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HE is a benefactor to his species who makes two blades of corn grow where only one grew before." The substantial truth of the aphorism none will question; vet it would be a doubtful benefit if all our waste lands were reclaimed and brought under the plough. Enclosure Acts, by extending the area of our productive soil, have increased the resources of the country and the food of the people. But the total absorption into cultivated farms of heath, forest, and woodland would be to purchase the utilitarian advantage at too high a price.
The open commons of Surrey and the rolling downs of Sussex are, in their way, of a beauty unsurpassed. Both are chiefly due to the great chalk formation, which comes down in a south-westerly direction from the eastern counties, breaks into the Chiltern Hills, extends over the greater part of Wiltshire, Dorsetshire, and Hampshire; and in the east of the last-named county becomes separated into two branches; one, the "North Downs," running almost due east to the North Foreland and Shakespere's Cliff; the other, the "South Downs," pursuing a south-easterly direction to Beachy Head. In their long and undulating course, they form innumerable combinations of picturesque beauty. Places elsewhere, well known and deservedly famous, are rivalled in loveliness by many a sequestered scene in the line of the lower chalk country, of which few but the thinly-scattered inhabitants, and now and then an unconventional tourist, have ever heard.
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The charm of these lines of rolling upland is much enhanced by the great rough plain which they inclose—"the Weald" (i.e. Forest), as it is termed—extending in an irregular triangle from the point where the Downs diverge to the British Channel. Geologists have framed many theories as to the formation of the Weald. It belongs to the Oolite formation below the chalk; it is the uppermost member of that formation, and was a deposit of sands and clays in a tropical climate, as is abundantly evident from animal and vegetable remains found there. These prove the existence of islands, banks and forests, forming the shores of a vast estuary, the embouchure of some great river from the west. At one time, the deep chalk deposit extended all over it; but this was disturbed by a line of elevation running along its east and west axis, the superincumbent chalk being broken up and washed away; hence the cliff-like aspect of the Downs in many places, where they descend precipitously to the sandy and gravelly edge of the valley, as to a beach. The remains of the huge land lizards and iguanodons of the Weald, collected by the late Dr. Mantell, form one of the most conspicuous exhibitions of fossil bones in the British Museum. The pretty little fossil ferns, Lonchopteris and Sphenopteris, found nature-printed on the sandstones, are, on the other hand, the very counterparts, in size and delicacy, of their present successors.