occurring in mere handfuls, that seem as if they had been
detached from the mass during the last few tides, we begin to marvel to
what quarter the missing materials of the many hundred cubic yards of
rock, ground down along the shore in this bed during the last century or
two, have been conveyed away. As we pass on northwards, however, we see
the white sand occurring in much larger quantities,--here heaped up in
little bent-covered hillocks above the reach of the tide,--there
stretching out in level, ripple-marked wastes into the waves,--yonder
rising in flat narrow spits among the shallows. At length we reach a
small, irregularly-formed bay, a few hundred feet across, floored with
it from side to side; and see it, on the one hand, descending deep into
the sea, that exhibits over its whiteness a lighter tint of green, and,
on the other, encroaching on the land, in the form of drifted banks,
covered with the plants common to our tracts of sandy downs. The
sandstone bed that has been worn down to form it contains no fossils,
save here and there a carbonaceous stem; but in an underlying harder
stratum we occasionally find a few shells; and, with a specimen in my
hand charged with a group of bivalves resembling the existing conchifera
of our sandy beaches, I was turning aside this sand of the Oolite, so
curiously reduced to its original state, and marking how nearly the
recent shells that lay embedded in it resembled the extinct ones that
had lain in it so long before, when I became aware of a peculiar sound
that it yielded to the tread, as my companions paced over it. I struck
it obliquely with my foot, where the surface lay dry and incoherent in
the sun, and the sound elicited was a shrill, sonorous note, somewhat
resembling that produced by a waxed thread, when tightened between the
teeth and the hand, and tipped by the nail of the forefinger. I walked
over it, striking it obliquely at each step, and with every blow the
shrill note was repeated. My companions joined me; and we performed a
concert, in which, if we could boast of but little variety in the tones
produced, we might at least challenge all Europe for an instrument of
the kind which produced them. It seemed less wonderful that there should
be music in the granite of Memnon, than in the loose Oolitic sand of the
Bay of Laig. As we marched over the drier tracts, an incessant _woo_,
_woo_, _woo_, rose from the surface, that might be heard in the calm
some twenty or