“You will go through so many feet of Bagshot sand; and so many feet of London clay; and so many feet of the Thanet beds between them and the chalk: and then you will win water, at about 412 feet; but not, I think, till then.”

The well-sinker laughed at that, and said, “He had no opinion of geologists, and such-like. He never found any clay in England but what he could get through in 150 feet.”

So he began to bore—150 feet, 200, 300: and then he began to look rather silly; at last, at 405—only seven feet short of what the geologist had foretold—up came the water in a regular spout. But, lo and behold, not expecting to have to bore so deep, he had made his bore much too small; and the sand out of the Thanet beds “blew up” into the bore, and closed it. The poor manufacturer spent hundreds of pounds more in trying to get the sand out, but in vain; and he had at last to make a fresh and much larger well by the side of the old one, bewailing the day when he listened to the well-sinker and not to the geologist, and so threw away more than a thousand pounds. And there is an answer to what you asked on board the yacht—What use was there in learning little matters of natural history and science, which seemed of no use at all? And now, look out again. Do you see any change in the country?

What?

Why, there to the left.

There are high hills there now, as well as to the right. What are they?

Chalk hills too. The chalk is on both sides of us now. These are the Chilterns, all away to Ipsden and Nettlebed, and so on across Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire, and into Hertfordshire; and on again to Royston and Cambridge, while below them lies the Vale of Aylesbury; you can just see the beginning of it on their left. A pleasant land are those hills, and wealthy; full of noble houses buried in the deep beech-woods, which once were a great forest, stretching in a ring round the north of London, full of deer and boar, and of wild bulls too, even as late as the twelfth century, according to the old legend of Thomas à Becket’s father and the fair Saracen, which you have often heard.

I know. But how are you going to get through the chalk hills? Is there a tunnel as there is at Box and at Micheldever?

No. Something much prettier than a tunnel and something which took a great many years longer in making. We shall soon meet with a very remarkable and famous old gentleman, who is a great adept at digging, and at landscape gardening likewise; and he has dug out a path for himself through the chalk, which we shall take the liberty of using also. And his name, if you wish to know it, is Father Thames.

I see him. What a great river!

Yes. Here he comes, gleaming and winding down from Oxford, over the lowlands, past Wallingford; but where he is going to it is not so easy to see.

Ah, here is chalk in the cutting at last. And what a high bridge. And the river far under our feet. Why we are crossing him again!

Yes; he winds more sharply than a railroad can. But is not this prettier than a tunnel?

Oh, what hanging-woods, and churches; and such great houses, and pretty cottages and gardens—all in this narrow crack of a valley!

Ay. Old Father Thames is a good landscape gardener, as I said. There is Basildon—and Hurley—and Pangbourne, with its roaring lasher. Father Thames has had to work hard for many an age before he could cut this trench right through the chalk, and drain the water out of the flat vale behind us. But I suspect the sea helped him somewhat, or perhaps a great deal, just where we are now.

The sea?

Yes. The sea was once—and that not so very long ago—right up here, beyond Reading. This is the uppermost end of the great Thames valley, which must have been an estuary—a tide flat, like the mouth of the Severn, with the sea eating along at the foot of all the hills. And if the land sunk only some fifty feet,—which is a very little indeed, child, in this huge, ever-changing world,—then the tide would come up to Reading again, and the greater part of London and the county of Middlesex be drowned in salt water.

How dreadful that would be!

Dreadful indeed. God grant that it may never happen. More terrible changes of land and water have happened, and are happening still in the world: but none, I think, could happen which would destroy so much civilisation and be such a loss to mankind, as that the Thames valley should become again what it was, geologically speaking, only the other day, when these gravel banks, over which we are running to Reading, were being washed out of the chalk cliffs up above at every tide, and rolled on a beach, as you have seen them rolling still at Ramsgate.

Now here we are at Reading. There is the carriage waiting, and away we are off home; and when we get home, and have seen everybody and everything, we will look over our section once more.

But remember, that when you ran through the chalk hills to Reading, you passed from the bottom of the chalk to the top of it, on to the Thames gravels, which lie there on the chalk, and on to the London clay, which lies on the chalk also, with the Thames gravels always over it. So that, you see, the newest layers, the London clay and the gravels, are lower in height than the limestone cliffs at Bristol, and much lower than the old mountain ranges of Devonshire and Wales, though in geological order they are far higher; and there are whole worlds of strata, rocks and clays, one on the other, between the Thames gravels and the Devonshire hills.

But how about our moors? They are newer still, you said, than the London clay, because they lie upon it: and yet they are much higher than we are here at Reading.

Very well said: so they are, two or three hundred feet higher. But our part of them was left behind, standing up in banks, while the valley of the Thames was being cut out by the sea. Once they spread all over where we stand now, and away behind us beyond Newbury in Berkshire, and away in front of us, all over where London now stands.

How can you tell that?

Because there are little caps—little patches—of them left on the tops of many hills to the north of London; just remnants which the sea, and the Thames, and the rain have not eaten down. Probably they once stretched right out to sea, sloping slowly under the waves, where the mouth of the Thames is now. You know the sand-cliffs at Bournemouth?

Of course.

Then those are of the same age as the Bagshot sands, and lie on the London clay, and slope down off the New Forest into the sea, which eats them up, as you know, year by year and day by day. And here were once perhaps cliffs just like them, where London Bridge now stands.

* * * * *

There, we are rumbling away home at last, over the dear old heather-moors. How far we have travelled—in our fancy at least—since we began to talk about all these things, upon the foggy November day, and first saw Madam How digging at the sand-banks with her water-spade. How many countries we have talked of; and what wonderful questions we have got answered, which all grew out of the first question, How were the heather-moors made? And yet we have not talked about a hundredth part of the things about which these very heather-moors ought to set us thinking. But so it is, child. Those who wish honestly to learn the laws of Madam How, which we call Nature, by looking honestly at what she does, which we call Fact, have only to begin by looking at the very smallest thing, pin’s head or pebble, at their feet, and it may lead them—whither, they cannot tell. To answer any one question, you find you must answer another; and to answer that you must answer a third, and then a fourth; and so on for ever and ever.

For ever and ever?

Of course. If we thought and searched over the Universe—ay, I believe, only over this one little planet called earth—for millions on millions of years, we should not get to the end of our searching. The more we learnt, the more we should find there was left to learn. All things, we should find, are constituted according to a Divine and Wonderful Order, which links each thing to every other thing; so that we cannot fully comprehend any one thing without comprehending all things: and who can do that, save He who made all things? Therefore our true wisdom is never to fancy that we do comprehend: never to make systems and theories of the Universe (as they are called) as if we had stood by and looked on when time and space began to be; but to remember that those who say they understand, show, simply by so saying, that they understand nothing at all; that those who say they see, are sure to be blind; while those who confess that they are blind, are sure some day to see. All we can do is, to keep up the childlike heart, humble and teachable, though we grew as wise as Newton or as Humboldt; and to follow, as good Socrates bids us, Reason whithersoever it leads us, sure that it will never lead us wrong, unless we have darkened it by hasty and conceited fancies of our own, and so have become like those foolish men of old, of whom it was said that the very light within them was darkness. But if we love and reverence and trust Fact and Nature, which are the will, not merely of Madam How, or even of Lady Why, but of Almighty God Himself, then we shall be really loving, and reverencing, and trusting God; and we shall have our reward by discovering continually fresh wonders and fresh benefits to man; and find it as true of science, as it is of this life and of the life to come—that eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor hath it entered into the heart of man to conceive, what God has prepared for those who love Him.