What caused the striking difference?
My beloved friend and teacher, the late Dr. Henslow, when Professor
of Botany at Cambridge, had brought to him by a farmer (so the story
ran) a few fossils. He saw, being somewhat of a geologist and
chemist, that they were not, as fossils usually are, carbonate of
lime, but phosphate of lime--bone-earth. He said at once, as by an
inspiration, "You have found a treasure--not a gold-mine, indeed, but
a food-mine. This is bone-earth, which we are at our wits' end to
get for our grain and pulse; which we are importing, as expensive
bones, all the way from Buenos Ayres. Only find enough of them, and
you will increase immensely the food supply of England, and perhaps
make her independent of foreign phosphates in case of war."
His advice was acted on; for the British farmer is by no means the
stupid personage which townsfolk are too apt to fancy him. This bed
of phosphates was found everywhere in the Greensand, underlying the
Chalk. It may be traced from Dorsetshire through England to
Cambridge, and thence, I believe, into Yorkshire. It may be traced
again, I believe, all round the Weald of Kent and Sussex, from Hythe
to Farnham--where it is peculiarly rich--and so to Eastbourne and
Beachey Head; and it furnishes, in Cambridgeshire, the greater part
of those so-called "coprolites," which are used perpetually now for
manure, being ground up, and then treated with sulphuric acid, till
they become a "soluble super-phosphate of lime.
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