at limestone full of shells and corals, dead, but
many of them quite perfect, some of the corals plainly in the very
place in which they grew, would you not say--These creatures must
have lived down here before the coal was laid on top of them? And
if, lastly, below the limestone you came to a bottom rock quite
different again, would you not say--The bottom rock must have been
here before the rocks on the top of it?

And if that bottom rock rose up a few miles off, two thousand feet,
or any other height, into hills, what would you say then? Would you
say: "Oh, but the rock is not bottom rock; is not under the
limestone here, but higher than it. So perhaps in this part it has
made a shift, and the highlands are younger than the lowlands; for
see, they rise so much higher?" Would not that be as wise as to say
that the bottom of the pond was not there before the pond mud,
because the banks round the pond rose higher than the mud?

Now for the soil of the field.

If we can understand a little about it, what it is made of, and how
it got there, we shall perhaps be on the right road toward
understanding what all England--and, indeed, the crust of this whole
planet--is made of; and how its rocks and soils got there.

But we shall best understand how the soil in the field was made, by
reasoning, as I have said, from the known to the unknown. What do I
mean? This: On the uplands are fields in which the soil is already
made. You do not know how? Then look for a field in which the soil
is still being made. There are plenty in every lowland. Learn how
it is being made there; apply the knowledge which you learn from them
to the upland fields which are already made.

If there is, as there usually is, a river-meadow, or still better, an
aestuary, near your town, you have every advantage for seeing soil
made. Thousands of square feet of fresh-made soil spread between
your town and the sea; thousands more are in process of being made.

You will see now why I have begun with the soil in the field; because
it is the uppermost, and therefore latest, of all the layers; and
also for this reason, that, if Sir Charles Lyell's theory be true--as
it is--then the soils and rocks below the soil of the field may have
been made in the very same way in which the soil of the field is
made. If so, it is well worth our while to examine it.

You all know from whence the soil comes which has filled up, in