-
of the mammoth, or woolly elephant; the woolly rhinoceros, the cave
lion and bear, the reindeer, the musk oxen, the lemmings and the
marmots which inhabited Britain till the ice drove them out
southward, even into the South of France; and how as the ice
retreated, and the climate became tolerable once more, some of them--
the mammoth and rhinoceros, the bison, the lion, and many another
mighty beast reoccupied our lowlands, at a time when the
hippopotamus, at least in summer, ranged freely from Africa and Spain
across what was then dry land between France and England, and fed by
the side of animals which have long since retreated to Norway and to
Canada. I should have liked to tell the archaeologist of the human
beings--probably from their weapons and their habits--of the same
race as the present Laplanders, who passed northward as the ice went
back, following the wild reindeer herds from the South of France into
our islands, which were no islands then, to be in their turn driven
northward by stronger races from the east and south. But space
presses, and I fear that I have written too much already.

At least, I have turned over for you a few grand and strange pages in
the book of nature, and taught you, I hope, a key by which to
decipher their hieroglyphics. At least, I have, I trust, taught you
to look, as I do, with something of interest, even of awe, upon the
pebbles in the street.

III. THE STONES IN THE WALL

This is a large subject. For in the different towns of these
islands, the walls are built of stones of almost every age, from the
earliest to the latest; and the town-geologist may find a quite
different problem to solve in the nearest wall, on moving from one
town to another twenty miles off. All I can do, therefore, is to
take one set of towns, in the walls of which one sort of stones is
commonly found, and talk of them; taking care, of course, to choose a
stone which is widely distributed. And such, I think, we can find in
the so-called New Red sandstone, which, with its attendant marls,
covers a vast tract--and that a rich and busy one--of England. From
Hartlepool and the mouth of the Tees, down through Yorkshire and
Nottinghamshire; over the manufacturing districts of central England;
down the valley of the Severn; past Bristol and the Somersetshire
flats to Torquay in South Devon; up north-westward through Shropshire
and Cheshire; past Liverpool and