The South Downs of England descend at about eight miles from the sea
into beds of clay, diversified by gravel and sand, and with an upper
deposit of peaty, boggy soil, all having been brought down by the
rivers of which the Itchen and the Test remain.

On the western side of the Itchen, exactly at the border where the
chalk gives way to the other deposits, lies the ground of which this
memoir attempts to speak. It is uneven ground, varied by
undulations, with gravelly hills, rising above valleys filled with
clay, and both alike favourable to the growth of woods. Fossils of
belemnite, cockles (cardium), and lamp-shells (terebratula) have been
found in the chalk, and numerous echini, with the pentagon star on
their base, are picked up in the gravels and called by the country
people Shepherds' Crowns--or even fossil toads. Large boulder stones
are also scattered about the country, exercising the minds of some
observers, who saw in certain of them Druidical altars, with channels
for the flow of the blood, while others discerned in these same
grooves the scraping of the ice that brought them down in the Glacial
age.

But we must pass the time when the zoophytes were at work on our
chalk, when the lamp-shells rode at anchor on shallow waves, when the
cockles sat "at their doors in a rainbow frill," and the belemnites
spread their cuttlefish arms to the sea, and darkened the water for
their enemies with their store of ink.

Nor can we dwell on the deer which left their bones and horns in the
black, boggy soil near the river, for unfortunately these were