layers of the lower
Greensand also, are worth our attention; for we are all probably
eating them from time to time in the form of bran.

It had been long remarked that certain parts of these beds carried
admirable wheatland; it had been remarked, too, that the finest hop-
lands--those of Farnham, for instance, and Tunbridge--lay upon them:
but that the fertile band was very narrow; that, as in the Surrey
Moors, vast sheets of the lower Greensand were not worth cultivation.
What caused the striking difference?

My beloved friend and teacher, the late Dr. Henslow, when Professor
of Botany at Cambridge, had brought to him by a farmer (so the story
ran) a few fossils. He saw, being somewhat of a geologist and
chemist, that they were not, as fossils usually are, carbonate of
lime, but phosphate of lime--bone-earth. He said at once, as by an
inspiration, "You have found a treasure--not a gold-mine, indeed, but
a food-mine. This is bone-earth, which we are at our wits' end to
get for our grain and pulse; which we are importing, as expensive
bones, all the way from Buenos Ayres. Only find enough of them, and
you will increase immensely the food supply of England, and perhaps
make her independent of foreign phosphates in case of war."

His advice was acted on; for the British farmer is by no means the
stupid personage which townsfolk are too apt to fancy him. This bed
of phosphates was found everywhere in the Greensand, underlying the
Chalk. It may be traced from Dorsetshire through England to
Cambridge, and thence, I believe, into Yorkshire. It may be traced
again, I believe, all round the Weald of Kent and Sussex, from Hythe
to Farnham--where it is peculiarly rich--and so to Eastbourne and
Beachey Head; and it furnishes, in Cambridgeshire, the greater part
of those so-called "coprolites," which are used perpetually now for
manure, being ground up, and then treated with sulphuric acid, till
they become a "soluble super-phosphate of lime."

So much for the useless "hobby," as some fancy it, of poking over old
bones and stones, and learning a little of the composition of this
earth on which God has placed us.

How to explain the presence of this vast mass of animal matter, in
one or two thin bands right across England, I know not. That the
fossils have been rolled on a sea-beach is plain to those who look at
them. But what caused so vast a destruction of animal life along
that beac