Originally, the land alone possesses such materials; but it is the sea which finds them out; and these two facts, put side by side, have sometimes reminded me of the arbitrary allotment of the sexes in the old mythology. _Oceanus_ being an enterprising gentleman. _Terra_ (always feminine) is the quiescent lady, to whom he pays his court. She carries a prodigious number of these treasures in her flinty bosom; but it is only he, and his friends the rivers, who can get at them and draw them forth. In our English Channel, Ocean is as fond of doing this, and of fringing his waterline with a brown pebbly border, as other gentlemen are, now-a-days, of wearing, if possible, a beard like that of the Sophi. Nor is this surprising, when we remember that all creatures naturally desire something which they have not got. For the bottom of the sea itself is no beach at all, but chalk or sand, and sometimes hardened sandstone, with, I dare say, many precipitous pits and hollows, and many pointed crags. Here, gigantic fronds of the oar-weed wave to and fro among thousands of acres of dulse and bladderwrack; while porpoises and dog-fish dive, and limpets and mussels crawl, and arrowy lobsters shoot through the cerulean gloom, and (if Mr. Tennyson may be believed) mermen and mermaids play at hide-and-seek. Wonderful things there must be, if we could only spy them out; but I do not think many pebbles. Whereas, our mother Earth teems with these latter. There are jaspers in the conglomerate, and agates in the mountain rocks, and veins of porphyry and serpentine in the trap and basalt, and garnets and sapphires in the granite, and flint-nodules in the chalk, and quartz-crystals almost everywhere. Probably these exist, also, in many of the submarine strata; but unless a volcanic eruption should occur, there is no force in operation there to dislodge them. The bed of the ocean, and all depths of it below a hundred feet perpendicular,[2] as _divers_ well know, remain calm and still, even when a tempest is raging above. But on what we are pleased to call “terra firma,” the case is reversed. Solid as the ground appears, all is subject to elemental change and motion; and whenever the waves of the sea or the strong current of a river can plough some crumbling chine, or wear away the face of a cliff, down come the imbedded pebbles and crystals, and gradually form a _beach_ upon the margin of the ocean. And this beach is tossed up and down, and rolled to and fro, until most of the stones composing it have become as smooth as hazel-nuts. The above may be rather a rough sketch of the source of a beach; but I believe it is correct in its leading features. In a subsequent chapter we may better note certain peculiarities which are more than meet the eye. But what are the pebbles themselves?