Slowly the calm sea ebbs. As the pulse of the great ocean beats, its glassy ribbon-waves flow swellingly along in long thin lines, and then drain rapidly away. Every now and then, with higher swelling motion, one wavelet ripples further in, leaving us doubtful for a moment of the tide's recess. But gently, surely are those slippery rocks unveiled, and on their smooth and purple flats the glittering fossils lie.

There, in their radiant iridescence in scores are pearly Ammonites. A. lautus, A. splendens, A. auritus, A. tuberculatus, and the little ribbed and everywhere bestrewn A. varicosus.

There hundreds of amber-like translucent Belemnites (B. Listen) protrude their spine-like forms from the dark blue solid clay.

Curled Hamites, small nut-shaped Nuculœ (N. pectinata and N. ovata), spiny Rostellariœ, Pterocera, and Naticæ, and black phosphatic caste of antique forms of crabs and prawns, and little stud- and cup-like corals await your gathering. Everything to your hand, resplendent as the sea has left them for you. Every here and there the smallest portion of some shell or crab reveals the untouched treasure buried underneath. Pick, trowel, knife, anything will dig into that moist yielding clay, or cut your treasure out. Patience and care are all you want.

What a sliding, slipping, torn, and rugged ruinous heap is that far-famed Copt Point itself, with its ravines of shattered clay-splinters, and its shivering peaks and promontories. How the rotten clay breaks and crumbles away beneath your foot-tread, and goes scattering down in multitudes of leaping, racing, bounding chips on to the hard and sea-worn rocks below. Pyritous casts of Ammonites, amber-like Belemnites, and phosphatic casts of Nuculæ, with their two prominent muscle-marks, strew the cindery-looking ground; while here and there, like horny flakes, are the thin angular shell-pieces of Pollicipes.

Rosinus, Waloh, Lemery, and others writing after him followed not in the new path opened ont to them, but reiterated former absurdities.

Bruckmann thinks them a kind of pholas, or boring shell; Bourquet holds to the old notion of their being teeth of whales; Klein even in 1731 regards them as worm-tubes, although three years later he comes round to the opinion that they were nearly allied to the Argonautes; Spirulæ, and chambered shells. Dufay, one of the numerous writers who followed, states that burnt belemnites have the property of being luminous after having been calcined upwards of five years. We have not tried the experiment, and cannot, therefore, speak to the accuracy of the assertion.

Crossing the railway to the harbour, a footpath brings us to some old white-washed cottages, “The Folly Houses,” as they are called (but why I know not), where a young dealer (Griffiths) lives, of whom some good specimens may often be got. Continuing the footpath to the edge of the cliff, we descend by rugged green-sand steps again to the favourite collecting ground, Eastwear Bay.

Slowly the bright green tide is quitting the flat shore, and leaving again exposed the dark blue clay, dotted with black phosphatic nodes and glittering iridescent shells, washed clean and bright. Daily may you pick up hundreds of these ancient inhabitants of the sea; gather the crop as clean as you will, there will be another harvest for you when the next tide falls. Here are Inocerami, or “fibre-shells,” in abundance. Two species, the Inoceramus sulcatus and Inoceramus concentricus—the furrowed and concentric are particularly characteristic of the gault.

Time passes away, and we all of us grow older and older. As day by day the daylight lengthens or contracts, the air gets warmer or chillier, the skies brighter or bleaker, and everything around us imperceptably changes, it is only after the lapse of weeks that we perceive the change.

Yet Time never stays his rapid course; and in mid-life it is perhaps for the first time we stop in our onward path to feel, for the first time too, we are not what we were.

Years ago, when a child, I picked up shells and pebbles on the Kentish strands. In school-boy days, with bolder hand and surer foot, oft have I scrambled o'er those white chalk-cliffs, or clambered homewards for six long miles o'er sea-weeded rocks with satchel loaded full of fossils gathered from the slippery shores of Eastwear Bay, were the dark-blue crumbling Gault daily yields its crop of glittering fossils to the destructive battering of the salt sea waves.

Of all the Gault fossils, the Ammonites take precedence both for beauty and number; and, holding as the Cephalopods do the highest rank of molluscous animals, we cannot but view their extraordinary variety in this deposit with singular interest. If, therefore, we dwell here somewhat at length on their general classification, we could scarcely choose a more fitting occasion.

As ordinarily seen in collections, the Gault Ammonites appear to be all more or less of diminutive size. Few exceed two inches in diameter; many are little more than an inch; while one of three inches would be looked upon as a fine individual.

These specimens are, however, for the most part only the central whirls solidified or hardened by interior walls, or in-fillings of iron-pyrites. In the Gault itself Ammonite-shells of far larger size—commonly of six or seven inches across, sometimes more than a foot—are not merely frequent, but extremely abundant, although, from the fragile state of the main mass, they are commonly cleft to pieces in breaking out the central pyritous cores without attracting observation.

