After last night\'s rain, the cliffs that bound the bay have come out in all their most brilliant colours; so this morning I am turning my steps seaward, and wandering along the great ridge of pebbles which here breaks the force of the Channel waves as they beat against the long line of the Dorset downs. Our cliffs just at this point are composed of blue lias beneath, with a capping of yellow sandstone on their summits, above which in a few places the layer of chalk that once topped the whole country-side has still resisted the slow wear and tear of unnumbered centuries. These three elements give a variety to the bold and broken bluffs which is rare along the monotonous southern escarpment of the English coast. After rain, especially, the changes of colour on their sides are often quite startling in their vividness and intensity. To-day, for example, the yellow sandstone is tinged in parts with a deep russet red, contrasting admirably with the bright green of the fields above and the sombre steel-blue of the lias belt below. Besides, we have had so many landslips along this bit of shore, that the various layers of rock have in more than one place got mixed up with one another into inextricable confusion. The little town nestling in the hollow behind me has long been famous as the head-quarters of early geologists; and not a small proportion of the people earn their livelihood to the present day by \'goin\' a fossiling.\' Every child about the place recognises ammonites as \'snake-stones;\' while even the rarer vertebrae of extinct saurians have acquired a local designation as \'verterberries.\' So, whether in search of science or the picturesque, I often clamber down in this direction for my daily stroll, particularly when, as is the case to-day, the rain has had time to trickle through the yellow rock, and the sun then shines full against its face, to light it up with a rich flood of golden splendour.

The base of the cliffs consists entirely of a very soft and plastic blue lias mud. This mud contains large numbers of fossils, chiefly chambered shells, but mixed with not a few relics of the great swimming and flying lizards that swarmed among the shallow flats or low islands of the lias sea. When the blue mud was slowly accumulating in the hollows of the ancient bottom, these huge saurians formed practically the highest race of animals then existing upon earth. There were, it is true, a few prim?val kangaroo-mice and wombats among the rank brushwood of the mainland; and there may even have been a species or two of reptilian birds, with murderous-looking teeth and long lizard-like tails—descendants of those problematical creatures which printed their footmarks on the American trias, and ancestors of the later toothed bird whose tail-feathers have been naturally lithographed for us on the Solenhofen slate. But in spite of such rare precursors of higher modern types, the saurian was in fact the real lord of earth in the lias ocean.
For him did his high sun flame, and his river billowing ran,
And he felt himself in his pride to be nature\'s crowning race.

We have adopted an easy and slovenly way of dividing all rocks into primary, secondary, and tertiary, which veils from us the real chronological relations of evolving life in the different periods. The lias is ranked by geologists among the earliest secondary formations: but if we were to distribute all the sedimentary rocks into ten great epochs, each representing about equal duration in time, the lias would really fall in the tenth and latest of all. So very misleading to the ordinary mind is our accepted geological nomenclature. Nay, even commonplace geologists themselves often overlook the real implications of many facts and figures which they have learned to quote glibly enough in a certain off-hand way. Let me just briefly reconstruct the chief features of this scarcely recognised world\'s chronology as I sit on this piece of fallen chalk at the foot of the mouldering cliff, where the stream from the meadow above brought down the newest landslip during the hard frosts of last December. First of all, there is the vast lapse of time represented by the Laurentian rocks of Canada. These Laurentian rocks, the oldest in the world, are at least 30,000 feet in thickness, and it must be allowed that it takes a reasonable number of years to accumulate such a mass of solid limestone or clay as that at the bottom of even the widest prim?val ocean. In these rocks there are no fossils, except a single very doubtful member of the very lowest animal type. But there are indirect traces of life in the shape of limestone probably derived from shells, and of black lead probably derived from plants. All these early deposits have been terribly twisted and contorted by subsequent convulsions of the earth, and most of them have be............