Town Geology

-geologist may find a quite different problem to solve in the nearest wall, on moving from one town to another twenty miles off. All I can do, therefore, is to take o

sandstone plain, from under which everywhere the coal-bearing rocks rise as from a sea. It contains, in many places, excellent quarries of building-stone; the most famous of which, perhaps, are the well-known Runcorn quarries, near Liverpool, from which the old Romans brought the material for the walls and temples of ancient Chester, and from which the stone for the restoration of Chester Cathedral is being taken at this day. In some quarters, especially in the north-west of England, its soil is poor, because it is masked by that very boulder-clay of which I spoke in my last paper. But its rich red marls, wherever they

I said just now) over great tracts of England, especially about the manufacturing

iately, or at least soon after, the sandstones or marls on which it lies; that as soon as the on

e. But in this case it would be a mistake. The sandstone and marls are immensely old

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

rse of this paper. But that these changes have taken place, is my main thesis. The fact I assert; and I am bound to try and prove it. And in trying to do so, I shall no longer treat my readers, as I did in the first two papers, like children. I

deposits of rock-salt, which have been long worked, and worked to such good purpose, that a vast subsidence 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 bel

y by the name of "Bunter," from its mottled and spotted appear

rias; that is, the triple group. But as yet we hav

helkalk. A long epoch must therefore have intervened between the laying down of the Bunter and of the Keuper. And we have a trace of that long epoch, even in England. The Keuper lies, certainly, imm

t, through ages during which it was deep enough beneath the sea in Germany, to have the Muschelkalk laid down on it. H

that all rocks and soils are derived from the wear and tear of still older rocks, off what land came thi

ere so different from what they are now, that the rocks which furnished a gre

ick; thick enough, in fact, if it were there still, to make a range of mountains as high as the Andes. It is a provable and proven fact that vast tracts of the centre of poor old Ireland were once covered with coal-measures, which have been scraped off in likewise, deprived of inestimable mineral wealth. The destruction of rocks-"denudation" as it is called-in the district round Malvern, is, I am told, prov

But it is certain that most of these sands were deposited in a very shallow water, and very near to land. Sand and pebbles, as I said in my first paper, could not be carried far out to sea; and some of the beds of the Bunter are full of rounded pebbles. Nay, it is certain that their surface was often out of water. Of that you may see very pretty proofs. You find these sands ripple-marked, as you do shore-sands now. You find cracks where the marl mud has dried in the sun: and, more, you find the littl

the so-called Labyrinthodon belong to the animal which made the footprints. If so, the creature must have been a right loathly monster. Some think him to have been akin to lizards; but the usual opinion is that he was a cousin of frogs and toads. Looking at his hands and other remains, one pictures him to oneself as a short, squat brute, as big as a fat hog, with a head very much the shape of a baboon, very large hands behind and small ones in front, waddling about on the tide flats of a sandy sea, and dragging after him, seemingly, a short tail, which has left its mark on the sand. What his odour was, whether he was smooth or warty, what he ate, and in general how he got his liv

ed on in that remote island for long ages, ever since the days of the New Red sandstone, is one of those questions-quite awful questions I consider them-with which I will not puzzle my readers. I only mention it to show them what serious questions the scientific man has to face, and to answer, if he can. Only the next time they go to the Zoological Gardens in London, let them go to the repti

m of the red marl which caps the sandstone. It was formed most probably by the gradual drying up of lagoons, such as are depositing salt, it is said now, both in the Gulf of Tadjara, on the Abyssinian frontier opposite Aden, and in the Runn of Cutch, near the Delta of

s, as I called it-which elapsed between the laying down of th

ginary railway journey to London from any spot in the manufacturing districts

are passing-of the reverend antiquities, the admirable agriculture, the rich and peaceful scenery, the like of which no country upon earth can show; unconscious, too, of how much they might learn of botany and zoology, by simply watching the flowers along the railway banks and the sections in the cuttings: then it grieves me to

nning up southward to London-or the reverse way-let them keep their eyes open, and veri

ar younger rocks, called now Permian, from the ancient kingdom of Permia, in Russia, where they cover a vast area. With them I will not confuse the reader just now, but will only ask him to keep his eye on the rolling plain of New Red san

rkshire, to Lyme in Dorsetshire, and is known as Lias. Famous it is, as some readers may know, for holding the bones of extinct monsters-Ichthyosaurs and Plesiosaurs, suc

s, but of kinds, be it remembered, which differ more and more from those of the lias beneath, as the beds are higher in the series, and therefore nearer. There, too, are found principally the bones of that extraordinary flying lizard, the Pterodactyle, which had wings formed out of its fore-legs, on somewhat the same plan as those of a bat, but with one exception. In the bat, as any one may see, four fingers of the hand are lengthened t

, at the bottom. Each great band of clay signifies a long period, during which fine mud was brought down from some wasting land in the neighbourhood. And that land was not far distant is proved by the bones of the Pterodactyle, of Crocodiles, and of Marsupials; by the fact that the shells are of shallow-water or shore species; by the presence, mixed with them, of fragments of wood, impressions of plants, and ev

et. Considering, then, the length of time required to lay down a thousand feet of strata, and considering the vast difference between the animals

reensand, though it is not green, but rich iron-red. Then succeeds a band of stiff blue clay, called the Gault, and then another bed of sand, the upper Greensand, which is more worthy of the name, for it does carr

finest hop-lands-those of Farnham, for instance, and Tunbridge-lay upon them: but that the fertile band was very narrow; tha

ally 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

shire 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;

king over old bones and stones, and learning a little of

, I know not. That the fossils have been rolled on a sea-beach is plain to those who look at them. But what c

ite bed, and has been formed under circumstances the most opposite to it. We are

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 li

t vast depths, over the greater part of the Atlantic sea-floor. This fact has been put out of doubt by recent deep-sea dredgings. A whole literature has been written on it of late. Any reader who wishes to know it, need only ask the first geologist he meets; and if he has the wholesome instinct of wonder in him, fill his imagination with true wonders, more grand and strange than he is like to find in an

For so minute are the living atomies which form the ooze, that an inch, I should say, is as much as we can allow for their yearly deposit; and the chalk is at least a thousand feet thick. It may have taken, therefore, twelve thousand years to form the chalk alone. A rough guess, of

new world above the New Red sandstone, we must

ormous downward leap, from sea-shore to deep ocean, which the beds seem (but only seem) to have taken. The change-like all changes in geology-was probably g

ndoner may ascertain for himself, if he will run out a few miles by rail, and look in any

lackheath and Woolwich district-sand

ifted up again, to form gradually, doubtless, and a

roof is th

ces, 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 wo

one. There is another

four hundred and more feet thick, which (as I said in my last chapter) was certainly laid down

s power of bel

e 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 Switzerland, in Italy; a perio

inter, as they lay a-wash in the shallow sea; and over them, in many places, is spread a thin sh

the greater part of that period (as far as we can guess at it) look no more like Europe than like America or the South Sea Islands. And this we can tell besides: that that period was long enough for the Swiss Alps to be lifted up at least 10,000 feet of

foreign countries-happened between the date of the boulder