilized
world), on them will the future of that
world mainly depend. They will rule, and
they will act — cautiously, we may hope,
and modestly and charitably, because in
learning true knowledge they will have
learned also their own ignorance, and the
vastness, the complexity, the mystery oi
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 toward 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 sjDread 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 my¬
self and all over whom I may have influ¬
ence ? 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 toward it ?

First, as to meddling with secular mat¬
ters. I grudge that epithet of secular to
any matter whatsuever. But I do more ; I
deny it to anything which God has made, '
even to the tiniest of insects, the most in¬
significant 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
less lofty w'ord. The grain or dust is a
thought of God ; God’s power made it ;
God’s wisdom gave it whatsoever proper¬
ties or qualities it may possess. God’s
providence has put it in the place wdiere 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 Siurit than
you or I can. If it go up to the physical

330

TOWN GEOLOGY.

heaven, and float (as it actually often does)
far above the clouds, in those higher strata
of the atmosphere 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 press¬
ure, heat, crystallization, 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 ex¬
pressions of God’s mind and will concern¬
ing this universe in which we live — “ the
Word of God,” as Bacon says, “ revealed
in facts” — and then you will not fear jfliys-
ical 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 Psalm¬
ist : “The heavens,” says he, “declare
the glory of God ; and the firmament
showeth his handiwork. There is neither
speech nor language ’where their voices are
not heard among them.” So held the
Psalmist concerning astronomy, the knowl¬
edge 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 jjoet 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
Romans “ 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 God¬
head,” and who told the savages of Lyca-
onia that “ God had not left himself with¬
out witness, in that he did good and sent
men rain from heaven, and fruitful sea¬
sons, filling men’s hearts with food and
gladness.” Rain and fruitful seasons wit¬
nessed 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 sea¬
sons, what we now call climatology, mete¬
orology, 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 dis¬
proving, has only corroborated St. Paul’s
assertion, and how the ocean and the ram-

cloud, like the sun and stars, declare the
glory of God. And if any one undervalues
the sciences which teach us concerning
stones and plants and animals, or thinks
that nothing can be learner! from them con¬
cerning God, allow one who has been from
childhood only a humble, though he trusts
a diligent, student of these sciences — allo’w
him, I say, to ask in all reverence, but in
all frankness, who it -was who said, “ Con¬
sider the lilies of the field, how they
grow.” “Consider the birds of the air,
and how your Heavenly Father feedeth
them.”

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

I know, of course, the special aj)plica-
tion 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 ap¬
plication itself is deeper, wider, more liter¬
ally true, more wonderful, more tender,
and, if I dare use such a word, more poetic,
than the unscientific man can guess.

But let me ask you further, do you
think that our Lord in that instane, 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 sub
ject of contemplation, in the laws and pro
cesses of the natural world, and their an¬
alogy with those of the spiritual world, the
kingdom of God — a subject of contempla¬
tion, I say, which it was not safe to con¬
template 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 uni¬
verse, 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 uni¬
verse which He, the Truth, the Light, tlie
Love, has made can be otherwise than in¬
finitely worthy to be considered ? or th nt
the careful, accurate, and patient consider¬
ation 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 Plim 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 to¬
gether, by him, and lives and moves and
has its being in him ?

And here I must pause to answer an ob¬
jection which I have heard in my youtli
from many pious and virtuous people —
better people in God’s sight than I, I fear,

TOWN GEOLOGY.

S3i

can pretend to be.

They used to say, “ Tliis would be all
very true if there were not a curse upon
the earth.” And then they seemed to de¬
duce, 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 trust¬
ed, because they were disordered, and de¬
ceptive, and what not.

Now, in justice to the Bible, and in jus¬
tice 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
ir, the earth is not cursed. For it is said
in Gen. 8 : 21, “And the Lord said, I
will not again curse the ground any more
for man’s sake. While the earth remain-
eth, 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 ; for all
things serve thee.” And again, “Thou
hast made them fast forever 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 S^t. Paul, and One greater
than St. Paul) declare the permanence 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, “ O all ye works of the
Lord, bless ye the Lord ; praise him and
magnify him forever.” On that one
hymn I take my stand. That is my char¬
ter as a student of natural science. As
long as that is sung 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 bold¬
ly likewise, and, with Socrates of old, to
follow the Logos whithersoever it leads.

The Logos. I must pause on that word.
It meant at first, no doubt, simply speech,
argument, reason. In the mind of Soc¬
rates it had a deeper meaning, at which
he only dimly guessed ; which w as seen
more clearly by Philo and the Alexandrian
Jews ; which w'^as revealed in all its ful¬
ness to the beloved Apostle St. John, till

he gathered speech to tell men of a Logos„
a Word, who was in the beginning with
God, and W'as God ; by whom all things
w ere made, and without him was not any¬
thing made that was made ; and how in
him w as life, and the life was the light of
men ; and that he was none other than
Jesus Christ our Lord.

Y"es, 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 be¬
lieve that — as long as w^e believe that in
his light alone can we see light — as
long as we believe that the life 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 w^e shall not fear to investi¬
gate life ; for we shall know, however
strange or novel, beautiful or awful, the
discoveries w^e may make may be, w e are
only following the Word wiiithersoever 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 w ords 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 as¬
tronomical question. If I may be allowed
to liken this earth to a fruit, then astrono¬
my 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, doubt¬
less, 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, wdiich we call geology, would be a.
magnificent 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 be¬
coming more and more an open (question.

But meanwdiile all must agree that there
is matter enough for interest — nay, room
enough for the free use of the imagination,

882

TOWN GEOLOGY.

in a science which tells of the growth and
decay of whole mountain-ranges, conti¬
nents, oceans, whole tribes and worlds of
plants and animals.

And yet it is not so much for the vast¬
ness and grandeur of those scenes of the
distant past, to which the science of geol¬
ogy introduces us, that I value it as a
study, and wish earnestly to awaken you
to its beauty and importance. It is be¬
cause 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 mathematics or
of chemical analysis ; they may be studied
in every bank, every grot, every quarry,
every railway-cutting, by any one 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 im¬
portant 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 discov¬
ered 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, Greek, mathematics, scientific chem¬
istry, 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 un¬
known by the known. If you meet some¬
thing 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 ex¬
plain the other also. Sometimes it will ;
sometimes it will not. But if it 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 pret¬
tiest 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 there-
fore, 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 scien¬
tifically. You would have made a fair and
sufficient induction (as it is called) from
the facts about birds’ habits and birds’

deaths which you knew.

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 not taken into account, and
for which your old explanation was not
sufficient ; and you would have to try a
new induction — to use your common-sense
afresh — saying, 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 oe blown across the Atlantic alive. I
do know that 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, 1
prefer to believe, till I get a better explana¬
tion, 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
nor 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 continents,
by I know not what of fancied cataclysms
and convulsions of nature ; explaining the
unknown by the still more ui^known, till
some of their geological 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 ip past ages and in ancient rocks

TOWN GEOl.OOY.

should be explained, if possible, by the
changes which are taking place now in the
most recent deposits — in the soil of the
held.

And in the last forty years, since that
<rreat and sound idea has become rooted
in the minds of students, and specially 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 Ly ell’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 honor 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, through¬
out the series, from the known to the un¬
known, and show ‘you how to explain the
latter by the former. Sir Charles Lyell
has, I see, in the new edition of his “ Stu¬
dent’s Elements of Geology,” begun his
book with the uppermost, that is newest,
strata or layers, and has gone regularly
downward, 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
ane law or rule, which seems to me found¬
ed on common-sense — namely, that the up¬
permost 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 tru¬
ism ? Do I seem almost impertinent in
asking you to remember it ? So much the
better. I shall be saved unnecessary trou¬
ble 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 })robably,” be¬
cause 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 ?” 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 fiist.

Now why is this ? Simply because, in
laying one thing on another, you only move
weight. In thrusting one thing under an¬
other, you have not only to move weight,
but to overcome friction. That is why you
do it, tliough 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 re¬
quires a force so enormous, compared with
what isem|)loyed inlaying one rock on an¬
other, that (so to speak) she continually
fails, and, instead of producing a volcanic
eruption, produces only an earthquake.
Of that I may speak hereafter, and may
tell you, in good time, how to distinguish
rocks which have been thrust in from be¬
neath 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 Ido not v/ish 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 your¬
selves, 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 rocks, there will be no use in my go¬
ing 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 com.*: m 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 comn
sense tell you that the mud was there \j^
fore the leaves ? And so on down to the
bottom of the pond, where, lastly, I think
common-sense would tell you that the bot¬
tom of the pond was tliere already before
all the layers which were laid down on it.
Is not that simple common-sense ?

334

TOWX (JEOT.OCIY.

Then apply that reasoning to tlie soils
and rocks in any spot on earth. If you
naade 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, \ou
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. Tf next the
boring came into (piite 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 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 per¬
fect, 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 b'mestone
you came to a bottom rock (piite differ¬
ent 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 tlie lime¬
stone here, but higher than it. So per¬
haps in this part it has made a shift, and
the highlands are younger than the low¬
lands ; for see, they rise so much higher” ?
WouM not that be about 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 tow¬
ard 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 un¬
known. What do I mean ? This. 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 arc plenty ii:
every lowland. Learn how it is being
made there ; apply tlie 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 estuary, near
vour town, vou have eveiv advantage for
seeing soil made. Thousands of sipiare
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 estuaries below Loudon,
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 biings a
fresh load, either of fine mud or of line
sand, or possibly some of it peaty matter
out of distant hills. Here is one indisputa¬
ble fact from which to start. Let us look
for another.

