It was found that the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, after you
have left the land a few hundred miles, is one vast plain of mud, of
some thirteen hundred miles in breadth. But here is the wonder; it
was found that at a depth, averaging 1,600 fathoms--9,600 feet--in
utter darkness, the sea floor is covered with countless millions of
animalcule-shells, of the same families, though not of the same
species, as those which compose the chalk.
At the bottom of a still ocean, then, the chalk was deposited. But
it took many an age to raise it to where Odiham chalk-pit now
stands.
But how was it raised?
By the upheaving force of earthquakes. Or rather, by the upheaving
force which causes earthquakes, when it acts in a single shock,
cracking the earth's crust by an explosion; but which acts, too,
slowly and quietly, uplifting day by day, and year by year, some
portions of the earth's surface, and letting others sink down; as in
the case of the valley of the Jordan and the Dead Sea, which is now
1,300 feet below the level of the Mediterranean.
That these upheaving forces were much more violent than now, in the
earlier epochs of our planet, we have some reason to believe: but
the subject is too long a one to enter on now; and all I can say is,
that you must conceive for yourself the chalk gradually brought up
to the surface, worn away along a shifting shoreline by the waves of
the sea, and covered in shallow water by the clays and sands on
which Odiham stands; and which compose the earliest part of our
second world.
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