Page:The New Forest - its history and its scenery.djvu/253

Rh country. "One green field is like another green field," cried Johnson. Nothing can be so untrue. No two fields are ever the same. A brook flowing through the one, a narrow strip of chalk intersecting the other, will make them as different as Perthshire from Essex. Even Socrates could say in the Phædrus, τὰ μὲν οὖν χωρἰα καὶ τὰ δένδρα οὐδέν μ᾽ ἐθέλει διδάσκειν· and this arose from the state, or rather absence, of all Natural Science at Athens. Had that been different he would have spoken otherwise.

The world is another place to the man who knows, and to the man who is ignorant of Natural History. To the one the earth is full of a thousand significations, to the other meaningless.

First of all, then, for a few words on the geology of the Forest; for upon this everything depends—not only the scenery, but its Flora and Fauna, the growth of its trees and the course of its streams. Throughout it is composed of the Middle-Eocene, the Osborne and Headon Beds capping the central portion, with their fluvio-marine formation. The Upper Bagshot develops itself below them, and is succeeded by the Barton Clays, so well exposed on the coast, and finally by the Bracklesham Beds, which crop out in the valley of Canterton, trending in a south-easterly direction to Dibden.

Here, then, where the New Forest stands, in the Eocene period, rolled an inland sea, whose waves lashed the Wiltshire chalk hills on the north, moulding, with every stroke of their breakers, its chalk flints into pebbles, dashing them against its cliffs, as the waves do at this very hour those very same pebbles along the Hurst beach. Its south-western boundary-line between Ballard Head and the Needles was rent asunder by volcanic action, and the chalk-flints flung up vertically mark to this day the violence of the disruption. 234