rnemouth are; and the gravel, if it was
laid down by water, would naturally lie flat on it again: but it does
not. See how the top of the sand is dug out into deep waves and pits,
filled up with gravel. And see, too, how over some of the gravel you get
sand again, and then gravel again, and then sand again, till you cannot
tell where one fairly begins and the other ends. Why, here are little
dots of gravel, six or eight feet down, in what looks the solid sand
rock, yet the sand must have been opened somehow to put the gravel in.

You say you have seen that before. You have seen the same curious
twisting of the gravel and sand into each other on the top of Farley
Hill, and in the new cutting on Minley Hill; and, best of all, in the
railway cutting between Ascot and Sunningdale, where upon the top the
white sand and gravel is arranged in red and brown waves, and festoons,
and curlicues, almost like Prince of Wales's feathers. Yes, that last is
a beautiful section of ice-work; so beautiful, that I hope to have it
photographed some day.

Now, how did ice do this?

Well, I was many a year before I found out that, and I dare say I never
should have found it out for myself. A gentleman named Trimmer, who,
alas! is now dead, was, I believe, the first to find it out. He knew
that along the coast of Labrador, and other cold parts of North America,
and on the shores, too, of the great river St. Lawrence, the stranded
icebergs, and the ice-foot, as it is called, which is continually forming
along the freezing shores, grub and plough every tide into the mud and
sand, and shove up before them, like a ploughshare, heaps of dirt; and
that, too, the ice itself is full of dirt, of sand and stones, which it
may have brought from hundreds of miles away; and that, as this
ploughshare of dirty ice grubs onward, the nose of the plough is
continually being broken off, and left underneath the mud; and that, when
summer comes, and the ice melts, the mud falls back into the place where
the ice had been, and covers up the gravel which was in the ice. So,
what between the grubbing of the ice-plough into the mud, and the dirt
which it leaves behind when it melts, the stones, and sand, and mud upon
the shore are jumbled up into curious curved and twisted layers, exactly
like those which Mr. Trimmer saw in certain gravel-pits. And when I
first read about that, I said, "And exactly like what I have been seeing
in every gravel-pit round here,