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

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 mackintosh 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 lit¬
tle 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 near¬
est roadside drain where it runs into a
pond, and see how it drops the pebbles tin.
moment it enters the pond, and then tlie
sand in a fan-shaped heap at the nearest
end ; but carries the fine mud on, and
holds it suspended, to be gradually de¬
posited at the bottom in the still water :
and say to yourself. Perhaps the sands
which cover so many inland tracts were

TOWN Gf:OL()GY.

dropped by water, very near the sliore of a
lake or sea, and by rapid currents. Per¬
haps, again, the brick clays, which are
often mingled with these sands, w^ere
dropped, like the mud in the pond, in
deeper water farther from the shore, and
certainly in still water. But more. Sup¬
pose once more, then, that, looking and
watcliing a pond being cleared out, under
the lowest layer of mud, you found — as
you would find in any of those ma^^nificent
reservoirs so common in the Lancashire
hills — a layer of vegetable soil, with grass
and brushw'ood rooted in it. What would
you say but, The pond has not been
always 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 your-
ijelves. It certainly would not tell you
that those trees were thrust in there by a
violent convulsion, cr that all those layers
were deposited there in a few days, or
even a few years, and you might safely in¬
dulge in speculations about the antiquity of
the estuary, 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 con¬
clusion, but still you will be trying fairly
10 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
ourselves, if you will read the sixth ehap-
^er of Sir Charles LyelPs new “ Elements
of Geology,” or the first hundred pages of
dial admirable book, De la Beche’s ” Geo¬
logical Observer and last, but not least,
A very elever little book called “ Rain and
Rivers,” by Colonel George Greenwood.

But though rain, like rivers, is a carrier of
soil, it is more. It is a maker of soil
likewise; and by it mainly the soil of an
upland field is made, whether it be car¬
ried down to the sea or not.

If you will look into any quarry you will
see that, however compact the rock may lx;
a few feet below the surfaee, it becomes,
in almost every case, rotten and broken u})
as it nears the upper soil, till you often

385

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 for 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 elifl^s. 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 sum¬
mer, but just after the winter’s frost, you
will see for yourselves, by the fresh frost
crop of newly-broken bits, that I am right.
Possibly you may find mx; 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. If you go to the
Alps at certain seasons, and hear the thun¬
der of the falling rocks, and see their long
lines— moraines, as they are called — slid
ing 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
table-land, 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 earbonic acid ; and that acid, beat¬
ing in shower after shower against the
face of a cliff— espeeially if it be a
limestone cliff — weathers the rock chemi¬
cally, clianging (in the case of lime¬
stone) 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 limestone 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 tlie
soil, it is still less pure. It carries with it
not only carbonic 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 ce¬
ment 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, discolors the soil with which it is in
contact. You may see how the whole
rock, just below the soil, has often changed
in color 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, mak¬
ing 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 And the
shore protected 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 stan¬
chions, if they are there still ; and then ask
yourselves — 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, maybe,
ere now. Its teeth are strong enough, 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 an¬
other counteracting force, of wliich 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 estuary.
Now you will not wonder how old harbors

so often become silted up. The sea has
washed the land into them. But more,
the sea-currents do not allows the sands of
the estuary to escape freely out to sea.
They pile it up in shifting sand-banks
about the mouth of the estuary. The pre¬
vailing 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 estu¬
ary ?

You find over great tracts of East Scot¬
land. Lancashire, Norfolk, etc., pure loose
sand just beneath the surface, which looks
as if it w^ere 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 bv the waves, from the base of wiiich
the waters have gone back. Why should
not those crags be old sea- cliffs ? Why
should we not, following our rule of ex¬
plaining the unknown by the knowm, as¬
sume that such they are till some one gives
us a sound proof that they are not, and
say, These great plains of England and
Scotland w’ere probably once covered b}’’
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 vvhole 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 your¬
selves. 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 low¬
lands were once beneath the sea, then will
it not be certain that, somehow or other,
they must have been raised out of the sea.
again ?

TOWN OKOLOGY.

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, rivers, and seas are per¬
petually 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 com¬
mon-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
neighborhood 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 estuary, there is geology
enough to be learned 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 north¬
ern town, you will almost certainly see
paving courts and alleys, and sometimes —
to the discomfort of your feet — whole
streets, or set up as bourne-stones at cor¬
ners, or laid in heaps to be broken up for
road-metal, certain round pebbles, usually
dark brown or speckled gray, and exceed¬
ingly 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 counsrf '^‘>y be. How¬

ever n uch they nicij amei, tnci- , ’ 'des

337

will be, on the whole, the same every¬
where.

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 imme¬
diately above or below the chalk. The
blocks of “ Sarsden” sandstone — those
of which Stonehenge is built — and the
“ plum-pudding stones” which are some¬
times 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, ypu inquire, like a sensible person
who wishes to understand 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 peb-
liles 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 — asl'ei's as they call
them in Ireland. These mounds, with
therr sweet fresh turf rising out of heather
and bog, were tenanted — so Scottish chil¬
dren 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 shore,
near Edinburgh ; or, to give one more in¬
stance 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 clifi, great beds of sticky
clay, stuffed full of bits of every rock be¬
tween the Lake mountains and Scarbor¬
ough, from rounded pebbles of most an¬
cient rock down to great angular fragments
of ironstone and coal. There, as else¬
where, 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 placetj many miles
^way.

TOW,\ (inoLOGY

Now, if we find spread over a low land
pebbles composed of rocks which are only
found in certain Idgli lands, is it not ah
act of mere 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 ver}’’ long
ago that such arguments would have been
'Considered, not only no truisms, but not
«ven common-sense.

But to return ; let us take, as an e.vample
a sample of these boulder-clay pebbles
from the neighborhood 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 by or altered by
■volcanic heat, and almost all found in the
Lake mountains), 87 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 — that is,
rocks immediately round Liverpool — 12 per
cent

Now, does not this sample show, as far
as human common- sense can be depended
on, t]i."t 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 knowl¬
edge of mineralogy would prove that.
But even if you are no mineralogist, com¬
mon-sense will tell you that if they were
r.ll 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 cla}^ it is a most extraor¬
dinary coincidence — indeed one too strange
to be believed, if any less strange explana¬
tion can be found — that they should have
taken the composition of different rocks
which are found all together in one group
<►1 mountains to the northward. You will
.'■iirely say. If this be granite, it has most
probably come from a granite mountain ;
if this be grit, from a gritstone mountain ;
and so on with the whole list. Why are
we to go out of our w^ay to seek improba¬

ble explanations when there is a probable
one staring us in the face ?

Next — and this is well worth your
notice — if you will examine the pebbles
carefully, especially the larger ones, you
will lind that they are not only more or
less rounded, but often scratched ; and
often, too, in more than one direction, tw'o
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 dis¬
cover 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 tha ques
tion, as some have tried to answer it, by
saying that they were brought by Noah’i
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 Scripture had
asserted their existence.

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.

Recollect 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 to¬
gether, probably 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.

TOWN GKOLOGY

338

Rut the boulders may liav'e been l)rought
by a current, and then the water may liave
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 wiL do which sup¬
poses them to have been brought by water
alone.

Try yourself, dear reader, and make ex¬
periments with running water, pebbles,
and mud. If you try for seven years, I be¬
lieve, 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 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 but 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
^orce, wdiich we do not see at work in
Britain now, may have been at work here
ages since ? That w ould at least be rea¬
soning 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 perma¬
nently covered with ice ?

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

We find underneath the glaciers first l

moraine profonde, consisting of the bould¬
ers and gravel and earth, which the gla¬
cier has ground off the hillsides, and is
carrying down with it.

These stones, of course, grind, scratch,
and polish each other, and in likewise
grind, scratch, and polish the rock over
which they pass, under the enormous
w^eight 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 have fallen from
neighboring cliffs, and are now travelling
dowmward 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
throwm 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 ex¬
pected if the glacier ends, as it commonly
does in Arctic regions, in the sea. The ice
grows out to seaward 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 icebergs, which float away, at the
mercy of tides and currents, often ground¬
ing again in shallower water, and plough¬
ing 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 con¬
fusedly about the sea floor.

Meanwhile the fine mud which is flowing
out from under the ice goes out to sea like¬
wise, coloring 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 distin¬
guished from the brick-clay or fossiliferous
boulder-clay so common in the North. A
very illustrious Scandinavian explorer,
visiting Edinburgh, declared, as soon as ha
saw the sections of boulder-clay exhibited
near that city, that this was the very sub¬
stance which he saw forming in the Spitz-
bergen 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 ex¬
cited by their real poetry and grandeur.

840

' TOWN gp:ology.

Indeed, it would have been an imperti¬
nence 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
bo'und to suppose that many of my readers
know as much or more about them than I
do.

