Page:First impressions of England and its people.djvu/68

 worth, sweep on to the Bristol Channel in the diagonal line of the English formations. These level plains represent the yielding, semi-coherent New Red Sandstone of England. The denuding agents have worn it down in the way we find the soft shale-beds worn down on the sea-shore. On the west we see it flanked by the Old Red Sandstone and Silurian systems of Wales and western England,—formations solid enough to form a hilly country; and on the east, by a long hilly line, that, with little interruption, traverses the island diagonally from Whitby on the Yorkshire coast, to Lyme Regis on the English Channel. This elevated line traverses longitudinally the Oolitic formation, and owes its existence to those coralline reefs and firm calcareous sandstones of the system that are so extensively used by the architect. Another series of hilly ridges, somewhat more complicated in their windings, represent the Upper and Lower Chalk; while the softer Weald, Gault, Greensand, and Tertiary deposits, we find existing as level plains or wide shallow valleys. In most of our geologic maps the hill-ranges are not indicated; but in a country such as England, where these are so palpably a joint result of the geologic formations and the denuding agencies, the omission is surely a defect.

Manchester I found as true a representative of the great manufacturing town of modern England, as York of the old English ecclesiastical city. One receives one's first intimation of its existence from the lurid gloom of the atmosphere that overhangs it. There is a murky blot in one section of the sky, however clear the weather, which broadens and heightens as we approach, until at length it seems spread over half the firmament. And now the innumerable chimneys come in view, tall and dim in the dun haze, each bearing atop its own troubled pennon of darkness. And now we enter the suburbs, and pass