or allied formations beneath our feet. On to Lyme Regis, with its famous liassic strata fruitful in fossil monsters, but barren of either of the objects of our search. Already we have travelled twenty-five miles from our starting-point, and have not found so much as a single flintstone.
At last, between Lyme and Axmouth, we come upon chalk and green sand extending almost to Sidmouth, and yielding flints in abundance. We have reached the great storehouse of this material from which the Chesil pebbles have been derived; and this is the nearest possible point from which the greater part of the bank can have come. But the reddish-brown pebbles, where are they? Not much farther ahead. Leaving Sidmouth, we enter the new red sandstone, and moving still westward we shortly reach the pretty little village of Budleigh Salterton. Our march is done, and we halt upon a beach of which every pebble is more or less a counterpart of the specimen we brought along with us. The sandstone crumbling year by year, attacked by gales and washed by water, drops on the shore an inexhaustible supply of these red-brown stones whose travels begin only in the fall from the parent rock, and end upon the strange isthmus thirty miles away. Matter, like man, plays many a part before it leaves the world’s stage. The flint and the sandstone pebble are dug up again for modern uses by that inexorable utilitarian Nature, after a measureless period of repose which has succeeded their last appearance. Both have helped at least once before to line the shores of a primeval ocean with red beaches such as those of to-day, for both come to their work rounded and waterworn, marked unmistakeably with the badge of their previous employment æons ago.
Fishing by Moonlight off the Chesil Bank.
Now, if the diligent reader will take a map of England and glance at the towns we have named, he will see that we tax his powers of faith somewhat largely when we bid him believe that every pebble which rolls beneath the feet of Portland fishers has crossed the West Bay, performed a journey varying in distance from thirty to forty miles, and been finally arrested where we now stand. Such, nevertheless, is the fact, and the south-westerly gales which blow upon these coasts throughout almost the entire year, are the immediate agents in the work: these, sometimes slowly, sometimes rapidly, as calmer or rougher times prevail, clear out ton after ton of pebbles from the localities mentioned, and roll them along the shore; the exodus of stones going on until some obstacle crossing the path of the prevailing wind arrests their progress:—this obstacle is found in the Chesil Bank.
But how (formidable a barrier as it now is) did it first become so? Why, when once started, did the pebbles stop, thus suddenly arrested in mid-ocean? The reason is very simple, although not obvious. From Portland to the mainland there runs at a few feet above the low-tide level a bank of stiff clay covered up deep in pebbles now and hidden from all observation less searching than that of the boring-bar; by this the travelling stones were first checked and accumulation begun. Through how many circling years the winds and waves have been about their task we know not, yet it is not probable that this action is a very slow and lingering one; the sea, which can patiently gnaw century after century at some
