I give you a rough section, from a deep well at Dogmersfield House;
from which you may see how steeply the chalk dips down here under
the clay, so that Odiham stands, as it were, on the chalk beach of
the clay sea.

In boring that well there were pierced:

Forty feet of the upper sands (the Bagshot sands), of which I shall
speak presently.

Three hundred and thirty feet of London clay.

Then about forty feet of mottled clays and sands.

Whether the chalk was then reached, I do not know. It must have
been close below. But these mottled clays and sands abound in water
(being indeed the layer which supplies the great breweries in
London, and those soda-water bottles on dumb-waiters which squirt in
Trafalgar Square); and (I suppose) the water being reached, the
boring ceased.

Now, this great bed of London clay, even more than the sands below
it, deserves the title of a new creation.

As a proof--some of you may recollect, when the South-Western
Railway was in making, seeing shells--some of them large and
handsome ones--Nautili, taken out of the London clay cutting near
Winchfield.

Nautili similar to them (but not the same) are now only found in the