Scientific Essays and Lectures

THOUGHTS IN A GRAVEL-PIT 6

Ladies and gentlemen, we may of course think of anything which we choose in a gravel-pit, as we may anywhere else.  Thought is free: at least so we fancy.

But the most right sort of thought, after all, is thought about what lies nearest us; not always, but surely once in a way, that we may understand something of everyday objects.  And therefore it may be well worth our while to go once into a gravel-pit, and think about it, till we have learnt what a gravel-pit is.

Learnt what a gravel-pit is?  Everybody knows.

If it be so, everybody knows more than I know.  We all know a gravel-pit when we see one; but we do not all know what we see.  I do not know.  I know a little; a few scraps of fact about these pits round here, though about no others.  Were I to go into a pit a hundred miles, even fifty miles off, I could tell you nothing certain about it; perhaps might make a dozen mistakes.  But what I know, with tolerable certainty, about the pits round here, I wish to tell you to-night.

But why?  You do not need, one in ten of you, to know anything about gravel, unless you be highway surveyor, or have a garden-walk to make; and then someone will easily tell you where the best gravel is to be got, at so much a load.

Very true; but you come here to-night to instruct yourselves; that is, to learn, if you can, something more about the world you live in; something more about God who made the world.

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 quantity 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 shores 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 washings 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 mass 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 mass of chalk must have been washed away, to leave that vast mass 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 mass 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 Sussex to the chalk of the South Downs.  And out of the scourings of that vast mass 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.

And I have a better proof of this—at least I should have in every gravel-pit at Eversley—in a few pieces of a stone which is not chalk-flint at all; flattish and oblong, not more than two or three inches in diameter; of a grayish colour, and a porous worm-eaten surface, which no chalk-flint ever has.  They are chert, which abound in the greensand formation; and insignificant as they look, are a great token of a most important fact; that the currents which formed our sands and gravels set from the south during a long series of ages, first till they had washed away all the chalk off the Weald, and next till they had washed away a great part of the sands, which then became exposed, the remains whereof form great commons over a wide tract of Surrey.

Now let me pause, and ask you to observe one thing.  How, in inductive science, we arrive, by patient and simple observation of the things around us, at the most grand and surprising results.  Of course I am not giving you the whole of the facts which have made this argument certain.  I am only giving you enough to make it probable to you.  Its certainty has been proved by many different men, labouring in many different parts of England, and of the Continent also, and then comparing their discoveries together; often, of course, making mistakes; but each working on patiently, and correcting their early mistakes by fresh facts, till they have at last got hold of the true key to the mystery, and are as certain of the existence of the great island of the Weald, and its gradual destruction by the waves and currents of an ancient sea, as if they had seen it with their bodily eyes.  You must take all this, of course, as truth from me to-night; but you may go and examine for yourselves; and see how far your own common sense and observations agree with those of learned geologists.

The history of this great Wealden island to the south-east of us is obscure enough; but a few general facts, which bear upon our gravel-pit, I can give you.

I must begin, however, ages before the Wealden island existed; when the chalk of which its mass was composed was at the bottom of a deep ocean.

We know now what chalk is, and how it was made.  We know that it was deposited as white lime mud, at a vast sea-depth, seemingly undisturbed by winds or currents.  We know that not only the flint, but the chalk itself, is made up of shells; the shell of little microscopic animalcules smaller than a needle’s point, in millions of millions, some whole, some broken, some in powder, which lived, and died, and decayed for ages in the great chalk sea.

We know this, I say.  We had suspected it long ago, and become more and more certain of it as the years went on.  But now we seem to have a proof of it which is past gainsaying.

In the late survey of the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, with a view to laying down the electric telegraph between England and America, by Lieutenant Maury of the American navy, a great discovery was made.  It was found that the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, after you have left the land a few hundred miles, is one vast plain of mud, of some thirteen hundred miles in breadth.  But here is the wonder; it was found that at a depth, averaging 1,600 fathoms—9,600 feet—in utter darkness, the sea floor is covered with countless millions of animalcule-shells, of the same families, though not of the same species, as those which compose the chalk.

At the bottom of a still ocean, then, the chalk was deposited.  But it took many an age to raise it to where Odiham chalk-pit now stands.

But how was it raised?

By the upheaving force of earthquakes.  Or rather, by the upheaving force which causes earthquakes, when it acts in a single shock, cracking the earth’s crust by an explosion; but which acts, too, slowly and quietly, uplifting day by day, and year by year, some portions of the earth’s surface, and letting others sink down; as in the case of the valley of the Jordan and the Dead Sea, which is now 1,300 feet below the level of the Mediterranean.

That these upheaving forces were much more violent than now, in the earlier epochs of our planet, we have some reason to believe: but the subject is too long a one to enter on now; and all I can say is, that you must conceive for yourself the chalk gradually brought up to the surface, worn away along a shifting shoreline by the waves of the sea, and covered in shallow water by the clays and sands on which Odiham stands; and which compose the earliest part of our second world.

A second world; a new world.  We can use no weaker expression.  When we compare the chalk with the strata which lie upon it, we can only call them a complete new creation.

