laid bare; and their remains, being washed away by the sea the last,
would be washed on to the top of the remains of the Silurians; and so
(as in most cases) the remains of the older rock, when redeposited by
water, would lie on the remains of the younger rock. And do they not
see that (if what I just said is true) these slates would grind up
into red marl, such as is seen over the west and south of Cheshire
and Staffordshire and far away into Nottinghamshire? The red marl
must almost certainly have been black slate somewhere, somewhen. Why
should it not have been such in Snowdon? And why should not the
slates in the roof be the remnants of the very beds which are now the
marl in the fields?

And thus I end my story of the slates in the roof, and these papers
on Town Geology. I do so, well knowing how imperfect they are:
though not, I believe, inaccurate. They are, after all, merely
suggestive of the great amount that there is to be learnt about the
face of the earth and how it got made, even by the townsman, who can
escape into the country and exchange the world of man for the world
of God, only, perhaps, on Sundays--if, alas! even then--or only once
a year by a trip in a steamer or an excursion train. Little, indeed,
can he learn of the planet on which he lives. Little in that
direction is given to him, and of him little shall be required. But
to him, for that very reason, all that can be given should be given;
he should have every facility for learning what he can about this
earth, its composition, its capabilities; lest his intellect, crushed
and fettered by that artificial drudgery which we for a time miscall
civilisation, should begin to fancy, as too many do already, that the
world is composed mainly of bricks and deal, and governed by acts of
parliament. If I shall have awakened any townsmen here and there to
think seriously of the complexity, the antiquity, the grandeur, the
true poetry, of the commonest objects around them, even the stones
beneath their feet; if I shall have suggested to them the solemn
thought that all these things, and they themselves still more, are
ordered by laws, utterly independent of man's will about them, man's
belief in them; if I shall at all have helped to open their eyes that
they may see, and their ears that they may hear, the great book which
is free to all alike, to peasant as to peer, to men of business as to
men of science, even t