Proudly ramparted with rocks;
And Ocean, ’mid his uproar wild,
Speaks safety to his island-child.
Hence for many a fearless age
Has social quiet loved thy shore;
Nor ever proud invader’s rage
Or sack’d thy towers or stain’d thy fields with gore.”
If we were to tell the story of the Chalk formation, it would run something after this fashion:—Once upon a time—but what time we don’t know, for man’s records only go back a few thousand years; but long, long ages before there was a man to till the earth—all this chalk lay out of sight at the deep bottom of the old, old sea. The tall cliffs at Dover, which Shakspeare would hardly recognise now with their tunnels and railroads, the wavy downs of Sussex and Surrey, the chalk hills of Hampshire, all that piece of Wiltshire called Salisbury Plain, and this line of country stretching away north to bluff Flamborough Head, and running down south to Weymouth and the isle of Purbeck, taking up in its course a good part of Buckinghamshire, Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, and Norfolk,—all this immense district, averaging probably a thousand feet in thickness, lay quietly at the bottom of the sea. Yes! it wasn’t created just pat in a moment, and set up in these hills and valleys, any more than sand was created sand, but gradually, grain by grain, it accumulated, ages rolling by while thus the earth was a-preparing. These undulating downs knew then no boys pursuing on them their healthful and gymnastic games; no fair riders then crossed these pleasant turfy swards, inhaling life and vigour from the air of heaven; no evening promenades for men of business, recreating the overworked physical nature,—then diversified the scene: but instead thereof crumbling particles of older rocks covered the floor of the ocean with their dust, so making green sand, while the waste and débris of coral reefs, ground up and pulverized, poured in their lavish contributions, so making chalk; (?) while above this deposit thus forming, the ocean waves rolled to and fro, and in their rise and fall, their daily ebb and flow, sounded their eternal bass in the ear of old father Time, who certainly then had no human children. Had we been there we should have seen as tenants of the “vasty deep,” pectens, plagiostamas, hamites, belemnites, and other odd-looking crustaceans, roaming about at their own sweet will; some ganoid fishes that have now such hard names, that to write them would interfere with the strain of this description; while here and there we might have spied a veteran remnant of the oolite come down by strange chance into the chalk, a solitary pterodactyle, snapped at and pounced upon by an ugly mososaurus, a sea crocodile standing four feet high. These, and such as these, were the tenants of that ocean, which then rolled over our heaths and downs; and when at length their period of life and purpose of creation were answered, these too all perished, and the secondary formation ended its wondrous career. The old ocean still rolls on, unchanged, unaltered still; but what changes has it seen in these long distant epochs of which geology tries to tell the story!
“Time writes no wrinkle on thine azure brow;
Such as creation’s dawn beheld, thou rollest now!”