persons whose acquaintance I afterwards
made—I must tell in my own way in future
chapters.

A LEAF FROM THE OLDEST OF
BOOKS.

THE insular Englishman is prone to spend
his holidays abroad; and the highways of
Europe, about the time of the long vacation,
swarm with pleasure-hunting and sight-seeing
emigrants from the white cliffs of
Albion. Her shores, nevertheless, include
many localities that would well repay the
intelligent tourist; and he may not be
uninterested to know the peculiar attractions
of some places nearer home than the Alps,
Scandinavia, or the Bosphorus.

Were a magician, for example, to turn a
spice-island, with its plants and animals, into
stone, and to transport it bodily from the
Indian Archipelago to the mouth of the
Thames, he would realise such a phenomenon
as the Isle of Sheppey now presents to the
eyes of the geological visitor. There can
scarcely be a less promising locality, at first
sight, for any subject of amusement, interest,
or instruction; but I will endeavour to show
what resources Sheppey presents to an
excursionist who may have been bitten by
Buckland or Lyell with their favourite
science.

In the depth of last year's hard winter,
February, eighteen hundred and fifty-five, I
visited, in company with two brother
collectors, that favourite locality for the
discovery and acquisition of fossil organic
remains. The dark cliffs of London clay looked
all the blacker by contrast with the thick
coat of snow that then covered them, and
with the white wreaths or tatters of the
same winter garment that clung to the
crevices and irregularities in the face of the
cliffs. The sea stretched away, of a leadeny-
grey greenish hue, under a bitter cold, stormy
sky; and yet, as we walked along the beach,
which the tide had deserted, almost every
pebble that we kicked along proved to be
some water-worn organic fossil washed out
of the cliffs,—for the most part, the
recognisable remains of some tropical plant or
animal. In many of them we could discern
traces of palm-fruits, petrified, most like
those of the low shrubby palms of the
genus Nipa, several species of which now
abound in the Molucca and Philippine
Islands, where they grow in marshy tracts,
at the mouths of great rivers, and where
the waters are brackish; fragments of
the carapace of sea-tortoises or turtles;
vertebrae of crocodiles; teeth of huge
sharks; pieces of the back-bone of large
boa-constrictors; all turned into dark-
coloured stone. The contrast was most
singular and striking.

We left London Bridge by one of the
Southend and Sheerness steamers, at eleven
o'clock one Tuesday morning (these vessels
sail on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays,
at that hour), and reached Sheerness between
four and five o'clock in the afternoon. On
landing at this busy place of war, we walked
rapidly through the part included within the
limits of the garrison, and called the Blue
Town, beyond the fortifications to the north-
east, to the part of Sheerness called the Mile
Town, where we took up our quarters at the
comfortable inn called the Wellington. Here
we ordered dinner, beds, and Paddy Hays.
Let no one who visits Sheppey for the sake of
its fossils, lose a moment after his arrival at
the Royal Hotel, or the Wellington, in
requesting the attendance of the industrious
collector and humorous vendor of the natural
curiosities of the neighbourhood, who is best
known to the servants of these inns by the
name above-cited. Mr. Hays will submit to
you, with, perhaps, one or two exceptional
rarissima reserved for old scientific
customers, all the best fossils which he has been
able to collect since his boxes were emptied
at the last visit of the curious. He will
expatiate upon them in a language combining
a fragmentary assortment of learned
technicalities with the richest of brogues; but he
will not ask much more than the market
value of the fossils, and a very little bargaining
will leave a characteristic assortment of
fossil fruits, fishes' heads and trunks, teeth of
sharks, teeth and bones of crocodiles and
turtles, outlandish petrified crab-like and
lobster-like crustacea, the nautilus and
other eocene shells, in the possession of
the dilletante visitor, at a very moderate
cost.

Our negociation with Mr. Hays being
satisfactorily concluded, and our meal ended
—a sort of improvised dinner-tea—we
indulged in a review of our newly-acquired
treasures, alternating the whiff of the cigar
and the sip of the tumbler of punch with
inspections and comparisons of our respective
specimens, and interblending the joke and
laugh with recondite speculations on the
nature of the extinct creatures, and the kind
of world they lived in.

The beds at the Wellington are clean and
comfortable; our slumbers were sound and
refreshing. We rose in the morning to an
early breakfast, having a considerable extent
of ground to traverse during the day's brief
daylight at this season. Before starting, we
were careful to stow into our haversacks
sheets of soft paper to wrap round the fragile
specimens; a few calico-bags of from three
to five inches diameter, to separate the small
from the large fossils; a chisel, and our
lightest geological hammer.

One of the party was chiefly bent upon
viewing the great section of the eocene
London clay, which is afforded by the cliffs
on the north shore of Sheppey. The principal
object of my other companion and myself
was to collect as many fossils as we could.