underlying causes have coloured the
entire local history of every district to an extent which few people
adequately recognise, and that until such recognition becomes more
general, our views of history must necessarily be very narrow. We must
see not only that something depends upon geographical configuration,
not even merely that a great deal depends upon it, but that everything
depends upon it. We must unlearn our purely human history, and learn a
history of interaction between nature and man instead.

From the great central boss of the chalk system in Salisbury Plain, two
long cretaceous horns or projections run out to eastward towards the
Channel and the German Sea. These two horns, separated by the deep
valley of the Weald, are known as the North and South Downs
respectively. The first great spur or ridge passes through the heart of
Surrey, and then forms the backbone of Kent, expanding into a fan at
its eastward extremity, where it topples over abruptly into the sea in
the sheer bluffs which sweep round in a huge arc from the North
Foreland in the Isle of Thanet, to Shakespeare's Cliff at Dover. The
second or southernmost range, that of the South Downs, parts company
from the main boss in Hampshire, and runs eastward in a narrower but
bolder line, till the Channel cuts short its progress in the water-worn
precipice of Beachy Head. Between these two ranges of Downs lies the
low forest region of the Weald, and between the South Downs and the sea
stretches a long but very narrow strip of lowland, beginning at
Chichester, and ending where the chalk cliffs first meet the shore
beside the new Aquarium and Chain Pier at Brighton. Thus the whole of
Sussex consists of three well-marked parallel belts: the low coast-line
on the south-west, the high chalk Downs in the centre, and the Weald
district on the north and north-west. As these three belts determine
the whole history and very existence of Sussex as an English shire, I
shall make no apology for treating their origin here in some rapid
detail.

The oldest geological formation with which we have to deal in Sussex
(to any considerable extent) is the Wealden: so that our inquiry need
not go any farther back in the history of the world than the later
secondary ages. Before that time, and for long aeons afterward, the
portion of the earth's crust which now forms Sussex had probably never
emerged from the ocean. Britain was then wholly represented by the
primary regions of