nomenclature plagued them. Why Devonian, Cambrian, Jurassic--as
if the portions of the earth designated by these names were not in other
places as well as in Devonshire, near Cambridge, and in the Jura? It was
impossible to know where you are there. That which is a system for one
is for another a stratum, for a third a mere layer. The plates of the
layers get intermingled and entangled in one another; but Omalius
d'Halloy warns you not to believe in geological divisions.

This statement was a relief to them; and when they had seen coral
limestones in the plain of Caen, phillades at Balleroy, kaolin at St.
Blaise, and oolite everywhere, and searched for coal at Cartigny and for
mercury at Chapelle-en-Juger, near St. Lo, they decided on a longer
excursion: a journey to Havre, to study the fire-resisting quartz and
the clay of Kimmeridge.

As soon as they had stepped out of the packet-boat they asked what road
led under the lighthouses.

Landslips blocked up the way; it was dangerous to venture along it.

A man who let out vehicles accosted them, and offered them drives around
the neighbourhood--Ingouville, Octeville, Fecamp, Lillebonne, "Rome, if
it was necessary."

His charges were preposterous, but the name of Falaise had struck them.
By turning off the main road a little, they could see Etretat, and they
took the coach that started from Fecamp to go to the farthest point
first.

In the vehicle Bouvard and Pecuchet had a conversation with three
peasants, two old women, and a seminarist, and did not hesitate to style
themselves engineers.

They stopped in front of the bay. They gained the cliff, and five
minutes after, rubbed up against it to avoid a big pool of water which
was advancing like a gulf stream in the middle of the sea-shore. Then
they saw an archway which opened above a deep grotto; it was sonorous
and very bright, like a church, with descending columns and a carpet of
sea-wrack all along its stone flooring.

This work of nature astonished them, and as they went on their way
collecting shells, they started considerations as to the origin of the
world.

Bouvard inclined towards Neptunism; Pecuchet, on the contrary, was a
Plutonist.

"The central fire had broken the crust of the globe, heaved up the
masses of earth, and made fissures. It is, as it were, an interior sea,
which has its flow and ebb, its tempests; a thin film separates us from
it. We could not sleep if we thought of all that is unde