Here, surely, our literary censor may claim that no room can be found for the foot of science. What can we pretend to add to the charm of such scenery; or what can we do, if we touch it at all, but lessen that charm? Again, I accept the challenge, though with perhaps somewhat more diffidence; not that I think the contribution from science is here less available or less appropriate, but because I so fully share in the feeling that a scene, in itself and to the ordinary eye so full of everything that can give pleasure, needs no addition from any source. Let me suppose that we are placed upon the extreme western verge of the down, with the Needles in front of us. The chalk that forms these white faces of rock is shown by science to be made up entirely of the mouldered remains of creatures that gathered on the sea-bottom, ages before the species of animals living at the present day came into existence. Sponges, crinoids, corals, shells, fishes, reptiles, mingled their remains with those of the minuter forms of life that accumulated on the floor of that ancient ocean. And now, hardened into stone, the ooze of that sea-bed has been upraised into land. The 'long backs of the bushless downs,' which for many successive centuries have remained as we see them, were originally parts of the sea-bed, and are entirely built up of the vestiges of dead organisms. But this is not all. Look at one of those noble faces of rock which shoot up from the restless breakers, and take note of the parallel lines of dark flints which, as if traced with a pencil, sweep in such graceful curves from base to crest of the cliffs. Alike on buttress and recess, from headland to headland, no matter how irregularly the chalk has been sculptured, these parallel lines may be followed. A feature so conspicuous in the architecture of the precipices could not escape the attention of the most casual visitor, but he only vaguely marvels at it, until geology tells him that these dark lines mark successive floors of that ancient sea--floors that gathered one over another, as generation after generation of marine creatures left their crumbling remains upon the bottom. But now they are bent up and placed on end, like books on the shelves of a library. And thus we learn that not only has this ancient sea-bed been turned into dry land, but its layers of hardened ooze have been tilted up vertically, and that it is the worn ends of these upturned layers which form the long ridges of the downs.