If you wish to learn the first elements of geology by direct experiment, do this: The next rainy day--the harder it rains the better--instead of sitting at home over the fire, and reading a book about geology, put on a macintosh and thick boots, and get away, I care not whither, provided you can find there running water. If you have not time to get away to a hilly country, then go to the nearest bit of turnpike road, or the nearest sloping field, and see in little how whole continents are made, and unmade again. Watch the rain raking and sifting with its million delicate fingers, separating the finer particles from the coarser, dropping the latter as soon as it can, and carrying the former downward with it toward the sea. Follow the nearest roadside drain where it runs into a pond, and see how it drops the pebbles the moment it enters the pond, and then the sand in a fan-shaped heap at the nearest end; but carries the fine mud on, and holds it suspended, to be gradually deposited at the bottom in the still water; and say to yourself: Perhaps the sands which cover so many inland tracts were dropped by water, very near the shore of a lake or sea, and by rapid currents. Perhaps, again, the brick clays, which are often mingled with these sands, were dropped, like the mud in the pond, in deeper water farther from the shore, and certainly in stilt water. But more. Suppose once more, then, that looking and watching a pond being cleared out, under the lowest layer of mud, you found--as you would find in any of those magnificent reservoirs so common in the Lancashire hills--a layer of vegetable soil, with grass and brushwood rooted in it. What would you say but: The pond has not been always full. It has at some time or other been dry enough to let a whole copse grow up inside it? And if you found--as you will actually find along some English shores--under the sand hills, perhaps a bed of earth with shells and bones; under that a bed of peat; under that one of blue silt; under that a buried forest, with the trees upright and rooted; under that another layer of blue silt full of roots and vegetable fibre; perhaps under that again another old land surface with trees again growing in it; and under all the main bottom clay of the district--what would common sense tell you? I leave you to discover for yourselves. It certainly would not tell you that those trees were thrust in there by a violent convulsion, or that all those layers were deposited there in a few days, or even a few years; and you might safely indulge in speculations about the antiquity of the aestuary, and the changes which it has undergone, with which I will not frighten you at present. It will be fair reasoning to argue thus. You may not be always right in your conclusion, but still you will be trying fairly to explain the unknown by the known. But have Rain and Rivers alone made the soil?