If you
have not time to get away to a hilly country, then go to the nearest
bit of turnpike road, or the nearest sloping field, and see in little
how whole continents are made, and unmade again. Watch the rain
raking and sifting with its million delicate fingers, separating the
finer particles from the coarser, dropping the latter as soon as it
can, and carrying the former downward with it toward the sea. Follow
the nearest roadside drain where it runs into a pond, and see how it
drops the pebbles the moment it enters the pond, and then the sand in
a fan-shaped heap at the nearest end; but carries the fine mud on,
and holds it suspended, to be gradually deposited at the bottom in
the still water; and say to yourself: Perhaps the sands which cover
so many inland tracts were dropped by water, very near the shore of a
lake or sea, and by rapid currents. Perhaps, again, the brick clays,
which are often mingled with these sands, were dropped, like the mud
in the pond, in deeper water farther from the shore, and certainly in
stilt water. But more. Suppose once more, then, that looking and
watching a pond being cleared out, under the lowest layer of mud, you
found--as you would find in any of those magnificent reservoirs so
common in the Lancashire hills--a layer of vegetable soil, with grass
and brushwood rooted in it.
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