But let us go a step farther ; and, bear¬
ing in our minds w^hat 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 skele¬
ton 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 out¬
ward 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, resifted, and reshaped by cur¬
rents and by tides, and mixed with shore-
sand ground out of shingle-beach, thus
making confusion worse confounded. A
few shells, of an Aretic 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 an¬
cient ooze, wherever the iceberg had left
it in peace long enough for sea-animals to
colonize and breed in it. But the general
appearance of tfije dried sea-bottom would
be a dreary and lifeless waste of sands,
gravels, loose boulders, and boulder-bear¬
ing 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 return-
mg vegetation coated their dreary sands
tnd clays with a layer of brown vegetable
zoil.

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 else¬
where.

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 ac¬
cumulated 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 pro¬
duced those rounded and polished and
scored and fiuted rockers moutomies —
“ sheep-backed rocks” — so common in the
Lake district ; so common, too, in Snow¬
don, 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 unw^eathered
surface of rock, in the direction in w hich
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 see in land¬
locked and quiet fiords in Kerry — ice-
fiutings 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, irrespec¬
tive of the lie of the beds, not in valleys,
but on the browns and summits of moun¬
tains, often ending abruptly at the edge of
some sudden cliff, where the true work of
water, in the shape of rain and frost, is ac¬
tually dest)’oying 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 geol¬
ogy), that ice planes down into flats, while
water saws out into crags and gullies ; and
that the rain and frost are even now restor¬
ing Scotch scenerv to somethino' of that
ruggedness 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 wih
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

TOWN ( geology.

&41

4

and dry on mountain ridges and promon¬
tories, upon rocks of a totally different
kind. Some of my readers surely recollect
Wordsworth’s noble lines about these mys¬
terious wanderers, of which he had seen
many a one about his native hills :

'* As a hn^e stone is sometimes seen to lie
Coucliea on the bald top of an eminence,

Wonder to all w ho 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-heast 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 Brit¬
ain 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 «, &, e. 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 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 cer¬
tainty.

Now let us do the same, and say. If
this strange dream be true, and the low¬
lands 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 ice¬
bergs 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

nnd, 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 lit¬
erature has been already written. Those
who wish to study it may find all that they
need know, and more, in Lyell’s “ Stu¬
dent’s Elements of Geology,” and in chap¬
ter xii. of his “ Antiquity of Man.” They
will find that if the evidence of scientific
conchologistsbe 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 disappear, their
places being taken by shells of a temper¬
ate, and at last of an Arctic climate ;
which last have since retreated either to¬
ward their native north, or into cold water
at great depths. From Essex across to
Wales, from Wales to the estuary 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 consid¬
erable 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-scratch¬
ed boulders, which again lie on the moun¬
tain slates. It was discovered by the late Mr.
Trimmer, now, alas ! lost to geology. Out
of that beach fifty-seven different snecies
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 Ramsay, 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 com¬
mon-sense over this astounding fact —
which, after all, is only one among hun¬
dreds ; to let (as Mr, Matthew Arnold
would well say) their “ thought play free¬
ly” 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

342

TOWN GEOLOGY.

puts shells upon mountain-sides only to be -
fool 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 lengrth 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 Snow¬
donia, fourteen hundred feet into the air.
And if any one 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. Earth¬
quakes upheave lands now only by slight
and intermittent upward pulses ; nay,
some lands we know to rise without any
earthquake pulses, but by simple, slow, up¬
ward swelling of a few feet in a century ;
and we have no reason, and therefore no
right, to suppose that Snowdonia was up-
heaved by any means or at any rate which
we do not Avitness now ; and therefore we
are l)ound 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, gohe-movcherie, as
the French call it, which is agaj)e to snap up

any new and vast fancy, just because it is
new and vast. We want our readers to bo
slow, suspicious, conservative, 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 stejis and make sure. I must
see whether it is the right road ; whether
there are not other roads, a dozen of them
perhaps, which would do as well or better
than this.

That 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 dis¬
covered, through many mistakes, many
corrections, and many changes of opinion
about details, for nearly forty years of
hard work, by many men, in many lands.

As a very humole student of this sub¬
ject, 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 ex¬
plained 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
incredible, 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 latitude 70”, far
within the Arctic circle. Now there cer¬
tain 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 w^e must say that the climate o-f
Greenland was then so much warmer than
now, that it had summers probably as hot
as tliose of New York ; or we must saj

TOWN GEOLOGY.

343

tliat these leaves aud 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
live hundred feet of 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 wm 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 In¬
dian 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 Smith 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 de¬
ceitful 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 pa¬
per ? 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 whicn
these pebbles and boulders 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 fairy-land of wonders? to a time when
all England, Scotland, and Ireland were as
Greenland 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 emer¬
ald ?” when Snowdon was sunk for at least
fourteen hundred feet of its height ? wdien
(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 an-
sw^ered too. But so it is always in sci¬
ence. We know not what we shall dis¬
cover. But this, at least, we know, that
it will be far more wmnderful 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 — aud 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 ot ice, somewhat
less severe, probably, than the first. I
should have liked to have hinted at the
probable cause of this change — indeed, of
the age of ice altogether — whether it was
caused by a change in the distiibution 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
whetlier, 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, 1, as no astronomer, cannot
speak. But I should have liked to have
said somewhat on matters on which 1 have
knowledge enough, at least, to teach you

344

TOWN gKOLOG\.

how much there is to be learned. I should
have liked to tell the student of sea-ani¬
mals — how the ice-age helps to explain, and
is again explained by, the remarkable dis¬
coveries which Dr, Carpenter and Mr. W}'-
ville 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
])lants 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 tlie high¬
est 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 in¬
habited Britain till the ice drove them out
southward, even into the South of Fiance ;
and how, as the ice retreated and the cli¬
mate became tolerable once more, some of
them — the mammoth and rhinoceros, the
bison, the lion, and many another mighty
beast — reoccupied our lowlands, at a time
when the hippopotamus, at least in sum¬
mer, 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 pres¬
ent Laplanders, who passed northward as
the ice went back, following the wild rein¬
deer herds from the South of France into
our islands, which were no islands then, to
be in their turn driven northward by
strongfer 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 hieroglyphics.
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-geo’ ogist 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
'vhich 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 Red 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 York¬
shire and Nottinghamshire ; over the man¬
ufacturing districts of central England :
down the valley of the Severn ; past Bris¬
tol and the Somersetshire flats to Torquay
in South Devon ; up northwestward
through Shropshire and Cheshire ; past
Liverpool and northward through Lanca¬
shire ; reappearing again, north of the
Lake mountains, about Carlisle and the
Scotch side of the Solway Frith, stretches
the Now Red sandstone plain, from under
• which everywhere the coal-liearing rocks
rise as from a sea. it contains,* in many
places, excellent quarries of building
stone ; the most famous of which, per-
liaps, are the well-knowui Runcorn quar¬
ries, near Liverpool, from which the old
Romans brought the material for the walls
and temples of ancient Chester, and from
which the stone for the restoration of Ches¬
ter 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 favored land. On them one finds
one’s self 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 Red
marls ; and if I wished to show a foreigner
what England was, I should take him
along them, from Yorkshire to South
Devon, and say. There. Is not that a
country worth living for — and worth dy¬
ing for, if need be ?

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

The townsman, finding this, vmuld have
a fair right to suppose that the clay was
laid down immediately, or at '.east 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

TOWN GEOLOGY.

345

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
live 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 par¬
cel 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
r-hanges have taken place, is my main the¬
sis. 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 un¬
derstand something of the method by
which geological problems are worked
out ; and can trust it, and me ; and shall
state boldly the conclusions cf geologists,
only giving proof where proof is specially
needed.

Now you must understand that in Eng¬
land there are two great divisions of these
New Red sandstones, “Trias,” as geolo¬
gists call them. An upper, called in Ger¬
many Keuper, which consists, atop, of the
rich red marl, below thfem, of sandstones,
and of those vast deposits of rock-salt,
which have been long worked, and worked
to such good purpose, that a vast subsid¬
ence 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. Un¬
derneath these beds again are those which
carry the building-stone of Runcorn. Now
these beds altogether, in Cheshire at least,
are about 8400 feet thick, and were not
laid down in a year, or in a century either.

Below them lies a thousand feet of sand¬
stones, 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, be¬
tween the Keuper above and the Bunter be¬
low, lies a great series of limestone beds,
which, from the abundance of fossils which
they contain, go by the name of Muschel-
kalk. 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 Eng¬
land. The Keuper lies, certainly, imme¬
diately on tile Bunter, but not always
“ conformably” on it. That is, the beds
are not exactly parallel. The Bunter had
been slightly tilted and slightly water-
worn before the Keuper was laid on it.

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 enormous heap of sands, more
than 5000 feet thick in places, stretching
across England and into Germany ?

