artificial manure to improve his soils. She had ground and pounded all the older rocks to make up a new compound that should possess all their valuable mineral ingredients. In this way only could mankind have been blessed with the necessary elements for the purposes of husbandry. Thus, in comparison with other periods, that when man was introduced was especially favoured.

Fig. 161.-Ideal Landscape of the Quaternary Period.

CHAPTER XV.

"Where Tees, full many a fathom low,
Wears with his rage no common foe;
For pebbly bank, nor sand-bed here,
Nor clay-mound, checks his fierce career,
Condemned to mine a channell❜d way,
O'er solid sheets of marble grey."

SCOTT's Rokeby.

AM the last of my race. My brother storytellers have had their day, and ceased to be. Had you questioned me a few years ago, I should have been like Canning's Knife

* We are indebted to Mr. John Evans, F.R.S., for the loan of the

grinder, and had none to tell. Even now my story is not complete. New and revised versions are constantly coming out, although their general truth remains unaltered.

Who among my listeners has not played, when a child, in a sand or gravel-pit? We have them in abundance scattered over the surface of the country. But there are gravel-pits and gravel-pits—a difference without a popular distinction.

Those I particularly represent are usually situated on the banks of some great river-valley. Hence their other geological names of "Valley-gravels" and "River-gravels." Frequently they form terraces flanking the present course of the rivers, and you may identify two of these terraces-a low-lying one and a higher. If you could strip off these banks of gravel, you would find the bare rock beneath, or else some thick sheet of boulder clay, which had been scooped out to make the present river-valley. Banked up against these old denuded surfaces are the gravels, whose excavations are so well known as pits. I am one of them, and I propose to tell you my story, as well as I can recollect it. Although I can hardly define the difference between the gravels to which I belong and those which belong to the Glacial series, generally the Middle Drift, yet the practised eye readily learns to detect that there is a difference.

Flint implements illustrating this chapter. They are from his magnificent work on 'The Ancient Stone Implements, Weapons, and Ornaments of Great Britain.'

The pebbles composing our beds are well rounded, showing they have undergone a tremendous deal of wear-and-tear. They are composed of different kinds of rock, just as you would expect when you know they have been washed out of the boulder clays, or brought down by the river in its passage over the outcrops of successive beds. The flint pebbles have generally an oily look about them, and

all the pebbles are red and ochreous. Their position along the river-valley, however, is always the best test. Some of these valley-gravels are very thick, whilst others extend as mere banks of local distribution. All of them, however, indicate some degree of antiquity, inasmuch as you will find ancient trees growing on the most recent of these terraces, and,