CHAPTER XXX.—BRITISH PEBBLES.
By the Rev. A. N. Malan, M.A., F.G.S.
I.—THE PEBBLES AND HOW TO FIND THEM.
An endless variety of delights can be enjoyed by the sea. Bathing, boating, fishing, paddling, building sand-castles and forts, engineering experiments in canals and ponds, prawning, shrimping, collecting shells, anemones, and seaweeds, sailing toy-boats, cricket and tennis on the sands. Well, now, you boys who love the pleasures of the seaside, my purpose here is to introduce a new attraction to your notice. The amusement we are going to bring before you possesses more solid and lasting attractions. What say you to PEBBLE-HUNTING as a seaside recreation?
Pebble-hunting is a resource calculated to excite high enthusiasm. It brings us into familiarity with some of the most beautiful objects in Nature. Pebbles can be obtained free of expense. Nature’s inexhaustible treasure-house is always open. She invites you to approach and help yourself at will. She offers with unstinting hand stones of imperishable beauty. It is ungracious to scorn her liberality.
We propose, then, to give particulars of British pebbles—how to recognise those worth collecting, where to look for them, and how to cut and polish them for yourselves. No writer for boys, so far as I know, has ever yet given practical instructions about cutting and polishing stones. The best pebble unpolished looks dull and dead. The polishing brings out its beauty and makes it a lasting treasure. The polishing is nothing else than rubbing the pebble smooth. A flint pebble is so hard that when rubbed perfectly smooth it reflects light just as glass and water do. Nothing is put on to make the surface shine, as in polishing wood. The pebble is merely rubbed smooth; and when this is done, the surface proves to be so hard that no instrument of the hardest steel, not even a file, will produce upon it the faintest scratch. I am speaking of flint-pebbles or agates, which are to be found upon many beaches.
The first difficulty is, how to recognise the good pebbles, as they lie amid the countless host of less interesting stones. I often hear the question, ‘Can you tell what a pebble will be like inside before you cut it?’ The answer is ‘Yes’ and ‘No.’ I can tell so far that I should not labour at cutting and polishing an obviously worthless stone; but, alas! often a stone which gives good promise on the outside proves uninteresting when cut, and so is laid aside on the shelf as an example of unrequited toil not worth any further trouble. This is inevitable. But, far from being a discouragement, such disappointments only serve to stimulate the zeal and sharpen the faculties in discriminating the real prizes.
We must not start with an idea of finding gems upon our beaches. These exquisite objects are exotics, natives principally of dark mines and sunny strands in the far East. The diamond, sapphire, ruby, topaz, peridot, emerald, beryl, tourmaline, turquois, chrysolite, garnet, and precious opal, are not for us. The magnificent agates of India and Brazil are familiar to us when artificially stained and manufactured into bracelets, brooches, penholders, &c., and exhibited in the jewellers’ shops. Splendid specimens in their natural tints may be seen cut and polished in the Geological Museum, Jermyn Street, in the Natural History Museum, Cromwell Road, and elsewhere. But we shall never find such stones on our own beaches.
Oriental and Brazilian pebbles are not unfrequently palmed off upon innocent and unsuspecting visitors as the genuine products of some favoured beach within her Majesty’s British Dominions. A lady once told me that she picked up in a week a quantity of splendid onyxes at a watering-place—let us call it Rocksands—and had them ground and polished into a necklace of beads. Another showed me a beautiful brown onyx, set in gold, which she found (?) in the same neighbourhood. A third assured me that a friend of hers had picked up amethysts and topazes on the same beach. This was at the time when I first began to take an interest in pebbles. The summer holidays were approaching. My portmanteau was packed; I was off to Rocksands.