It is difficult to answer. The shape aiul
distribution 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 Bar¬
mouth, there has been ground off and car¬
ried 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 min¬
eral wealth. The destruction of rocks — -
“ denudation” as it is called — in the dis¬
trict round Malvern, is, I am told, prova-
bly enormous. Indeed, it is so over all
Wales, North England, and West and
North Scotland. So there is enough of
rubbish to be accounted for to make our
New Red sands. The round pebbles in it
being, .1 believe, pieces of Old Red sand¬
stone, may have come from the great Old

346

TOWN GEOLOGY.

lied 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), parti¬
cles of mica. Now this mica could not
have been formed in the sand. It is a
definite crystalline mineral, whose compo¬
sition is well known. It is only found in
••ocks which have been subjected to im
mense pressure, and probably to heat. The
granites and mica-slates of Anglesey are
full of it ; and from Anglesey — as likely as
from anywhere 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 riple-marked,
as you do shore-sands now. You fine!
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
markings must have been covered up im¬
mediately 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 tliat ? 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 bar¬
ren of fossils in England, is full of them in
Wiirtemberg, reptiles, fish, and remains of
plants being common. But what will in¬
terest the reader are the footprints of a
strange beast, found alike in England and
in Germany — the Cheirofherium, 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 anato¬
mists, 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 one’s self 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 color was, whether he was
smooth or warty, what he ate, and in gen¬
eral how he got his living, we know not.
But 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
a 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 wad¬
dled over the Cheshire flats. A lizard, for
instance, 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
af lizards utterly unlike anything now liv¬
ing save one, and that one is crawling
about, plentifully I believe — of all places
*in the world — in New Zeaxand. How ir
got there ; how so strange a type of creat¬
ure 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 sci¬
entific 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 tl\en look, I hope
•with kindly interest, at the oldest Con¬
servatives they ever saw, or are like to
see ; gentlemen of most ancient pedigree,
who have remained all but unchanged,
while the whole surface of the globe has
changed around them more than once or
twice.

And now, of course, my readers will ex¬
pect 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

847

TOWN GEOLOGY.

marl which caps the sandstone. It was
formed most probably by the gradual dry¬
ing up of lagoons, such as are depositing
salt, it is said now, both in the Gulf of
Tadjara, on the Abyssinian frontier ojipo-
site Aden, and in the Runn of Cutch, near
the Delta of the Indus. If this be so, then
these New Red sandstones may be the re¬
mains 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 imagin¬
ary railway journey to London from any
spot in the manufacturing districts of cen¬
tral England — begging them, meanwhile,
to keep their eyes open on the way.

And here I must say that 1 w ish 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 ab'
sorbed probably in a trashy shilling novel,
and never lifted up to look out of the win¬
dow, unconscious of all that they are pass¬
ing — of the reverend antiquities, the ad¬
mirable 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 zoo¬
logy, by simply watching the flowers along
the railway banks and the sections in the
cuttings : 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, ar«> of a better
mind. So the next time they find them¬
selves running up southward 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 Red sandstone,
and often carry along their edges layers of
far younger rocks, called now Permian,
from the ancient kingdom of Permia, in
Russia, w'here they cover a vast area.
With them I will not confuse the reader

just now, but will only ask him to Veep his
eye on the rolling plain of New Red sands
and marls past, sa}^ 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 toward
the south-east — that is, toward London.

First appear thin layers of a very hard
blue limestone, full of shells, and parted
by layers of blue mud. That rock runs in
a broad belt across England, from Whitby
in Y'orkshire to Lyme in Dorsetshire, and
is known as lias. Famous it is, as some
readers may know, for holding the bones
of extinct monsters — icthyosaurs and
plesiosaurs, such as the unlearned may be¬
hold 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.

L^-ing on it, as we go south-eastward, ap
pear alternate beds of sandy limestone,
with vast depths of clay between them.
These “ oolites,” or frees^-ones, 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 free¬
stones and clays abound in fossils, but of
kinds, be it remembered, which differ
more and more from those of the lias be¬
neath, as the beds are higher in the series,
and therefore nearer. There, too, are
found principally the bones of that extra¬
ordinary 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 lengthend to carry the wing,
while the first alone is left free, as
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
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 Red sandstone,
after it had been dry land, or all but dry
land (as is proved by the footprints of ani¬
mals 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
;dlow reefs of coral to grow and shells to
propagate at the bottom. Each great

-^48

TOWN GEOLOGY.

band of clay signifies a long period, during
which fine mud was brought down from
some wasting land in the neighborhood.
And that larjd was not far distan-t 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, impres¬
sions of phmts, and even wing-shells of
beetles ; and lastly, if further proof was
needed, by the fact that m the ‘‘ dirt-bed”
of the Isle of Portland and the neighboring
shores, stumps of trees allied to tne mod¬
ern sago-palms are found as they grew in
the soil, which, with them, has been cov¬
ered up in layers of freshwater sliale and
limestone. A tropic forest lias 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 thick¬
ness of the lias and oolites together cannot
be less than a thousand feet. Consider¬
ing, then, the length of time required to
lay down a thousand feet of strata, and
considering the vast differenee between the
animals found in them, and the few found
in the New Red sandstone, we have a right
to all 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 com¬
monly the lower Greensand, though it is
not green, but rich iron-red. Then suc¬
ceeds a band of still blue clay, called the
gault, and then another bed of sand, the
upper Greensand, which is more worthy
of the name, for it does carry, in most
places, a band of green or “ glauconite”
sand. But it and the upper layers of the
lower Greensand also are worth our atten¬
tion ; for we are all probably eating them
from time to time in the form of bran.

It had been long remarked that cntain
parts of these beds carried admirable
wheat-land ; it had been remarked, too,
that the finest hop-lands — ^those of Farn-
ham, 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. VYhat 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
?hemist, that they were not, as fossils usu¬
ally are, carbonate of lime, but phosphate
'>f 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’ end to get for our grain and
pulse ; which we are importing, as expeii
sive 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 independ¬
ent of foreign phosphates in case of war.”

His advice was acted on ; for the Brit¬
ish farmer is by no means the stupid per¬
sonage which townsfolk are too apt to
fancy him. This bed of phosphates was
found everywhere in the Greensand, un¬
derlying the chalk. It may be traced
from Dorsetshire through England to Cam¬
bridge, and thence, I believe, into York¬
shire. It may be traced again, I believe,
all round the Weald of Kent and Sussex,
from Hythe to Farnham — where it is pecu¬
liarly rich — and so to Eastbourne and
Beach ey Head ; and it furnishes, in Cam¬
bridgeshire, the greater part of those so-
called “ coprolites, ” which are used per¬
petually now for manure, being ground
up, and then treated with sulphuric acid,
till they become a “ soluble superphos¬
phate 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 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 cop-
rolite bed, and has been formed under cir¬
cumstances the most opposite to it. 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 ani¬
mals grow, on the whole, more and more
like our living forms as we rise in the
series of beds. But only above the chalk
fas far as we yet know) do we begin to

TOWK GEOLOGY.

84!)

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 animal¬
cules (I use an unscientific w'ord 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 Atlan¬
tic sea-floor. Tliis 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 wdshes to know it,
need only ask the first geologist he meets ;
and if he has the wdiolesome instinct of
wonder in him, fill his imagination witii
true wonders, more grand and strange
than he is like to find in any fairy-tale.
All I have to elo wdth the matter here is,
to say that, arguing from the 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 dow'n 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, strew'ed with dead ani¬
mals, 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 aa 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 ferm the chalk alone. A rough
guess, of course, but one as likelv 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 sus¬
pected, and more than suspected ; and the
late discoveries of Dr. Carpenter nnd Dr.
Wyville Thompson have surely placed it
beyond doubt.

Thus, surely, if we call the oolitic beds
one new world above the New Red sand¬
stone, 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 tlie enor¬
mous downward leap, from sea-shore to
deep ocean, which the beds seem (butordy
seem) to have taken. The change — like^

all changes in geology — was probably
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 himself, if he will run out a few miles
by rail, and look in any cutting or pit,
where the surface of the chalk and the
beds which lie on it are exposed.

On the chalk lie — especially in tlie
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 ill 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, ])lainly by the gnawing
of the waves ; and on it lie, in many
places, large rolled flints out of chalk
which has been destroyed, 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 Reading) 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 Reading beds) dip under that vast bed
of London clay, four hundred and more
feet thick, which (as I said in my last
chapter) was certainly laid down by the
estuary of some great tropic river, among
palm-trees and anonas, crocodiles and tur¬
tles.

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 n ay have been to Ascot races, or
to Aldersnot 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 SwitzerlaiKi,
in Italy ; a period during which the land
must at first have swarmed witli forms of
tropic life, and then grown — but very

350

'lOWJN' GEOLOGY.

gradually — more temperate, and then cold¬
er and colder still ; till at last set in that
age of ice, which spread the boulder peb¬
bles over all rocks and soils indiscrimi¬
nately, 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 man}’
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 asks how long the
period was during which those sands of
Ascot Heath and Aldershot have been laid
down, I cannot tell. But this we can tell.
It was long enough to see such changes in
land and sea, that maps representing Eu¬
rope 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 ten thou¬
sand 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 gn it
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 Red sandstone
on which it rests.

IV.

THE COAL TN TFE FERE.

My dear town-dwelling readers, let me
tell you now something of a geological
product well known, happily, to all dwell¬
ers 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 com¬
monly said to be composed of vegetable
matter, of the leaves and stems of ancient
plants and trees — a startling statement, and
one which I do not wish you to take en¬
tirely on trust. I shall therefore spend a
few pages in showing you how this fact — ■
for fact it is— was discovered. 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 onl}’^ property which they seem to
iiave in common is that they can both
burn.” True. But difference of mere
look may be only owing to a transforma¬
tion or series of transformations. There
are plenty in nature ijuite as great, and
greater. What can be more different in

look, for instance, than a green field of
wheat and a basket of loaves at the ba¬
ker’s ? And yet there is, I trust, no doubt
whatsoever tliat the In’cad has been once
green wheat, and that the green wheat has
been transformed into bread— making due
allowance, of course, lor 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, fiowering, 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 sav¬
age who knew nothing of agriculture and
nothing of cookery - cklled in, as an ex¬
treme case, the man in the moon, who cer¬
tainly can know nothing of either ; for as
there is neither air nor water round the
moon, there can be nothing to giow there,
and therefore nothing to cook — and sup¬
pose 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 con¬
versation 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 arc the same thing I do see, for I see
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, there¬
fore, they have a common origin.

