One feels a real and enhanced pleasure in his researches, and his speculations assume a wider and a loftier range, as he casts a glance back to the white shores of Britain, and around upon the aspect of the country before him, and sees that he is still treading the same soil, threading his way among the same rocks, ascending and descending the slopes and valleys of the same earthy accumulations, varied only by slight local causes. Embarked upon the Seine, and along the banks of that lovely river, there is laid open for inspection a series of deposits, with every one of which we are already acquainted. The resemblance is even more striking when we examine the vast undulating plains around, and find the depressions, elevations, hills, and general outline of surface all of a class; and when we observe also the rocky foundations beneath to be one and the same—extensions merely of the same series of deposits, and forming at no very distant geological period integral portions of one great continent. Combined with the subterranean movements which occasioned the dislocations, and inversions often, of the strata on both sides of the channel, the action of oceanic currents and incessant beating of the waves may be looked to as the instruments which produced their severance. The proofs are ample of the encroachments of the sea upon the eastern coast of England, the sites of towns, villages, and extensive fields, as marked on maps, now forming sand-banks, islands, and marshy swamps. The promontories and cliffs of Yorkshire, Norfolk, and Suffolk are still, as they were in Pennant’s time, “perpetually preyed on by the fury of the German sea;” the whole site of ancient Cromer is now under its waves; the towns of Shipden, Wimpwell, and Eccles, have entirely disappeared; large manors and even parishes have, piece after piece, been swallowed up; nor has there been any intermission, from time immemorial, in the inroads of the sea along a line of coast twenty miles in length, in which these places stood.[9] The ravages, from the same cause, have been equally if not more violent on the shores of the channel, the Straits of Dover, and the whole south coast; where slips of enormous magnitude are frequently recorded, cliffs undermined, and lands of considerable extent carried into the sea. The Isle of Wight, the peninsulas of Purbeck and Portland, the promontories of Devonshire and Cornwall, have all received their shape from the destructive agency, as they are still preyed upon and consumed by the tides and currents to which they are incessantly exposed. The French coast bears similar testimony to the inroads of the sea. From Calais to Cherbourg, with its magnificent dock-yard, the line of shore is everywhere indented and stripped bare, the strata undermined, and huge masses toppling over the abyss or rising into lofty pyramids of the most grotesque and varied forms. Britanny lies open, on every side, to the full swell of