Where now is that great funereal mass ? Where now that twothousand feet of ocean mud and sand ? All round the rim of the great Wealden area the basset-edges of that thick mass crop out, bearing on their cliff-like downs patches of red loam, gravel and round flint-pebbles—remnants that mark the ravages of time and physical forces upon the rock-beds of yet another age, in which that great Cretaceous mass was slowly raised, bearing as it were on its shoulders the ever-forming ooze, filled with the relics of other intervening forma of life that reigned in that vast interval between the Secondary period and our own.

On passing the interesting group of islands in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, known as the Magdalens, the observer is struck with their beautiful and picturesque appearance, which is suddenly presented to his view. The cliffs, which vary in height, present equally various colours, in which the shades of red predominate; these, contrasted with the yellow of the sand-bars, and the green pastures of the hill-sides, the darker green of the spruce trees, and the blue of sea and sky, produce an effect, as Captain Bayfield describes, extremely beautiful, and one which distinguishes these islands from anything else in the Gulf. Such an agreeable picture it has been my own good fortune to witness and admire. The striking feature in their formation is the dome-shaped hills rising in the centre of the group, and attaining a height of from two hundred to five hundred and eighty feet. They are composed of the Triassic or New Red Sandstone formation, which forms their base, being surmounted or topped by masses of trap rocks.

No man is right at all times, says the common proverb, and Geologists are not always exceptions to the rule. Granite has been looked upon as the “back-bone” of the earth's crust, and fire or deeply-seated internal heat has been supposed to have fused an ancient unknown kind of rock into its present compact and crystalline state, while although now scarcely anything more than, at most, hot water will be allowed as an agent in the structural change. The older geologists invoked on all occasions when great effects were to be produced most terrible commotions and catastrophes, just as melodramatists bring in blue fire and demons. Nature is, however, a most methodical business personage. Sedate and steady, she takes quietly and methodically everything with which she has to do, and keeps her accounts properly by double entry. If you draw on her on the one hand, immediately she pays into her bankers on the other. Nothing goes down on the one side of her accounts but instantly she makes some entry on the other.

In our route we shall pass several brick-pits dug into a stiff brown clay or ordinary brick-earth, which must in no way be mistaken for gault, as this fresh-water or marshy stratum, for such the abundance in its lower part of the small white shells of Helix, Succinea oblonga, and Pupa prove it to be, skirts the chalk downs for many miles, apparently into Surrey. At the time when it is extensively dug for brick-making, bones of Bos primigenius, Cervus elephus, Bos urus, and horse are met with. The specimen figured is from one of these pits belonging to Mr. Kingsnorth, of Broadmead.

Deep cuttings and long tunnels are regarded by railway-contractors as things to be avoided, though lessons of the greatest instruction are derived from them by the student of geology. But as safety in transit demands the easiest gradients, and a line as straight as possible, the lesser inequalities of the surface have often to be cut into, so that no insignificant part of geological teaching is derived from railway-work. And oft-times a way that puzzles the contractor to make “ good,” or a hill-slope that, lacking Knowledge of its springs, he has cut into only to see it slip continuously upon his line, are great aids and helps to comprehending the natural formation of a district, and so, a contractor's poison becomes a geologist's meat.

There are, perhaps, few spots richer in the “time-hallowed memories of the past” than the old town of Woodstock, near Oxford. In its immediate neighbourhood once stood a royal palace, where, as the readers of Scott will doubtless remember, many of the scenes in one of his novels are laid. The site of this ancient fabric is now occupied by the more stately pile of Blenheim, the princely residence of the Duke of Marlborough. In the park there is a spring still termed, in allusion to the legend more or less familiar to all students of English history, Rosamond's well. At the distance of a few miles only, memorials of our Celtic ancestors exist in the form of tumuli, embowered among the venerable oaks of Wychwood Forest. It is not, however, our present intention to linger amid the many historical associations of Woodstock, deeply fraught with interest as they are, but proceeding at once to our object, we invite our readers to accompany us in a geological ramble to the village of Stonesfield, situated in its vicinity, at a distance of between three and four miles. By far the most agreeable portion of our road traverses the picturesque slopes and luxuriantly wooded glades of Blenheim Park: leaving these behind, we soon arrive within sight of our destination.

Coral-Hunting in the debris of a Wenlock-shale quarry ranks high— to my thinking—amongst the pleasures of geology. And, indeed, has no insignificant place among its wonders. For to any one not conversant with zoophytic life, it is hard to believe that the rugged corals that lie strewn about the quarry, once held sensitive masses of life—that from every pore tiny arms waved to and fro in the water to entangle the lesser creatures they lived on; and that the animal— that slight thread of jelly-like substance, filling each tube, was at once a limb of the body and an independent creature, contributing, while attached, to the general support, and being able, if severed from the mass, to lead a separate existence and be itself the parent of others. The Wenlock series of the Upper Silurians have been rightly regarded as the metropolis of its zoophytic life, for both in variety and number, corals culminated in the seas of that age. Of these species, “so far removed from existing ones as to be quite unknown in modern seas, all with rare exceptions, dying out at the close of the Palæozoic epoch.” I will essay a familiar sketch.