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

Suppose you had come into Britain with
Ih’ute, the grandson of vEneas, at that re¬
mote epncli when (as all archreologists
know who have duly road Geoffrey of
Monmouth and the Arthuric legends) Brit-

TOWN OTOLOGY. 35I

am \vafs inhabited only by a few giants, —namely, vegetable matter ? Tliey have
Now if you had met giants with one head, a common origin — namely, woodv fibre,
and also giants with seven heads, and no And coal, or rather culm, is the last link
othei s, you would have had a right to say, in a series of transformations from growinf>’
“ There are two breeds of giants here, one- vegetation?’’

headed and seven-headed.” But if you This is our first theory. Let us try tc
had found, as Jack the Giant Killer (who verify it, as scientific men are in the habit
belongs to the same old cycle of myths) of doing, by saying, If that be true, then
a]>pears to have found, two-headed giants something else is likely to be true too.
also, and three-headed, and giants, in- If coal has all been vegetable soil, then
deed, with any reasonable number of heads, it is likely that some of it has not been
^•ould you not have been justified in say- quite converted into shapeless coal. It is
ing, “ They are all of the same breed, after likely that there will be vegetable fibre still
all ; only some are more capitate, or heady, to be seen here and there ; perhaps leaves,
than others?” perhaps even stems of trees, as in a peat

I ho})e that you agree to that reasoning ; bog. Let us look for them,
for by it I think we arrive most surely at Ymu will not need to look far. The
a belief in the unity of the human race, coal, and the sands and shales which ac-
and that the Negro is actually a man and company the coal, are so full of plant-re-
a brother. mains, that three hundred species were

If the only two types of men in the world known to Adolphe Brongniart as early as
were an extreme white type, like the Nor- 1849, and that number has largely in-
wegians, and an extreme black type, like creased since.

the Negroes, then there would be fair Now one })oiut is specially noticeable
ground for saying, “ These two types have about these plants of the coal; namely,
been always distinct ; they are different that they may at least have grown in
races, who have no common origin.” But swamps.

if you found, as you will find many types of First, you will be interested, if you study
man showing endless gradations between the coal flora, with the abundance, beauty,
the white man and the Negro, and not and variety of the ferns. Now ferns in
only that, but endless gradations between these islands grow principally in rocky
them both and a third type, whose extreme woods, because there, beside the moisture,
perhaps is the Chinese — endless gradations, they get from decaying vegetable or decay-
I say, showing every conceivable shade of ing rock, especially limestone, the car-
resemblance or difference, till you often bonic acid which is their special food, and
cannot say to what type a given individual which they do not get on our dry pastures,
belongs ; and all of them, however differ- and still less in our cultivated fields. But
ent from each other, more like each other in these islands there are two noble spe-
than they are like any other creature upon cies, at least, which are true swamp-ferns ;
earth ; then you are justified in saying, the lastraea thelypteris, which of old filled
” All these are mere varieties of one kind, the ferns, but is now all but extinct ; and
However distinct they are now, they were the osmunda, or king-fern, which, as all
probably like each other at first, and therer know, will grow wherever it is damp
fore all probably had a common origin.’^ enough about the roots. In Hampshire,
That seems to me sound reasoning, and ad- in Devon, and Cornwall, and in the South-
vanced natural science is corroborating it west of Ireland, the king-fern too is a true
more and more daily. swamp fern. But in the tropics I have

Now apply the same reasoning to coal, seen more than once noble tree-ferns grow-
Y"ou may find about the world — you may ing in wet savannahs at the sea-level, as
see even in England alone — every grada- freely as in the mountain-woods : ferns
tion between coal and growing forest, with such a stem as some of the coal ferns
You may see the forest growing in its bed had, some fifteen feet in height, under
of vegetable mould ; you may see the for- which, as one rode on horseback, tme saw
est dead and converted into peat, with the blazing blue sky, as through a parasol
stems and roots in it ; that, again, into of delicate lace, as men might have long
sunken forests, like those to be seen below ages since have seen it, through the plume
high-water mark on manj’ coasts of this fronds of the ferns now buried in the coal,
island. Y^ou find gradations ]>etween them had there only been a man then created to
and beds of lignite, or wood coal ; then enjoy its beauty.

gradations between lignite and common or Next we find plants called by geologists
bituminous coal ; and then gradations be- calamites. There is no doubt now that
tween common coal and culm, or anthra- they are of the same lamily as our equiseta,
cite, such as is found in South AVales. or horse-tails, a race which has, over most
Have you not a right to say, “ These are parts of the globe, dwindled down now
all but varieties of the same kind of thing from twenty or thirty feet in height, as

352

TOWN GEOLOGY.

they were in the old coal measures, to
paltry little weeds. The tallest equisetum
in England — the beautiful E, tolmateia —
is seldom live 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 ly¬
copodiums. Now it is a certain fact,
which can be proved by the microscope,
that a very great part of the best coal is
actually made up of millions of tlie 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-mak¬
ing 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 else¬
where, lovers of wet and peaty soils, and
so may their huger 2)rototjq3es have been
in the old forests of the coal.

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

And as to the conifers, orpine-like trees
— the dadoxylon, of which the pith goes
by the name of sternbergia, and the uncer¬
tain 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 grow¬
ing 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 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 in¬
terior 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 scien¬
tific, you will listen to those who tell yon
that instead of there having been one
unique carboniferous epoch, with a pecu¬
liar coal-making climate, all epochs are car¬
boniferous if tiiey get the chance ; that
coal is of every age, from that of the
Scotch and English beds, up to the pres¬
ent day. The great coal-beds along the
Rocky Mountains, for instance, are ter¬
tiary — 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 state¬
ment. They will give you, beside, a fresh
proof of Sir Charles Lyell’s great geologi¬
cal rule — that the best way to explain what
we see in ancient rocks is to take for grant¬
ed, 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 masses of vegetable
matter get there ? The Yorkshire and Der¬
byshire coal-fields, I hear, cover seven hun¬
dred or eight hundred square miles ; the
Lancashire about two hundred. 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.^
a thousand or twelve hundred 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
destroyed. 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 vegetable soil come ? Of some neigh¬
boring land, was the first and most natural
answer. It W'as a rational one. It pro¬
ceeded from the known to the unknown.
It was clear that these plants had grown

TOWN GEOLOGY.

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
sandstone, 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, 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 objec¬
tion — then surely the coal would be im¬
pure — 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 w^as, 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 con¬
tained 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 discov¬
ered a tree — a sigillaria, standing upright
in the coal-measures, with its roots attach¬
ed. Those roots penetrated into the under
clay of the coal ; and those roots were stig-
marias. 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 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 vegetation 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 lepidodendra 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 bi¬
tuminous 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 geologi¬
cal 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. 888
of his “ Student’s Elements of Geology.”
He tells us that the dense growths of reerls
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 them¬
selves entirely before they reach the areas
in which vegetable matter may accumulate
for centuries, forming coal if the climate
be favorable ; and that in the cypress-
swamps of that region no sediment
mingles with the vegetable matter accumu¬
lated from the decay of trees and semi-
aquatic plants ; so that when, in a very
dry season, the swamp is set on fire, pits
are burnt into the ground many feet deep,
or as far as the fire can go down without
reaching water, and scarcely any earthy re¬
siduum is left ; j\ist 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 trans¬
parent than many a pool surrounded by
quaking bogs, fringed, as they are, in Ire¬
land, with a ring of white water-lilies,
which you dare not stoop to pick, lest the
peat, bending inward, slide you down ini'
that clear, dark gulf some twenty feet ik
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
color of coffee, or rather of dark beer,
and so impregnated with gases that it pro¬
duces fever or cholera when drunk, yet it
i.- — 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

-354

TOWN GNOLOGY.

the coal, and through the sandstones 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 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 in¬
side 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 tou¬
cans, 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 pre¬
vented me having the pleasure of writing
this book.

Now is it not plain that if such trees as
that sunk, their bark w^ould 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 sand¬
stone wouid be formed, which might do
to the collier of the future what they are
too apt to do now in the New^castle 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 w^ounding
the hapless men below.

Or again, if w'e find — as we very often
find — as w’as found at Parkfield Colliery,
near Wolverhampton, in the year 18-^14 — a
.quarter of an acre of coal-seam filled with
stumps of trees as they crrew', their trunks
broKen off and lying in every direction,
turned into coal, and flattened, as coal-fos¬
sils so often are, by the weight of the rock
above — should we not have a right to say.
These trees w^ere snapped off where they
grew by some violent convulsion ; by a
storm, or by a sudden inrush of water ow¬
ing to a sudden sinking of the land, or by
the very earthquake shock itself w hich sank
the land ?

