"
So much for the useless "hobby," as some fancy it, of poking over old
bones and stones, and learning a little of the composition of this
earth on which God has placed us.
How to explain the presence of this vast mass of animal matter, in
one or two thin bands right across England, I know not. That the
fossils have been rolled on a sea-beach is plain to those who look at
them. But what caused so vast a destruction of animal life along
that beach, must remain one of the buried secrets of the past.
And now we are fast nearing another world, which is far younger than
that coprolite bed, and has been formed under circumstances the most
opposite to it. We are nearing, by whatever rail we approach London,
the escarpment of the chalk downs.
All readers, surely, know the white chalk, the special feature and
the special pride of the south of England. All know its softly-
rounded downs, its vast beech woods, its short and sweet turf, its
snowy cliffs, which have given--so some say--to the whole island the
name of Albion--the white land. But all do not, perhaps, know that
till we get to the chalk no single plant or animal has been found
which is exactly like any plant or animal now known to be living.
The plants and animals grow, on the whole, more and more like our
living forms as we rise in the series of beds.
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