The chalk, then, is certainly older than the boulder clay.  If you ask how much, I will again take you no further than the same spot upon your own coasts for evidence.  I have spoken of the boulder clay and drift as resting upon the chalk.  That is not strictly true.  Interposed between the chalk and the drift is a comparatively insignificant layer, containing vegetable matter.  But that layer tells a wonderful history.  It is full of stumps of trees standing as they grew.  Fir-trees are there with their cones, and hazel-bushes with their nuts; there stand the stools of oak and yew trees, beeches and alders.  Hence this stratum is appropriately called the “forest-bed.”

It is obvious that the chalk must have been upheaved and converted into dry land, before the timber trees could grow upon it.  As the bolls of some of these trees are from two to three feet in diameter, it is no less clear that the dry land thus formed remained in the same condition for long ages.  And not only do the remains of stately oaks and well-grown firs testify to the duration of this condition of things, but additional evidence to the same effect is afforded by the abundant remains of elephants, rhinoceroses, hippopotamuses, and other great wild beasts, which it has yielded to the zealous search of such men as the Rev. Mr. Gunn.

When you look at such a collection as he has formed, and bethink you that these elephantine bones did veritably carry their owners about, and these great grinders crunch, in the dark woods of which the forest-bed is now the only trace, it is impossible not to feel that they are as good evidence of the lapse of time as the annual rings of the tree-stumps.

Thus there is a writing upon the wall of cliffs at Cromer, and whoso runs may read it.  It tells us, with an authority which cannot be impeached, that the ancient sea-bed of the chalk sea was raised up, and remained dry land, until it was covered with forest, stocked with the great game whose spoils have rejoiced your geologists.  How long it remained in that condition cannot be said; but “the whirligig of time brought its revenges” in those days as in these.  That dry land, with the bones and teeth of generations of long-lived elephants, hidden away among the gnarled roots and dry leaves of its ancient trees, sank gradually to the bottom of the icy sea, which covered it with huge masses of drift and boulder clay.  Sea-beasts, such as the walrus, now restricted to the extreme north, paddled about where birds had twittered among the topmost twigs of the fir-trees.  How long this state of things endured we know not, but at length it came to an end.  The upheaved glacial mud hardened into the soil of modern Norfolk.  Forests grew once more, the wolf and the beaver replaced the reindeer and the elephant; and at length what we call the history of England dawned.

Thus you have, within the limits of your own county, proof that the chalk can justly claim a very much greater antiquity than even the oldest physical traces of mankind.  But we may go further and demonstrate, by evidence of the same authority as that which testifies to the existence of the father of men, that the chalk is vastly older than Adam himself.