We know that chalk and limestone do not form in the open air. If we find them piled up in enormous hills and mountains high above the level of the sea, and far from its coasts, we know that they did not grow in that position; that once their proud crests and ridges lay low in an ocean bed. They could not have been formed on a sudden, or rapidly, or by any other than the slow steps of infinitesimally small successive accumulations: for we find them filled throughout with the evidences of life, shells and sponges, and corals of exquisite beauty and delicacy, generations after generations of which must have had time to build up their beautiful fabrics. Many things may be hastened; you may quicken the growth of many; but you can’t hurry a sponge. Every foot and inch of a chalk cliff, of a limestone mountain, must have been formed originally under water with almost incredible slowness. It must have been raised up to meet the clouds of heaven since its formation in the ocean-depth. Do you think that this can have been a rapid process? Volcanic cones, it is true, are sometimes piled up by a sudden effort. But with widespread platforms of solid rock the upheaving forces deal more respectfully. An average elevation of a foot or two in a century, is perhaps a high exceptional speed for such movements. But this rate requires a thousand centuries for a hill only one or two thousand feet high, to rise, not from the depths, but from the surface of the water. If we had only a single formation to deal with instead of scores of them; if we had a thickness of only one thousand feet of the earth’s crust to consider, instead of scores of thousands, the proved antiquity of the globe would be enormous. What is to be said, then, when we stand face to face with what geologists have been pleased to call the new red sandstone? This formation cannot be less than millions of years old, although in relation to the Devonian limestone it is indisputably new. Those deep red rocks, that with their fantastic profiles in so many places fringe the southern border of Devon, must have been formed since the limestone; for the simple reason, that in every part they are full of pebbles or fragments of the limestone containing characteristic fossils of the earlier formations. It will at least be granted that you cannot break off a piece from a rock before the rock itself exists. Prior, then, to the very beginning of the formation of these red conglomerates, the limestone rock must have been formed; it must have been heaved up above the level of the sea; fragments must have been broken off from it, rolled into pebbles, triturated into sand. As the breaking, and the rolling, and the grinding went on, so with equal steps would the growth of the conglomerate proceed. But the workshop and the work must still have been beneath the waters of the ocean, and not till the whole work of formation was finished could the further process be begun of raising the work above the level of the waves.