seem dull, now that the grass is cut; but you
would not have said so two months ago, when the fields were all golden-
green with buttercups, and the whitethorn hedges like crested waves of
snow. I should like to take a foreigner down the Vale of Berkshire in
the end of May, and ask him what he thought of old England. But what
shall we talk about?

I want to know about Coprolites, if they dig them here, as they do at
Cambridge.

I don't think they do. But I suspect they will some day.

But why do people dig them?

Because they are rational men, and want manure for their fields.

But what are Coprolites?

Well, they were called Coprolites at first because some folk fancied they
were the leavings of fossil animals, such as you may really find in the
lias at Lynn in Dorsetshire. But they are not that; and all we can say
is, that a long time ago, before the chalk began to be made, there was a
shallow sea in England, the shore of which was so covered with dead
animals, that the bone-earth (the phosphate of lime) out of them crusted
itself round every bone, and shell, and dead sea-beast on the shore, and
got covered up with fresh sand, and buried for ages as a mine of wealth.

But how many millions of dead creatures, there must have been! What
killed them?

We do not know. No more do we know how it comes to pass that this thin
band (often only a few inches thick) of dead creatures should stretch all
the way from Dorsetshire to Norfolk, and, I believe, up through
Lincolnshire. And what is stranger still, this same bone-earth bed crops
out on the south side of the chalk at Farnham, and stretches along the
foot of those downs, right into Kent, making the richest hop lands in
England, through Surrey, and away to Tunbridge. So that it seems as if
the bed lay under the chalk everywhere, if once we could get down to it.

But how does it make the hop lands so rich?

Because hops, like tobacco and vines, take more phosphorus out of the
soil than any other plants which we grow in England; and it is the
washings of this bone-earth bed which make the lower lands in Farnham so
unusually rich, that in some of them--the garden, for instance, under the
Bishop's castle--have grown hops without resting, I believe, for three
hundred years.

But who found out all this about the Coprolites?

Ah--I will tell you; and show you how scientific men, whom ignorant
people sometimes laugh at as dreamers, and mere pickers up of usele