“When you look at such a collection as he has formed, and bethink you that these elephantine bones did veritably carry their owners about, and these great grinders crunch in the dark woods of which the Forest-bed is now the only trace, it is impossible not to feel that they are as good evidence of the lapse of time as the annual rings of the tree-stumps. “Thus there is a writing upon the wall of cliffs at Cromer, and whoso runs may read it. It tells us with an authority which cannot be impeached, that the ancient bed of the Chalk sea was raised up and remained dry land until it was covered with forest, stocked with the great game whose spoils have rejoiced your Geologists. How long it remained in that condition cannot be said; but the ‘whirligig of time brought its revenges’ in those days as in these. That dry land, with the bones and teeth of generations of long-lived elephants hidden away among the gnarled roots and dry leaves of its ancient trees, sank gradually to the bottom of the icy sea, which covered it with huge masses of Drift and Boulder Clay. Sea-beasts, such as the walrus, now restricted to the extreme north, paddled about where birds had twittered among the topmost twigs of the fir-trees. How long this state of things endured we know not, but at length it came to an end. The upheaved glacial mud hardened into the soil of modern Norfolk. Forests grew once more, the wolf and the beaver replaced the reindeer and the elephant; and at length what we called the history of England, dawned. “Thus evidence which cannot be rebutted, and which need not be strengthened, though, if time permitted, I might indefinitely increase its quantity, compels you to believe that the Earth from the time of the Chalk to the present day, has been the theatre of a series of changes as vast in their amount as they were slow in their progress. The area on which we stand has been first sea and then land for at least four alternations, and has remained in each of these conditions for a period of great length. “Nor have these wonderful metamorphoses of the sea into land, and of land into sea, been confined to one corner of England. During the Chalk Period not one of the present great physical features of the Globe was in existence. Our great mountain ranges, Pyrenees, Alps, Himalayas, Andes, have all been upheaved since the Chalk was deposited, and the Cretaceous sea flowed over the sites of Sinai and Ararat.