But what evidence have we of such sink¬
ings ? The plain fact that you have coal-
seam above coal-seam, each with its bed of
under-clay ; and that therefore 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 rhiriy 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. Subsid¬
ence ? 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 we
know of subsidence ? You offered to ex¬
plain the thing wdiich had gone on once
by that wdiich is going on now\ Where is
subsidence going on now upon the surface
of our planet ? And w^here, 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 the}^ were in any age of this
planet’s history.

To give two instances, made now noto¬
rious 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 eigh¬
teen feet, and converted 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 neighbor¬
hood.

Again : in the valley of the Mississippi
— a tract which is nowq it would seem, in
much the same state as central England
was while our coal-fields w^ere 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 conspic¬
uous, some erect in the w^ater, others fall¬
en, and strew'ed 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”
(11th edit.), vol. i. p. 453. And I cannot
do better than advise my readers, if they
w ish to know more of the way in which
coal was formed, to read what is said in
that book concerning the Delta of the Mis¬
sissippi, and its strata of forests sunk
where they grew^, and in some places up¬
raised again, alternating with beds of clay
and sand, vegetable soil, recent sea-shella,
and w hat not, forming, to a deifih of sev-

TOWN G'-OLOGY.

355

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

If, therefore, the reader wishes to pic¬
ture to himself the scenery of what is now
central England, during the period when
oiir coal was being laid down, he has only,
I believe, to transport himself in fancy to
any great alluvial delta, in a moist and
varm climate, favorable 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 be¬
came 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 be¬
low high-water mark, and killed by the
waves ; while inland huge trees stood dy¬
ing, 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 inextricable confusion of vegeta¬
ble mud, roots of the alder-like man¬
groves, 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, com¬
pared with which the richest hot-house in
England was poor and small. But if the
sinking process which was going on con¬
tinued a few hundred years, all that huge
mass of wood and leaf would be sunk be¬
neath the swamp, and covered up 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
})eat, then lignite, and last, it may be,
coal, with the stems of killed trees stand¬
ing up out of it into the new mud and
sand-beds above it, just as the sigillarise
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 pro¬
cess went on — as that which had pre¬
ceded it.

That was a sight not easily to be forgot¬
ten. 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 of cultivation
— instead of fossil lepidodendra and sigil-
larise, 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 extra¬
ordinary 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 abun¬
dance of ferns, and especially of tree-ferns ;
but not so warm, to judge from the pres¬
ence 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 lit¬
tle or no food for animals, as the same
families of plants do to this day ; and if
creatures can get nothing to eat, they cer¬
tainly 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 North-western France, Belgi¬
um, Holland, and Germany were then un¬
der 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

356

TOWN GEOLOGY.

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 afterward, join
Greenland and North America with Scot¬
land and Norway ? Were the northern
fields of Nova Scotia, which are of the
same geological age as our own, and con¬
taining 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 Eter¬
nity.

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 mat¬
ter ; but can you show us how the trans¬
formation takes place ? Is it possible, ac¬
cording 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 corrobora¬
tion of 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 car¬
buretted 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 Pennsyl¬
vanian coal-fields some of the coal has actu¬
ally done this, under the disturbing force
of earthquakes ; for the coal, which is bitu¬
minous, like our common coal, to the west¬
ward where the strata are horizontal, be¬
comes gradually anthracite as it is tossed
and torn by the earthquake faults of the
Alleghany and Appalachian mountains.

And is a further transformation possi¬
ble ? 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, gra¬
phite — what we miscall blacklead. And,
after that, it might go through one trans¬
formation more, and that the most start¬
ling of all. It would need only perfect
purification and crystallization to become
■ — a diamond ; nothing less. We may con¬
sider 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 poeti¬
cal, 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 car¬
bonic 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 had to take in another ele¬
ment, 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 it¬
self 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 Roe>e."

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
fire, 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 tis-

TOWN viEOLOGY.

357

sueo The sun-force must stay, shut up age
after age, invisible, but strong ; worliing
at its own prison-cells ; transmuting them,
or making them capal)le of being trans¬
muted by man, into the manifold products
of coal — coke, petroleum, mineral pitch,
gases, coal-tar, benzole* delicate aniline
ilyes, and what not, till its day of deliver¬
ance 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 ignit¬
ing point ; the temperature at which it is
able to coiubine 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 infectious
hunger for that oxygen which it lost cen¬
turies 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 atmosphere, 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 all are bet¬
ter informed than a certain party of Au¬
stralian 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 ! — 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 jab¬
bering and dancing, the whole tribe gath¬
ered 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, smokeil,
boiled over. They turned and fled, man,
woman, and child, from before that super¬
natural prodigy ; and the settlers coming
back to look for the dropped sack, saw a
sight which told the wfliole 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 com¬
bined with oxygen and carbonic acid
gases.

In that state it will make, if it is crystal¬
line and hard, excellent building stone.
The finest white marble, like that of Car¬
rara 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 soft¬
ened and then brought into a state in
which it can be hardened again ; and ages
since, some man or other, wiio deserves to
rank as one of the great inventors, one of
the great benefactors of his race, discov¬
ered 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 dis¬
coveries, in the East, spreading westward
gradually. The earlier Greek buildings
are cyclopean, that is, of stone fitted to¬
gether without mortar. The earlier Egyp¬
tian buildings, though the stones are ex¬
quisitely squared and polished, are put to¬
gether likewise without mortar. So, long
ages after, were the earlier Boman build¬
ings, 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 cir¬
cular arches have been dropped into their
places upon the wooden centres, and stand
unmoved to this day, simply by the jam¬
ming of their own weight ; a miracle of
art. But the fact is puzzling ; for these
Romans were the best mortar-makers of
the world. We cannot, 1 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 tlie
stones which it holds togther. 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
Romans would not trust mortar made from
that coarse Nummulite limestone, filled
with gritty sand, and preferred, with their
usual carefulness, no mortar at all to bad.

3o8

TOWN GEOLOGY.

Bat 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 yon may discover by your
own nose ; as many a poor tramp has dis¬
covered too late, when, on a cold winter
night, he has laid 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 its water of crystallization,
that is, water which it holds (as do many
rocks) locked up in it unseen, and only to
be discovered by chemical an.alysis. 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 And 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 Avhich it
is as it were thirsting. So it is slacked
with water, which it drinks in, heating it¬
self 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 be¬
ing 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 to¬
gether ; but also in part chemically — 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 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 hard¬
ness, or rather toughness ; and good mor¬
tar, as is well known, will acquire extreme
harckiess with age, probably from the very
same cause that it did when it was lime¬
stone in the earth. For, as a general rule.

the more ancient the strata is in which the
limestone is found, the harder the lime¬
stone is ; except in cases where volcanic
action and earthquake pressure have hard¬
ened 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., hard¬
ened by the heat of intruded volcanic
rocks.

But 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
me 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 sol¬
diers 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
up till it is lost among white clouds above ?
Or shall it 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, sw arming
with innumerable sea -fowl and their eggs ?
Let it be which you will : both are strange
enough ; both ber.utiful ; 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 be¬
tween 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 wdiite coral at the bottom. But the
coral is not all white, only indeed a little
of it ; for as y^ou look down through the
clear water, you find that the coral is
starred with innumerable live flowers, blue,
crimson, gray, 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, bv a

TOWN

359

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-ane¬
mones, which make each a shell of lime,
growing- with its growth. As for their
sliapes, the variety of them, the beauty of
them, no tongue can describe them. If
you want to see them, go to the Coral
booms of the British or Liverpool Muse-
vims, and judge for yourselves. Only re¬
member that you must re-clothe each of
ihose 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 gar¬
den, the gaudiest of shell-less sea-ane¬
mones, 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 over¬
look, too, the fish, especially the parrot-
fish, some of them of the gaudiest colors,
who spend their lives in browsing on the
live coral, with strong clipping and grind¬
ing teeth, just as a cow browses the grass,
keeping the animal matter, and throwing
away the lime in the form of an impalpa¬
ble white mud, which tills up the inter¬
stices in the coral beds.

The bottom, just outside the reef, is cov¬
ered 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 tind, but
not always, animal forms rooted in it,
which will delight the soul of a scieutitic
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 an¬
cient seas once swarmed, but which is rare
now, all over the world, having been sup¬
planted and driven out of the seas by
newer and stronger forms of shelled ani¬
mals. The nearest spot at which you are
likely to dredge a live brachiopod will be
in the deep water of Loch Fyne, in Argyle-
shire, where two species still linger, fast¬
ened, 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 tirst time I saw those shells come up in
the dredge out of the dark and motionless
abyss, I could sympathize with those feel¬
ings of mingled delight and awe which, so
my companion told me, the great Professor
Owen had in the same spot tirst beheld the

::c)LOGY.

same lingering remnants of a primeval
world.

The other might be (but I cannot prom¬
ise 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 speci¬
mens of this family, now so rare, all but
extinct. And yet fifty or a hundred differ¬
ent forms of the same type swarmed in the
ancient seas : whole masses of limestone
are made up of little else but the frag¬
ments of such animals.

But we have not landed yet on the dry
part of the reef. Let us make for it, tak¬
ing 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, sometimes 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 coral, the whole
is setting, as cement sets, into rock. And
what is this ? A long bank of stone stand¬
ing up as a low cliff, ten or twelve feet
above high-water mark. It is full of frag-
ments 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 madre¬
pore 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 jou 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
hiountains to several hundred feet above
he sea, I have seen such many a time.

