Let us come up to the pit upon the top of the hill, and look carefully at what we see there.  The lower part of the pit of course is a solid rock of sand.  On the top of that is a cap of gravel, five, six, ten feet thick.  Now the sand was laid down there by water at the bottom of an old sea; and therefore the top of it would naturally be flat and smooth, as the sands at Hunstanton or at Bournemouth are; and the gravel, if it was laid down by water, would naturally lie flat on it again:  but it does not.  See how the top of the sand is dug out into deep waves and pits, filled up with gravel.  And see, too, how over some of the gravel you get sand again, and then gravel again, and then sand again, till you cannot tell where one fairly begins and the other ends.  Why, here are little dots of gravel, six or eight feet down, in what looks the solid sand rock, yet the sand must have been opened somehow to put the gravel in.

You say you have seen that before.  You have seen the same curious twisting of the gravel and sand into each other on the top of Farley Hill, and in the new cutting on Minley Hill; and, best of all, in the railway cutting between Ascot and Sunningdale, where upon the top the white sand and gravel is arranged in red and brown waves, and festoons, and curlicues, almost like Prince of Wales’s feathers.  Yes, that last is a beautiful section of ice-work; so beautiful, that I hope to have it photographed some day.

Now, how did ice do this?

Well, I was many a year before I found out that, and I dare say I never should have found it out for myself.  A gentleman named Trimmer, who, alas! is now dead, was, I believe, the first to find it out.  He knew that along the coast of Labrador, and other cold parts of North America, and on the shores, too, of the great river St. Lawrence, the stranded icebergs, and the ice-foot, as it is called, which is continually forming along the freezing shores, grub and plough every tide into the mud and sand, and shove up before them, like a ploughshare, heaps of dirt; and that, too, the ice itself is full of dirt, of sand and stones, which it may have brought from hundreds of miles away; and that, as this ploughshare of dirty ice grubs onward, the nose of the plough is continually being broken off, and left underneath the mud; and that, when summer comes, and the ice melts, the mud falls back into the place where the ice had been, and covers up the gravel which was in the ice.  So, what between the grubbing of the ice-plough into the mud, and the dirt which it leaves behind when it melts, the stones, and sand, and mud upon the shore are jumbled up into curious curved and twisted layers, exactly like those which Mr. Trimmer saw in certain gravel-pits.  And when I first read about that, I said, “And exactly like what I have been seeing in every gravel-pit round here, and trying to guess how they could have been made by currents of water, and yet never could make