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-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 one set of towns, in the walls of which 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 Yorkshire and
Nottinghamshire; over the manufacturing districts of central England;
down the valley of the Severn; past Bristol and the Somersetshire
flats to Torquay in South Devon; up north-westward through Shropshire
and Cheshire; past Liverpool and northward through Lancashire;
reappearing again, north of the Lake mountains, about Carlisle and
the Scotch side of the Solway Frith, stretches the New Red 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 come to the surface, are one of God's most precious
gifts to this favoured land. On them, one finds oneself 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 dying for if need be?
Another reason which I have for dealing with the New Red sandstone is
this--that (as I said just now) over great tracts of England,
especially about the manufacturing districts, the town-geologist will
find it covered immediately by the boulder clay.
The townsman, finding this, would have a fair right to suppose that
the clay was laid down immediately, or at least 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 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 five 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 parcel 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 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 shall take for granted that they now understand
something of the method by which geological problems are worked out;
and can trust it, and me; and shall state boldly the conclusions of
geologists, only giving proof where proof is specially needed.
Now you must understand that in England there are two great divisions
of these New Red sandstones, "Trias," as geologists call them. An
upper, called in Germany Keuper, which consists, atop, of the rich
red marl, below them, of sandstones, and of those vast 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 below, from whence the
salt has been quarried. Underneath these beds again are those which
carry the building-stone of Runcorn. Now these beds altogether, in
Cheshire, at least, are about 3,400 feet thick; and were not laid
down in a year, or in a century either.
Below them lies a thousand feet of sandstones, 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, between the Keuper above and the
Bunter below, lies a great series of limestone beds, which, from the
abundance of fossils which they contain, go by the name of
Muschelkalk. 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,
immediately on the Bunter; but not always "conformably" on it. That
is, the beds are not exactly parallel. The Bunter had been slightly
tilted, and slightly waterworn, 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 5,000 feet thick in
places, stretching across England and into Germany?
It is difficult to answer. The shape and 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 Barmouth,
there has been ground off and carried 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 mineral wealth. The destruction of
rocks--"denudation" as it is called--in the district round Malvern,
is, I am told, provably 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, I believe, pieces of Old Red sandstone, may have
come from the great Old Red 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), particles of mica. Now this mica could not have been
formed in the sand. It is a definite crystalline mineral, whose
composition is well known. It is only found in rocks which have been
subjected to immense 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 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 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 immediately 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 that? 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 barren of fossils in England, is
full of them in Wurtemberg, reptiles, fish, and remains of plants
being common. But what will interest the reader are the footprints
of a strange beast, found alike in England and in Germany--the
Cheirotherium, 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 anatomists, 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 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 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 the 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 waddled 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 of lizards
utterly unlike anything now living save one, and that one is crawling
about, plentifully I believe--of all places in the world--in New
Zealand. How it got there; how so strange a type of creature 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 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 reptile-house, and
ask the very clever and courteous attendant to show them the
Sphenodons, or Hatterias, as he will probably call them--and then
look, I hope with kindly interest, at the oldest Conservatives 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 expect 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 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
the Indus. If this be so, then these New Red sandstones may be the
remains 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 imaginary railway journey to London from any spot in the
manufacturing districts of central England--begging them, meanwhile,
to keep their eyes open on the way.
And here I must say that I wish 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 absorbed probably in a trashy shilling novel, and never lifted
up to look out of the window, unconscious of all that they 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 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, are of a better mind. So the next time they
find themselves 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, 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 sands and marls past, say, 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 towards 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 Yorkshire, 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, such as the unlearned may behold 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.
Lying on it, as we go south-eastward, appear alternate beds of sandy
limestone, with vast depths of clay between them. These "oolites,"
or freestones, 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
freestones and clays abound in fossils, 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 to carry the wing, while the first alone is left free,
as a 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 animals
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 allow reefs of coral to grow, and shells
to propagate, 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 even wing-shells of beetles; and lastly,
if further proof was needed, by the fact that in the "dirt-bed" of
the Isle of Portland and the neighbouring shores, stumps of trees
allied to the modern sago-palms are found as they grew in the soil,
which, with them, has been covered up in layers of freshwater shale
and limestone. A tropic forest has 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 thickness of the Lias and Oolites together cannot be less than a
thousand feet. Considering, then, the length of time required to lay
down a thousand feet of strata, and considering the vast difference
between the animals found in them, and the few found in the New Red
sandstone, we have a right to call 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 commonly
the lower Greensand, 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 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 attention; for we are all probably
eating them from time to time in the form of bran.
It had been long remarked that certain parts of these beds carried
admirable wheatland; it had been remarked, too, that the finest hop-
lands--those of Farnham, 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.
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."
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. But only above the
chalk (as far as we yet know) do we begin to 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 animalcules (I use an unscientific
word 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 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
any fairy tale. All I have to do with 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 down 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, strewed with dead animals, 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 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 course, but one as likely 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 suspected, and more
than suspected; and the late discoveries of Dr. Carpenter and Mr.
Wyville Thompson have surely placed it beyond doubt.
Thus, surely, if we call the Oolitic beds one new world above the New
Red sandstone, 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 the enormous 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 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 the 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 in 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, plainly 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 turtles.
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 may have
been to Ascot races, or to Aldershot 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 Switzerland, in Italy; a period during
which the land must at first have swarmed with forms of tropic life,
and then grown--but very gradually--more temperate, and then colder
and colder still; till at last set in that age of ice, which spread
the boulder pebbles over all rocks and soils indiscriminately, 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 many 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 ask 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 Europe 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 10,000 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 gnat 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.