But Egypt and Switzerland are a long way off; geologizing in a railway-cutting has been before now a fatal employment; and digging pits forty feet deep into the mud of the Nile is an operation attended with difficulties peculiar to itself. Here, however, in Torquay, close at hand, we possess a register of time as compact, as accessible, as genuine, as the Library of the British Museum. Limestone, it is well known, is formed beneath the waters of the sea. When it appears above the sea-level, it must have been upheaved from its ocean-bed. How long a period must be allowed for the hill which contains Kent’s cavern to have been formed by this double process, may be left for the present to the imagination. How long a time elapsed before the cavern was burst open or eaten out from the solid limestone, we will not enquire. Thanks to the diligent exploration of it; thanks to the unwearied courtesy of its scientific curators[51], the contents of the cavern, or at least a portion of them, are now well known. Not only do they embrace the remains of animals not now existing in England, but they embrace the remains of animals long since lost to the globe. With these are mingled the products of human intelligence, the weapons of the savage. The cave-earth which, as well as the stalagmite, contains these relics of a most remote antiquity, is itself permeated with films of stalagmite, a conclusive proof of its gradual introduction. Over the lower portions have been formed in succession three solid stalagmitic floors, remnants of which have quite lately been discovered still imbedded in the cavern[52]. Let us for a moment consider what this implies. If we transport ourselves to Matlock Bath in Derbyshire, for the small fee of a penny, any one of its ‘petrifying wells’[53] will be open to our inspection. In these curious grottoes whatever object you please, natural or artificial, be it skull or the cap that once covered it, be it basket or bird, or shell or leaf, may be encrusted with a coating of stalagmite. The inexperienced visitor would like to place an object in the well, and to wait while the ‘petrifying’ waters do their work. He is surprised to find that in that case he must wait and watch for months and years, while the slow persevering stream falls upon his treasure with its ceaseless drip, drip, drip, and that the work so slowly accomplished would not be accomplished at all if the flowing of the stream were hastened. Imagine, then, in this famous cavern of ours what an interminable song, though an intermittent one, must have been sung with this drip, drip, drip, through ages and ages, to produce, as in one place it has done, a solid stalagmitic mass full twelve feet in thickness. Now, according to Usher’s chronology, we have seventeen centuries from Adam to the Flood, and twenty-three centuries from the Flood to the age of Julius Cæsar. If this chronology is to be accepted, Kent’s cavern must have been filled either in the first