We will suppose that we have arrived at Hunstanton, and are walking towards the shore in front of the Le Strange Arms. A very few minutes will convey us to the wonderful cliff. I say wonderful, not from its height or length; for at its greatest height, under the lighthouse, it is not more than sixty feet; and it extends little more than a mile in length; but wonderful from its curious colour and general effect. [Illustration: Lign. 2.--Hunstanton Cliff (looking to the North)] The woodcut, copied from a water-colour drawing, made last autumn by a friend, will afford an idea of its appearance; but in it the absence of colour, of course, takes away from the beauty of the scene. The cliff itself may be divided into five portions: first, White Chalk, forty feet thick; secondly, bright Red Chalk, four feet; thirdly, a yellow sandy mass, ten feet; fourthly, a dark brown pebbly stratum, forty feet; and, lastly, twenty feet of a bed almost black. These divisions do not run one into the other, as is the case in most geological strata, but keep quite distinct. Thus the Red Chalk is as clearly separated from the White, as though the one had been covered by a broad band of paint. The same observation will hold good with respect to the others. It will readily be understood that when the sun shines upon the cliff, and lights up the bright white, the bright red, the pale yellow, and the dark brown and black, and casts a shadow over the mass of gaily tinted materials at the base, a picture is produced not easy to be surpassed in beauty, and certainly not to be fully appreciated unless it be actually seen. The bed of White Chalk above the Red is, at Hunstanton, very fossiliferous; though rendered somewhat useless, like that of Yorkshire, to the geologist, from its extreme hardness. Amongst other shells, may be mentioned several kinds of serpulæ, belemnites, and ammonites. These last are occasionally very large: when I was at Hunstanton, in the autumn, I found an example two feet in diameter; with great difficulty I extricated it from its matrix, breaking it in half during the operation; and, finally, had the mortification of discovering that its weight was so great I could not carry it away. The Red Chalk beneath, which is nearly four feet in thickness, is very full of fossils: belemnites, serpulæ, terebratulæ, corals, and many others, not to mention bones. The number of specimens on the table will testify to its richness in organic remains. Sometimes it is soft and crumbling; but, generally speaking, it is very hard, gritty, of a bright red shade, and full of small dark-coloured siliceous pebbles; in this respect differing considerably from the Red Chalk of Speeton--in which I have not seen pebbles. Professor Tennant, who has examined the Hunstanton pebbles, informs me that they consist of _chalcedony_, _quartz_, _flint_, _slate_, and _brown spar_ or _carbonate of iron_.