Thus you find the coral being converted
gradually into a limestone rock, either tine
and homogeneous, composed of coral
grown into pulp, or filled with coralr and
shells, or witli 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 com¬
monly used about these islands, with angu¬
lar fragments imbedded in the mass, and

360

TU^\’S GEOLOGY,

here and there a shell, the whole cemented
together by water holding in solution car¬
bonate of lime, and there see the very
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 the limestone
hills of these islands ; 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 mat¬
ter, certain to decay. Y"ou will see the
lime-mud hardened into rock beds ; you
will see the shells imbedded in it ; you
will see the corals in every stage of de¬
struction ; 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
iWest 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 an¬
other 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 ?

Y"ou 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 limestones of these isles — 'Save and
except the difference in every shell and
coral — which you would net 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 mightj’^ 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,
I'ke 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 ob¬
servations which he made in the world-
famous Voyage of the Beagle ; and the
observations of subsequent great naturalist.s
have all gone to corroborate his theory.

It was supposed at first, you must under¬
stand, that when a coral island rose steeply
to the surface of the sea out of blue water,
peihaps 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 waV
— say in thirty to forty fathoms. Indee
some of the strongest and largest spea..
work best at the very surface, and in tl*f
cut of the fiercest surf. And so arose*
puzzle as to how coral rock is often foi.rd
of vast thickness, which Mr. Darwin
plained. His theory was, and there is if
doubt now that it is correct, that in thei
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
^lieir dead ancestors ; so that, as the de¬
pression goes on, generation after genera¬
tion builds upward, 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.

By applying this theory to the coral reef
of the Pacific Ocean, the following inter¬
esting 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 moun¬
tain, 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 moun¬
tain-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 geogra¬
phy of the South-Sea Islands by the light
of this theory of Mr. Darwin’s, the follov^-
ing extraordinary fact has been discov¬
ered :

361

TOVT'

That over a jreat ])art of the Pacific
Ocean sinking is going on. and has been
going on for ages ; and that 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 lime¬
stone beds, which are, as you know, only
fossil coral reefs, we have a right to say,
when we see in England, Scotland, Ii-e-
land, limestones several thousand feet
thick, that while they were being laid
down as coral reef, the sea-bottom, and
probably the neighboring land, must have
been sinking to the amount of their thick¬
ness — to several thousand feet — before that
later sinking which enabled several hun-
red 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 Northumberland it forms
vast and lofty moors, capping, as at Whern-
side and Penygent, the highest limestone
hills with its hard, rough, barren, and im-
fossiliferous strata. Wherever it is found,
it lies on the top of the “mountain,” or
carboniferous limestone. Almost every¬
where, where coal is found in England, it
lies on the millstone grit. I speak rough¬
ly, for fear of confusing 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 present 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 — 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 Halkin Mountain in Flintshire,
for chert, which is sent to Staffordshire to
be ground down for the manufacture 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 sim¬
ply hollow casts of innumerable joints of
crinoids, so exquisitely preserved, even to

GFOt OCIY.

their most delicate markings, that it is
plain they were never washed about upon
a beach, but have grown where, or nearly
whei-e, they lie. What, then, has happened
to them ? They have been killed by the
sand. The soft part 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 meas¬
ures, we cannot tell. But it is clear at
least that parts of that ancient sea were
filling up and becoming dry land. For
coal, or fossilized 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 exist¬
ence of some such sheets of fertile and
forest-clad lowland as I described in m
last paper.

Thousands of feet of rich coral reel
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 vio¬
lent break or change : this is the story
which the lime in the mortar and the coal
on the fire — between the two — reveal.

VI.

THE SLATES ON THE HOOF.

The slates on the roof should be, when
rightly understood, 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 ; per¬
haps to pleasant trips to the lakes and hills
of Cumberland, Westmoreland, and North
Wales ; and to recognize — 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 delicacy of its texture, and for the regu¬
larity and smoothness of its surface, but

362

TOWN GEOLOGY.

still more for its color. Whether merely
warm gray, as when dry, or bright purple,
as when wet, the color 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 color
in an English landscape. But most beau¬
tiful is the hue of slate, when, shining wet
jn 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 blaz¬
ing intensity by the contrast of the golden
patches of floating gulf-weed beneath the
tropic sun.

Beautiful, I say, is the slate, and curi¬
ous likewise, nay, venerable ; a most anci¬
ent and elaborate work of God, which has
lasted long enough, and endured enough
likewise, to bring out in it whatsoever lat¬
ent 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 witli burning fears,

And bathed in baths of hissing tears,

And battered by tne 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 para¬
ble, on whicn I will not enlarge, but will
leave each reader to interpret it for him¬
self. 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 probable by the simple fact that it
can be turned into mud again. If you
grind up slate, and then analyze it, you
will find its mineral constituents to be ex¬
actly those of a fine, rich, and tenacious
clay. The slate districts (at least in Snow¬
don) 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. Wher¬
ever 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 elab¬
orate, 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 thick¬
ness of some eighty thousand feet, in La¬
brador, Canada, and the Adirondack moun¬
tains of New Y^ork ; but their representa¬
tives in Europe are, as far as is 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 “ uncon-
formably” 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 Tremadoc, lie other and
newer slate-bearing beds of inferior qual¬
ity, 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 disappeared. 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 Lau¬
rentian limestones, which seems to have
grown layer after layer, and to have formed
reefs of limestone as do the living coral-
Ouilding polypes. We know no more as
yet. But all that we do know points
downward, downward still, warning us
that we must dig deeper than we have dug
as yet, before we reach the graves of the
first living things.

Let this suffice at present for the Cam¬
brian and Laurentian rocks.

TOWN GEOLOGY.

863

The Silurian rocks, lower and upper,
which in these islands have their chief de¬
velopment in Wales, and which are nearly
thirty-eight thousand feet thick ; and the
Devonian or Old Red sandstone beds, which
in the Fans of Brecon and Carmarthenshire
attain a tliickness of ten thousand feet,
must be passed through in an upward di¬
rection before we reach the bottom of that
carboniferous limestone of which I spoke
m 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, show¬
ing thereby that the lower beds had been
upheaved, and their edges worn off on a
sea-shore, ere the upper were laid dowm on
them ; and throughout this vast thick¬
ness 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-varying forms, till those
in the upper beds have become unlike those
in the lower, and all are from the begin¬
ning more or less unlike any existing now
on earth. Whole families, indeed, disap¬
pear 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, of 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 well-known animal, of
which specimens may be sometimes seen
alive in English aquaria. So perished, in
the lapse of those same ages, the armor-
plated or “ganoid” fish which Hugh
Miller made so justly famous — and which
made him so justly famous in return — ap¬
pearing first in the upper Silurian beds,
and abounding in vast variety of strange
forms in the Old Red Sandstone, but grad¬
ually 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
<)f the Nile and Senegal ; the lepidosiiens
.jf the African lakes and Western rivers ;

I lie ceratodus or barramundi of Queens¬
land (the two latter of which approach
amphibians), and one or two more fan¬
tastic forms, either rudimentary or de¬
graded, 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 thou¬
sands of feet of ancient rock, among crea¬
tures the likes whereof are not to be found
now on earth. And these are but two ex¬

amples 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 ])resent time.

Surely — and it is to this conclusion I have
been tending throughout a seemingly wan¬
dering 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. S.E. (Bangor)
of the Snowdon district of the government
Geological Survey, which may be ordered
at any good stationer’s, price two shil¬
lings, and study it with me. He will
see down the right-hand margin interpre¬
tations of the different colors 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. Thev

V

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 vari¬
ety of shape and attitude between these
two. He will see also large spaces cov¬
ered with little colored dots, which signify
(as he will find at the margin) beds of
volcanic ash. If he look below the little
colored squares on the margin, he will see
figures marking the strike, or direction of
the inclination of the beds — inclined, ver¬
tical, horizontal, contorted ; that the w hite
lines in the map signify faults, that is,
shifts in the strata ; the gold lines, lodes
of metal — the latter of which I should ad¬
vise him strongly, in this district at least,
not to meddle with : but to button up his
pockets, and to put into the fire, in whole¬
some fear of his own w'eakness and ignor¬
ance, any puffs of mining companies which
may be sent him — as one or two have prol>-
ably 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, re-

TOWN GEOLOGY.

'dG4

turn due thanks to Professor Ramsay for
having found it all out ; not without won¬
dering, as I have often wondered, how
even Professor Ramsay’s acuteness and in¬
dustry could find it all out.

When my reader has studied a while 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, (juartz
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 Cam¬
brian 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 sum¬
mit of Snowdon, these very volcanic ashes
contain fossil shells.

The best answer I can give is to ask him
to use his imagination, or Iris commom
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 1788 and 1830, off the Azores in 1811,
nnd in our day in more than one spot in
the Pacific Ocean.

A main bore or vent — or more than one
— opens itself between the bottom of the
sea and the nether fires. From each rushes
an enormous jet of higli-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 cra¬
ters sawn through by the sea, and showing-
sections of beds of ash dipping outward
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 bur¬
rowed out through the soft ashes of the
cone. Of those lava veins I will speak
presently. What 1 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 Souffrii;re 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 laj’er of ashes, several
inches thick, not only on St. Vincent it¬
self, but on Barbadoes, eighty miles to
windward, and therefore on all the sea be¬
tween. Now let us consider what that
represents-— a layer of fine mud, laid down
at the bottom of the ocean, several inches
thick, eighty miles at least long, and
tw^enty 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 tc
the bottom of the sea, and build up oui
volcano toward 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 vol¬
cano 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., dwelling in them, which would
be converted into fossils when they died ;
and so we should have fossiliferous beds
over the ashes and lavas. Indeed, shells
might live and thrive in the ash-mud itself,
when it cooled, and the sea grew quiet, as
they have lived and thriven in Snowdonia.