For not only were they deposited in shallow water; a great deal of them, probably, near river-mouths, and by the force of violent currents, as the irregularity of their lower bed proves: but there is hardly a plant or animal found in the chalk itself, which is found in the gravels, sands, or clays above it.  The shells are all new species; unseen before in this planet.  The vegetables, as far as we know them, are all different from anything found in the chalk, or in the beds below it.  God Almighty, for His own good pleasure, has made all things new.  It is a very awful fact; but it is a very certain one.  Several times, in the history of our planet, has the Lord God fulfilled the words of the Psalmist:

“Thou takest away their breath, they die, and return again to their dust.

“Thou sendest forth thy breath, they are made: and thou renewest the face of the earth.”

But in no instance, perhaps, is the gulf so vast; is the leap from one world to another so sheer, as that between the chalk and the London clay above it.

But how do I know that there was a shore-line here?  And how do I know that the chalk was covered with sand-beds?

I know that there was a shore-line here, from this fact.  If you will look at the surface of the chalk, where the sands and clays lie on it, you will find that it is not smooth; that the beds do not rest conformably on each other, as if they had been laid down quietly by successive tides, while the chalk below was still soft mud.  So far from it, the chalk must have become hard rock, and have been exposed to the action of the sea waves, for centuries, perhaps, before the sands began to cover it.  For you find the surface of the chalk furrowed, worn into deep pits, which are often filled with sand, and gravel, and rounded lumps of chalk.  You may see this for yourselves, in the topmost layer of any chalk-pit round here.  You may see, even, in some places, the holes which boring shells, such as work now close to the tide-level, have made in it; all the signs, in fact, of the chalk having been a rocky sea-beach for ages.

The first bed which you will generally find upon the water-worn surface of the chalk is a layer of green-sand and green-coated flints.  Among these are met with in many places beds of a great oyster, now unknown in life.  I cannot say whether there are any here; but at Reading, to the east of Farnham, at Croydon, and under London, they are abundant.  There must have been miles and miles of oyster-bed at the bottom of that Eocene sea; among the oyster-beds, beds of a peculiar pebble, which we shall see in our gravel-pit.

They are flints; but very small, dark, often almost black, and quite round and polished.  Compare them with the average flints of the pit, and you see that while the average flints are fresh from the chalk, these have plainly been rolled and rounded for years.  They are (except in their dark colour) exactly such shingle as forms the south-coast beach about Hastings and Brighton.  They are the shingle beaches of the Eocene sea, part of which are preserved under the London clay.  To the north a vast bed of them remains in its original place, on Blackheath near London; while part, in the district to the south, which the London clay has not covered, have been washed away, and carried into our gravel-pit, to mingle with other flints fresh from the chalk.

I said just now that I had proof that a great tract of the chalk-hills which are now bare, was once covered with sand and gravel.  Here, in the presence of these dark pebbles, is a proof.  But I have another, and a yet more curious one.

For our gravel-pit, if it be, will possibly yield us another, and a more curious object.  You most of you have seen, I dare say, large stones, several feet long, taken out of these pits.  In the gravels and sands at Pirbright they are so plentiful that they are quarried for building-stone.  And good building-stone they make; being exceedingly hard, so that no weather will wear them away.  They are what is called saccharine (that is, sugary) sandstone.  If you chip off a bit, you find it exactly like fine whity-brown sugar, only intensely hard.  Now these stones have become very famous; for two reasons.  First, the old Druids used them to build their temples.  Second, it is a most puzzling question where they came from.

First.  They were used to build Druid temples.

If you go to the further lodge of Dogmersfield Park, which opens close to the Barley-mow Inn, you will see there several of them, about five feet high each, set up on end.  They run in a line through the plantation past the lodge, along the park palings; one or two are in an adjoining field.  They are the remains of a double line; an avenue of stones, which has formed part of an ancient British temple.

I know no more than that: of that I am certain.

But if you go to the Chalk Downs of Wiltshire, you see these temples in their true grandeur.  You have all heard of Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain.  Some of you may have heard of the great Druid temple at Abury in Wilts, which, were it not all but destroyed, would be even grander than Stonehenge.  These are made of this same sugar-sandstone.

But where did the sandstone come from?  You may say, it “grew” of itself in our sands and gravels; but it certainly did not “grow” on the top of a bare chalk down.  The Druids must have brought the stones thither, then, from neighbouring gravel-pits.  They brought them, no doubt: but not from gravel-pits.  The stones are found loose on the downs on the top of the bare chalk, in places where they plainly have not been put by man.

For instance, near Marlborough is a long valley in the chalk, which, for perhaps half a mile, is full of huge blocks of this sandstone, lying about on the turf.  The “gray wethers” the shepherds call them.  One look at them would show you that no man’s hand had put them there.  They look like a river of stone, if I may so speak; as if some mighty flood had rolled them along down the valley, and there left them behind as it sunk.

Now, whence did they come?

Many answers have been given to that question.  It was supposed by many learned men that they had been brought from the sandstone mountains of Wales, like the rolled pebbles of which I spoke just now.  But the answer to that was, that these great stones are not rolled: they are all squarish, more or less; their edges are often sharp and fresh, instead of being polished almost into balls, as they would have been in rolling two hundred miles along a sea-bottom, before such a tremendous current as would have been needed to carry them.