This fortress built by nature for herself,
Against infection and the hand of war;
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.”
King Richard II.
But, we confess, we rather dwell on other features in our physical and social history, as affording the best proof of our real greatness, and the best illustration of our untiring Anglo-Saxon energy. We would rather record such facts as the following, than announce any “famous victory;” we would rather turn fondly to considerations like these, than contemplate
“Our sands that will not bear her enemy’s boats,
But suck them to the top-mast.”
“Though animal organization is beyond the constructive skill of man, he takes the elements existing in nature, and by new combinations gets new power. He keeps adding to the qualities of his noblest coursers, his fleetest dogs, and his goodliest beeves. He year by year develops the resources of the soil, reclaims the marsh from wild fowl, the heath from rabbits, and the flinty hillside from briars and thistles. He goes on multiplying the blades of grass and grains of corn, and compels an equal area to yield a twofold substance. He discovers in his raw materials unsuspected properties, until soda and sand are converted into a Crystal Palace, and water, coal, and stony ore into a train, which rushes with the might of an earthquake and the velocity of the wind. He devises fresh applications of machinery, and in the creations of his ingenuity finds a servant and a master. The broad result to England is quickly told: fifty years have doubled the population, and employment and subsistence have been doubled likewise. An engine is contrived which economises labour, and threatens starvation to the labourer; but the issue proves that the work it makes is more than it saves. Annihilate all the cranks and wheels constructed in the interval, and return our counties with their present population to the condition in which they were when the century began, and there would be nothing but famine in the land. A government wiser than man’s has provided, in the constant exertion of talent, for the increase of our race, and maintains a proportion between our wants and our progress. Every round we rise in the ladder leads to a higher; but our step is limited, or we should outstrip our needs by too prodigious a stride, and encroach on the rights of a future age.”[[77]]
There is no turning over a leaf in the many-paged book of geologic investigation, without finding the frequent application of thoughts like these. Every part of the crust of the earth has its uses, and uses, too, that are peculiar to it; and as we have endeavoured hitherto to point out the economic uses of each formation in the great onward progress of humanity, we shall not find ourselves at a loss in this respect, now that we enter the second division of the secondary rocks.
We commence with the Lias.[[78]] During the new red sandstone period, clay and marl were being deposited at the bottom of the seas and lakes then in existence. These were the natural degradations of existing rocks; into these soft deposits sunk various pre-Adamite remains, finding in the soft argillaceous beds ready to receive them the “possession of a burying-place” provided for them by the infinite Creator. Here they remained until in process of time, at the close of the new red sandstone period, these beds and their contents were upheaved from beneath the ocean, apparently without much violence; and becoming hardened by the chemical action of sun and wind, present us with the formation we are now studying, rich in its peculiarly characteristic fossils. The name lias, or layers, indicates the finely stratified condition of the rocks, and affords proof of the tranquil method of their deposit and upheaval. They stretch in a north-easterly direction from Lyme Regis, in Dorsetshire, where it may be seen on the open coast cliffs for about four miles, on to Whitby, in Yorkshire, where also it lies open to the sea, in cliffs of considerable elevation, and lying conformably with other strata, and is thus particularly favourable to geologistic examination. It is in the shales of the lias at Whitby, and at Lyme Regis, that most of the extraordinary and remarkable fossils have been met with that we are about to describe, and for which this formation is so justly renowned. Indeed, so far as palæontology, or the knowledge of ancient beings, is concerned, there is no formation more full of interest to the student.