Now suppose that after these sediment¬
ary beds are laid down by water, the vol¬
cano 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 hori¬
zontal direction. * It burrows ouc through
the softer ash-beds, and between the sedi¬
mentary beds, spreading itself along hori¬
zontally. This process accounts for the very

TOWN GEOLOGY.

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 ma\" have
two lavas of different materials overlying
each other, which have come from differ¬
ent 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 sedimen¬
tary rocks, as we find throughout most
mountain ranges ; in Snowdon, in the Lake
Mountains, in the Auvergne in 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 can¬
not 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 dur¬
ing 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
Vjeginning in order to end at the end. Let
me first make my readers clearly under¬
stand that all our slate-bearing mountains,
and most also of the non-slate-bearing ones
likewise, are formed after the fashion
w^hich 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 a^.
they are now.

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

It is necessary to insist on this, because
many people hearing that certain moun¬
tains are volcanic, conclude — and very nat¬
urally 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 ac¬
quainted with recent craters would see at
once that Glas Llyn is not an ancient one ;
and I am not surprised to find the Govern¬
ment 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
jjart of the hill, as in the Mont Dore and
the Cantal in France, and in several ex¬
tinct volcanoes in the Antilles. Of course
the lava must have been poured out, and
the ashes blown out, from some vents or
other, connected wuth the nether world of
fire ; probably from many successive vents.
For in volcanoes, when one vent is choked,
another is wont to open at some fresh point
of least resistance among the overlying
rocks. But where are these vents ? Bur¬
ied deep under successive eruptions, shift¬
ed 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 .w'e hit upon here and there a
tap-root of ancient lava, connecting the
upper and the nether w'orlds. There are
such tap-roots, probably, under each of our
British mountain ranges. But , Snowdon,
certainly, does not owe iU shape to the fact
of one of these old fire vents being under
it. It ow^es its sha])e simply to the acci •
dent of some of the beds toward the sum¬
mit being especially hard, and thus able to
stand the w'ear and tear of sea-w^ave, ice,
and rain. Its lakes have been formed quite
regardless of the lie of the rocks, though
not regardless of their relative hardness,

366

TOWN GEOLOGY.

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 geol¬
ogists are still 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 Snowdon.

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 ex¬
planation, as may be proved by experi¬
ment. 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 themselves 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 com¬
mon in rocks.

But again, suppose that instead of squeez¬
ing 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 ; and as they rose leave open
space between them. Now if you could
contrive to squeeze into theui from below
a paste, which would harden in the cracks
and between the layers^ 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 w^ord — 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.

That such a contraction and expansion
goes on in the crust of the earth is evi¬
dent •, for here are the palpable effects of

it. And the simplest general cause which
I can give for it is this ; That things ex¬
pand as they are heated and contract as
they are cooled.

Now I am not learne<l enough — and were
d, I have not time — to enter into the vari¬
ous theories which philosopheis have put
forward to account for these grand phe¬
nomena.

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 in'^ide 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 noth¬
ing 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)
toward a particular spot, tliat sjiot must
expand, and swell up, bulging the rocks
out, and probably cracking them, and in¬
serting melting lava into those cracks fiom
below. On the other hand, if the internal
heat leaves that spot again, and it cools,
then it must contract more or less, in fall¬
ing inward toward the centre of the earth ;
and so the beds must be crumpled, and
crushed, and shifted against each other
still more, as those of our mountains have
been.

But here may arise, in some of my read¬
ers’ 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 rela¬
tive age of beds can, on the strength of
that known change, be determined gerie-
rally by the fossils, usually shells, peculiar
to them ; so that if we find the same
fashion of shells, and still more tbe 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 recognize a bed by its fossils-

TOVVINJ GKOLOCn.

807

iiicie 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
— downward 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, Ire¬
land, and Scotland.

For, throughout great tracts of Russia,
and in parts of Norway and Sweden, Sir
Roderick Murchison discovered our own
Silurian beds, recognizable from their pe¬
culiar 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, there¬
fore, of the same age as the lower crystalline
hard slates of North Wales. So entirely
have most of these oldest rocks in Russia
been exempted from the influence of change,
throughout those enormous periods which
have passed away since their accumula¬
tion.”

Among the many discoveries wuich sci¬
ence 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 magniflcent fact.

But what a contrast between these Scan¬
dinavian and Russian rocks and those of
Britain ! Never exceeding, in Scandina¬
via, a thousand feet in thickness, and ly¬
ing usually horizontal, as they were flrst
laid down, they are swelled in Britain to
a thickness of thirty thousand feet, by in¬
truded 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
(Twynnant, under Snowdon, an immense
wedge of porphyry has been thrust iq), in
what is now the bottom of the valley, be¬
tween 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 moun¬
tain without long and fearful struggles.

They are set in places upright on end,
then horizontal again, then sunk in an op¬
posite 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 — amass 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 vol¬
canic quartz-porphyry, which rises from
under them to the north-west, crossing the
end of the lower lake of Llanberris ; 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 any one 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 Cam¬
brian mud-strata of Llanberris and Pen-
rhyn quarries must have suffered enough
to change them into something very differ¬
ent 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 our¬
selves 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 sujipose at flrst sight, and fairly
enough, that the flat surface — the “ plane
of cleavage” — was also the plane of bed¬
ding. 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

O O

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
cleavagj Jr, more plainly the mud of
which the slate is made may have been de¬
posited 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,
sometimes inclined to, and sometimes again

368

TOWN

LOGY.

coinciding witli the ]>lane of cleavage,
which they have evidently acquired long
after.

Nay, more. These parallel planes ot
cleavage, at each of which the slate sjdits
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.

Now what has 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 them¬
selves. And this is proved by a very curious
tact — which the reader, if he geologizes
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 be along the plane of cleav-
Hge, or squeezed together, or doubled
flown on both sides, if they lie across the
plane. So that some force has been at
ivork 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
hot know. I should advise young geolo¬
gists to read what Sir Henry de la Beche
has said on it in his admirable “ Geologi¬
cal 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. \11 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 pro¬
duces single crystals ; and similar, too, to
that which produced the jointed crystals of
basalt, that is, lava, at the Giant’s Cause¬
way in Ireland, and Staffa in the Hebrides.
Two philosophers — Mr. Robert Were Fox
and Mr. Robert Hunt — are of opinion that
the force which has determined the cleav¬
age of slates may be that of the electric
currents, which (as is well known) run
thi ough 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 Rogers, again,
oints out that as these slates may have
een highly heated, thermal electricity
(that is, 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 hap¬
pened without a proportionately enormous
iressure, 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
chanjjes, whether mechanical or chemical.

whicli have made the earth’s surface what
we see it now.

Another startling fact the section ot
Snowdonia, and I believe of most
mountain chains in these islands, would
prove— namely, that the contour of the
earth’s surface, as wm 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 muct
say a few more words about it.

Any one who saw that noble peak
ing high into the air, dominating all the
country round, at least upon three sides,
and was told that its summit consisted 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 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
would 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 insignifi¬
cant 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 direetion 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, toward
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 Ffes¬
tiniog, where the Cambrian rocks rise
again to the surface, the south side of the
trough must have sloped upward 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,
'.vhich is now not two thousand feet high,
.vas once — either under the sea or above it;

TOWN GEOLOGY.

369

■ — nearer ten thousand feet.

If I am asked whither is all that enor¬
mous mass of rock — millions of tons-
gone? Where is it now ? I know not.
But if I dared to hazard a guess, I should
say it went to make the New Red sand¬
stones of Eimland.

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 Ilfracombe, wherever they
are weathered by rain and air. The chemi¬
cal composition is the same. The difference
in color 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 mountains were ground down, the
Silurian strata, being u])permost, 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 Siluri¬
ans ; 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 ser 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 Not¬
tinghamshire. The red marl must almost
certainly have been black slate somewhere,
somewhen. Why should it not have been
such in Snowdon ? And why should not
the slates in the roof be the remnants • t 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 Geol¬
ogy. I do so, well knowing how imperfect
they are — though not, I believe, inaccurate.
They are, after all, merely suggestive ot
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 es¬
cape 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, 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 cajDa-
bilities ; lest his intellect, crushed and fet¬
tered by that artificial drudgery which we
for a time miscall civilization, should be^
gin to fancy, as too many do already, that
the world is composed mainly of bricks
and deal, and governed by acts of parlia¬
ment. If I shall have awakened any towns¬
men 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 wilt
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 bus¬
iness 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 favorite study since I was a, boy.

CONTE]NTS.

Preface .

I. — The Soil of the Field .

II._The Pebbles in the Street
III. — The Stones in the Wall . ,

PAGE

.. 323
.. 331
.. 337
.. 344

Page

IV. — The Coal in the Fire . 350

V. — The Lime in the Mortar . 357

VI. — The Slates on the Roof . 361

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