In the late survey of the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, with a view to laying down the electric telegraph between England and America, by Lieutenant Maury of the American navy, a great discovery was made.  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.

A second world; a new world.  We can use no weaker expression.  When we compare the chalk with the strata which lie upon it, we can only call them a complete new creation.

For not only were they deposited in shallow water; a great deal of them, probably, near river-mouths, and by the force of violent currents, as the irregularity of their lower bed proves:  but there is hardly a plant or animal found in the chalk itself, which is found in the gravels, sands, or clays above it.  The shells are all new species; unseen before in this planet.  The vegetables, as far as we know them, are all different from anything found in the chalk, or in the beds below it.  God Almighty, for His own good pleasure, has made all things new.  It is a very awful fact; but it is a very certain one.  Several times, in the history of our planet, has the Lord God fulfilled the words of the Psalmist: 

“Thou takest away their breath, they die, and return again to their dust.

“Thou sendest forth thy breath, they are made:  and thou renewest the face of the earth.”

But in no instance, perhaps, is the gulf so vast; is the leap from one world to another so sheer, as that between the chalk and the London clay above it.