moreover, from the variety of its rocks, aspects, and sea-floors,
where limestones alternate with traps, and traps with slates, while
at the valley-mouth the soft sandstones and hard conglomerates of
the new red series slope down into the tepid and shallow waves,
affords an abundance and variety of animal and vegetable life,
unequalled, perhaps, in any other part of Great Britain. It cannot
boast, certainly, of those strange deep-sea forms which Messrs.
Alder, Goodsir, and Laskey dredge among the lochs of the western
Highlands, and the sub-marine mountain glens of the Zetland sea;
but it has its own varieties, its own ever-fresh novelties: and in
spite of all the research which has been lavished on its shores, a
naturalist cannot, I suspect, work there for a winter without
discovering forms new to science, or meeting with curiosities which
have escaped all observers, since the lynx eye of Montagu espied
them full fifty years ago.

Follow us, then, reader, in imagination, out of the gay watering-
place, with its London shops and London equipages, along the broad
road beneath the sunny limestone cliff, tufted with golden furze;
past the huge oaks and green slopes of Tor Abbey; and past the
fantastic rocks of Livermead, scooped by the waves into a labyrinth
of double and triple caves, like Hindoo temples, upborne on pillars
banded with yellow and white and red, a week's study, in form and
colour and chiaro-oscuro, for any artist; and a mile or so further
along a pleasant road, with land-locked glimpses of the bay, to the
broad sheet of sand which lies between the village of Paignton and
the sea - sands trodden a hundred times by Montagu and Turton,
perhaps, by Dillwyn and Gaertner, and many another pioneer of
science. And once there, before we look at anything else, come
down straight to the sea marge; for yonder lies, just left by the