Opercula of Ammonites are common in many localities, especially in banks and sections of the Kimmeridge Clay; but they usually occur in broken fragments, and very rarely with their valves paired, unless sheltered within the last whirl of the shell to which they belonged. Even when thus protected the valves are generally displaced, as might be expected if we consider how slight is their union along the suture, and how great were the chances of being shifted by the contraction of the animal after death, by the pressure of external mud.

The British Museum contains several examples of Ammonites Jason, A. Brightii, A. fluctuosus, A. lingulatus, and other species with their opercula more or less shifted; and Mr. Charles Moore, of Bath, has several small shells of Ammonites planorbis from the Lower Lias, with the opercula remaining in their true position; the smallest individual is only one quarter of an inch in diameter.

As the season for active out of door geological work is now approaching, I propose to give a brief glance at some interesting features of the South Wales coal-field, in the hopes that pedestrian geologists may be tempted to make it one of the scenes of their labours. And they will be richly rewarded; for, though coal-fields generally give us an impression of a black, unsightly country, without vegetation or anything pleasant for the eye to rest upon, they are not all alike, and that of South Wales is as rich in beautiful scenery above ground, as it is in the precious mineral beneath. Glorious hills intersected by narrow valleys and wooded dells, each washed by its mountain-stream, and antiquities—in the shape of castles, abbeys, cromlechs, and cairns, may tempt the tourist to whom geology does not hold out sufficient inducement. It is in outward features, which I shall first touch upon, that this differs so much from other coal-fields, the basin being more clearly marked, and the underlying grits and limestones, being more uniform in their development than in any district in Great Britain.

The inferior division of the Carboniferous series in Derbyshire and North Staffordshire, composed of calcareous rocks and shales, and forming the Mountain Limestone group of those counties, presents, particularly about the neighbourhood of Alstonfield, some very interesting and remarkable associations of metallic minerals with certain mechanical disturbances of the strata; moreover, these associations are not to be indiscriminately classed with the general phenomena of the mineral veins of the districts in question, but must be considered as special facts requiring a separate consideration and explanation. Their existence is no new discovery, since they have been recognized from the earliest times that mines have been worked in the places where they occur, and where also they are at most times regarded as valuable features, inasmuch as the richest deposits of ore have been found in connection with them; indeed, so decidedly has this been the case, that, in working the mines, much of the future success has been calculated by the amount of probability of any particular vein intersecting the disturbed beds; such unions having, in nearly all cases, been attended with most important results, both as respects the quantity, as well as the kind of ore met with. Nevertheless, I am not aware of their having ever received any particular attention from geologists, nor of their having been anywhere described, circumstances which may probably arise from the fact of these beds only being visible below the surface, and usually in deep mines; or they may have remained unnoticed, from the really small amount of scientific observation which in this country has been brought to bear on the facts connected with metalliferous deposits, compared with what has been done, and is still doing, in other branches of physical geology. The present article is drawn from memoranda made during several careful surveys of mines which are notable, in North Staffordshire, for exhibiting the phenomena of the saddles in great force.

In his address to the Geological Society of London, Prof. Phillips has stated that “very slight and trifling, if not mischievous, is that minute industry which, unguided by philosophical reflections, busies itself only with differentials of specimens and abandons the true integration of species, the work of the real naturalist” and from so just an assertion who could dissent; for although it may be necessary to study the characters by which species may be distinguished, still, if an undue importance is given to certain features, or that these are arbitrarily restricted within preconceived limits, and that the more important questions in connection with the distribution and zoological characters of the class in general are overlooked, then, as Professor Phillips so justly observes, but very little good and much harm may be the result of the minute industry of some would-be palæontologists.

In making the excavations now in progress for the formation of the great South High Level Sewer in the neighbourhood of Peck-ham and Dulwich, the works have been carried through a series of deposits, constituting part of the lower London, Tertiaries, and distinguished by Mr. Prestwich as the “Woolwich and Reading series.” As I learn from Mr. Charles Rickman, the able and zealous curator of the Lambeth Museum of Natural. History who has laboured assiduously in collecting the fossil remains found in them, these deposit at Dulwich, at the depth of twenty-five feet from the surface, comprise a bed of grey sand, and below this, at a depth of about forty feet, and intercalating a bed of clay containing, shells and a bed of Ostreæ, a band of hard compact sandstone, very slightly calcareous, apparently identical with that at Lee, referred to by Mr. De la Condsmine as known there by the name of the “cookle.”