Part 5 (1/2)

And you come here to educate yourselves; to educe and bring out your own powers of perceiving, judging, reasoning; to improve yourselves in the art of all arts, which is, the art of learning. That is mental education.

Now if a gravel-pit will teach you a little about these things, you will surely call it a rich gravel-pit. If it helps you to wisdom, which is worth more than gold; which is the only way to get gold wisely, and spend it wisely; then we will call our pit no more a gravel-pit, but a wisdom-pit, a mine of wisdom.

Let us go out, then, in fancy (for it is too cold to go out in person) to Hook Common, scramble down into the first gravel-pit we come to, and see what we can see.

The first thing we see is a quant.i.ty of stones, more or less rounded, lying in gravel and poor clay.

Well--what do those stones tell us?

These stones, as I told you when I addressed you last, are ancient and venerable worthies. They have seen a great deal in their time.

They have had a great deal of knocking about, and have stood it manfully. They have stood the knocking about of three worlds already; and have done their duty therein; and they are ready (if you choose to mend the road with them) to stand the knocking about of this fourth world, and being most excellent gravel, to do their duty in this world likewise; which is more, I fear, than either you or I can say for ourselves.

Three worlds?

Yes. Standing there in the gravel-pit, I see three old worlds, in each of which these stones played their part; and this world of man for the fourth, and the best of all--for man if not for the stones.

I speak sober truth. Let me explain it step by step.

You know the chalk-hills to the south; and the sands of Crooksbury and the Hind Head beyond them. There is one world.

You know the clays and sands of Hook and Newnham, Dogmersfield and Shapley Heath, and all the country to the north as far as Reading.

There is a second world.

You know the gravel-pit itself; and all the upper soils and gravels, which are spread over the length and breadth of the country to the north. There is a third world.

Let us take them one by one.

First, the chalk.

The chalk-hills rise much higher than the surrounding country; but you must not therefore suppose that they were made after it, and laid on the top of it. That guess would be true, if you went south- east from here toward the Hind Head. The chalk lies on the top of the sands of Crooksbury Hill, and the clays of Holt Forest; but it dips underneath the sands of Shapley Heath, and the clays of Dogmersfield, and reappears from underneath them again at Reading.

Thus you at Odiham stand on the edge of a chalk basin; of what was once a sea, or estuary, with sh.o.r.es of chalk, which begins at the foot of the High Clere Hills, and runs eastward, widening as it goes, past London, into the Eastern Sea. Everywhere under this great basin is the floor of chalk, covered with clays and sands, which, for certain reasons, are called by geologists Tertiary strata.

But what has this to do with a gravel-pit?

This first. That all the flints in this pit have come out of the chalk. They are coloured, most of them, with iron, which has turned them brown; but they are exactly the same flints as those gray ones in the chalk-pit on the other side of the town.

How do I know that?

I think our own eyes will prove it: they are the same shapes, and of the same substance; but as a still surer proof, we find exactly the same fossils in them; sponges, choanites (which were something like our modern sea-anemones), corals, and ”shepherds' crowns” as the boys call the fossil sea-urchins. The species of all these, and of other fossils, in the chalk-pit and in the gravel-pit, are absolutely identical. The natural conclusion is, then, that the gravel has been formed from the was.h.i.+ngs of the chalk. The white lime of the chalk has been carried away in water by some flood or floods; the heavier flints have been left behind.

Stop now one moment, and think. You all know how very few flints there are in the chalk-pit, in proportion to the ma.s.s of chalk. You all know what vast gravel-beds cover the country to the north, and often to the thickness of many feet. Try and conceive, then, what a much more vast ma.s.s of chalk must have been washed away, to leave that vast ma.s.s of gravel behind it.--Conceive? It is past conception. I will but give you two hints as to its probable size.

The chalk to the eastward, between here and Farnham, is a far narrower and shallower band than anywhere else in England. Its narrowest point is, I believe, beneath the bishop's palace at Farnham, where it may be a hundred feet thick, instead of several hundred, as it usually is in other parts of England. The cause of this is, that the whole of the upper chalk has been washed away, to form the gravel-beds to the north and east of us.

Again. Some of you may have been on the Hind Head or on Leith Hill, and have looked southward over the glorious prospect of the rich Weald, spread out five hundred feet below--a sight to make an Englishman proud of his native land. Now, the ma.s.s of chalk which has been carried away began behind you, at the Hogsback, and the line of chalk-hills which runs to Boxhill, and stretched hundreds of feet above your head as you stand on Hind Head or Leith Hill, right over the old Weald of Suss.e.x to the chalk of the South Downs. And out of the scourings of that vast ma.s.s of chalk was our gravel-pit made.

Of that, and also of the Hind Head sands below it.

For you will find a great deal of sharp sand in our gravel-pits, which has not, I believe, come from the grinding of chalk flints; for if it had been ground, it would not be the sharp sand it is; the particles would be rounded off at the edges. This is probably sand from the Hind Head; from what geologists term the greensands, below the chalk.