for a friend who was going abroad; and the look
and manner of the chariot, as I tried the cushions
and the springs, brought all these hints of
travelling remembrance before me.

"It will do very well," said I, rather sorrowfully,
as I got out at the other door, and shut
the carriage up.

  ENGLAND, LONG AND LONG AGO.

IN the days when our little island was young,
she was not a beauty; she was merely grand and
interesting. Unlike other belles, she began to
charm the poet and novelist only at a very mature
age; a strange consummation, and one which
has required a wonderful series of metamorphoses,
each as complete and mysterious as that
which transforms the larva into the butterfly.

The mind finds it difficult to realise the idea
that a country like England was once a steaming
morass, covered with the rank tropical vegetation
of the tree-fern groves; its awful silence
only broken by the hum of the shardy beetle,
the rush of the hideous flying-lizards through
lofty woods of ferns and reeds, or the tramp of
the giant iguanodons over the plashy wolds.
Imagination, left to itself, could scarcely have
indulged in so wild a flight as to picture an era
when palm-trees waved in Kent and Hampshire,
and the plains of Cumnor were the coral reefs
of some primeval lagoon; when the tiger and
hyæna lurked in the thickets of Kirkdale; when
the trumpeting of the huge northern elephant
was heard on the moors of Yorkshire and the
downs of Brighton; when the bison fed on the
plains, and the sullen river-horse and rhinoceros
browsed by the Thames and the Avon.

Yet these things were. The hammer of the
geologist, like the enchanter's wand, has
conjured up more than one panorama of Old
England, far more weird and wonderful than ever
was fabled. The historian only seeks to trace back
the annals of our island, to the days when it was
first peopled by painted savages, living in
wigwams like the Red Indian or the beaver, and
hunting with the rude bow and flint-headed
arrow; the geologist recals the times when our
island was the home of the dragon, the turtle,
and the iguanodon.

How these dreams formed and broke; how
the shoreless and stagnant oceans of the
primæval world changed into clear seas and rivers;
how the monotonous vegetation of kelp-weeds,
and, still later, the vast forests of ferns and
club-mosses, with all the uncouth actors in the
sombre drama of pre-Adamite life, gave way to the
beautiful flora and fauna of modern times;
we will endeavour to show as succinctly and
clearly as we can; first assuring any timid
reader that we neither purpose to inflict a
theological controversy upon him, nor to
bewilder him with a scientific jargon. We cannot
wonder at such a reader being terrified when
told that "slaty lamina are oblique to the
crystallisation;" that "diagonal lamination may be
produced by sedimentary deposition;" that "in
crystallisation there is something like definite
polarity;" that "cross-joints, combined with
cleavage, divide rocks into rhomboidal solids."
This is all right and essential in its way; this
is all proper in works of reference, but it has
deterred thousands from the study of science;
we will therefore try if it be not possible to give
a few brief sketches of past times without these
deterring accompaniments.

The curtain rises upon an interminable
ocean of granite, seething and glowing like
molten ore, and heaving like the Atlantic in a
gale; an impenetrable mist, formed by the heat
expelling every drop of water from the granite
ocean, its solemn stillness never stirred by a
breeze, contrasting strangely with the infernal
uproar beneath, overhangs the globe from pole
to pole.

As the first great day wears on, the heat
gradually passes out into space, and when we next
look upon the scene, though the granite still
seethes in every cleft and volcano, though
every hill and table-land shakes and thunders as
the raging flood beneath heaves and falls, and
the waters which have fallen from the mists
still boil like a pot, yet the fearful turmoil has
greatly subsided; the granite is settling down
into hills and valleys; and the Great Architect is
laying the foundations of the earth in the shape
of the igneous rocks.

Even before this part of the task was well
completed and the seas had cooled down from
boiling heat, the rivers were slowly wearing
down the granite, and pouring their mud into
every sea and lake, to form the first stratified
rocks. Little fucoids, progenitors of the kelp-
weeds which the wretched inhabitants of the
western highlands have, ever since the memory
of man, gathered for their cattle and sheep, lined
the iron-bound shores of these early seas; springing
up feeble and few at the outset, until at last
they grew so thick and rank, that beds of
anthracite are found in Dumfries, composed solely
of them, and flagstones are met with so full of
bitumen from the same cause, that they burn
more brightly than cannel coal. Sea-worms,
and zoophytes, creatures like little bundles of
twigs tied on a common stalk, without the sense
of sight and smell, alone peopled the waters.

Now and then, a volcano would pour its lava
over the mud of some inland sea, and bake it
into gneiss, and, later on, when the heat had
lessened more, into mica-schist, until, as the
violence and frequency of these outbursts abated,
the clay slates were formed. Nor was Nature
even at this early date, unmindful of beauty; the
same heat fed the alembic from which the garnet,
the ruby, and topaz, with many priceless stones
and metals, were distilled by her wondrous
alchemy.

The first day is gone amidst impenetrable
gloom, and with the second come the earliest
creatures of prey—the first tiny freebooters of the
ocean: stone lilies (Euerinites), accompanied by
crabs and little creatures serrated like combs.
The lily was furnished with long fingers to
catch its prey, and was guarded from assault by
an elaborately worked suit of armour, consisting