Walk beyond the town. You find the shore protected for a long way by a sea-wall, lest it should be eaten away by the waves. What the force of those waves can be, even on that sheltered coast, you may judge--at least you could have judged this time last year--by the masses of masonry torn from their iron clampings during the gale of three winters since. Look steadily at those rolled blocks, those twisted stanchions, if they are there still; and then ask yourselves- -it will be fair reasoning from the known to the unknown--What effect must such wave-power as that have had beating and breaking for thousands of years along the western coasts of England, Scotland, Ireland? It must have eaten up thousands of acres--whole shires, may be, ere now. Its teeth are strong enough, and it knows neither rest nor pity, the cruel hungry sea. Give it but time enough, and what would it not eat up? It would eat up, in the course of ages, all the dry land of this planet, were it not baffled by another counteracting force, of which I shall speak hereafter. As you go on beyond the sea-wall, you find what it is eating up. The whole low cliff is going visibly. But whither is it going? To form new soil in the aestuary. Now you will not wonder how old harbours so often become silted up. The sea has washed the land into them. But more, the sea-currents do not allow the sands of the aestuary to escape freely out to sea. They pile it up in shifting sand-banks about the mouth of the aestuary. The prevailing sea-winds, from whatever quarter, catch up the sand, and roll it up into sand-hills. Those sand-hills are again eaten down by the sea, and mixed with the mud of the tide-flats, and so is formed a mingled soil, partly of clayey mud, partly of sand; such a soil as stretches over the greater part of all our lowlands. Now, why should not that soil, whether in England or in Scotland, have been made by the same means as that of every aestuary. You find over great tracts of East Scotland, Lancashire, Norfolk, etc., pure loose sand just beneath the surface, which looks as if it was blown sand from a beach. Is it not reasonable to suppose that it is? You find rising out of many lowlands, crags which look exactly like old sea-cliffs eaten by the waves, from the base of which the waters have gone back. Why should not those crags be old sea-cliffs? Why should we not, following our rule of explaining the unknown by the known, assume that such they are till someone gives us a sound proof that they are not; and say--These great plains of England and Scotland were probably once covered by a shallow sea, and their soils made as the soil of any tide-flat is being made now? But you may say, and most reasonably "The tide-flats are just at the sea-level. The whole of the lowland is many feet above the sea; it must therefore have been raised out of the sea, according to your theory: and what proofs have you of that?"