We have read the story written in the rocks of the Isle of Wight. What wonderful changes we have seen in the course of the long history! First we were taken back to the ancient Wealden river, and saw in imagination the great continent through which it flowed, and the strange creatures that lived in the old land. We saw the delta sink beneath the sea, and a great thickness of shallow water deposits laid down, enclosing remains of ammonites and other beautiful forms of life. Then long ages passed away, while in the waters of a deeper sea the great thickness of the chalk was built up, mainly by the accumulation of microscopic shells. In time the sea bed rose, and new land appeared, and another river bore down fruits to be buried with sea shells and remains of turtles and crocodiles in the mud deposited near its mouth to form the London clay. We followed the alternations of sea and land, and the changing life of Eocene and Oligocene times. We have heard of the early mammalia found in the quarries of Quarr, and have learnt from the leaf beds of Alum Bay that at that time the climate of this part of the world was tropical. Indeed, I think everything goes to prove that through the whole of the times we have been studying,--except perhaps the earliest Eocene, that of the Reading beds,--the climate was considerably warmer than it is at the present day. After all these changes do you not want to know what happened next? Well, at this point we come to a gap in the records of the rocks, not only in the Isle of Wight, but also in the British Isles. The British Isles, or even England and Wales alone, are almost, if not quite unique in the world in that, in their small extent, they contain specimens of nearly every formation from the most ancient times to the present day. In other parts of the world we may find regions many times this area, where we can only study the rocks of some one period. But just at this point in the story comes a period,--a very important one, too,--the Miocene--of which we have no remains in our Islands. We must hear a little of what happened before we come back to the Isle of Wight again in comparatively recent times.