his hay, more is dropped down upon his nose,
or those corn-hoppers, by which pet poultry
are supplied with an inexhaustible feast of
grain; never too much at a time, but always
enough to go to work upon. Every tide eats
its meal from the cliff; and when it happens
that no new course of earthy dishes is tasted,
they are only reserved for a future treat; the
glutton's appetite is appeased for the time
with the remains of yesterday's, or last week's
banquet. And meanwhile, the function of
oceanic digestion is for ever going on,
unwearied and uncloyed.

The matters destined to be disposed of by
this stomach of thousand boa-constrictor
power, are, sands and earths, mixed with
stones or boulders of various size and constitution.
Now, the tidal stream, on the coast
of East Anglia, runs for six hours in a
northerly or north-westerly direction, from
the mouldering cliffs of Trimingham and
Mundesley towards the Lynn estuary, while
it is ebbing (see map); and for six hours in
a southerly or south-easterly course, from the
same cliffs towards Great Yarmouth, while it
is flowing. The rate of the current is various;
but call it three miles an hour. This gives
the possibility that a particle of matter should
be carried eighteen miles away from its
original resting-place in a single tide. But
the substances which are easiest removed are
not those which travel furthest at one journey.
Sand, for instance, is immediately swept
away; while the finer atoms of clay and
chalk, harder to melt from their parent block,
remain longer on hand, and are kept more
tantalizingly in suspense, before they are
deposited; while the great lumps of rock drop
down in company together, in the first
instance, rather by having their soft bedding
stolen from under them, than from any great
amount of transportation which they suffer.
The silt, and mud, and fine particles of
clay, are carried up the estuaries and left
there by the waters, during their temporary
state of stagnation at the turn of the
tide, till they eventually rise to the surface.
The sands are not borne so far inland, but
form shoals on the coast, and bars at the
mouths of harbours. Between the shoals
and sand-banks at sea, the ocean stream runs
like a mighty river, returning in its bed every
six hours; and if ever, as some surmise
possible, the Dogger Bank shall appear above the
sea, tidal rivers of salt water will be the
streams that flow amidst its sands. But the
sands and the mud find each their suitable
place to settle in. To save the cliffs of
England, therefore, from further degradation,—
to prevent the area of Great Britain from
daily diminution, is, at the same time, to cut
off one of the supplies of materials by which
our havens' mouths are being choked and
silted up.

The whole result is, that the heterogeneous
materials of the cliff get sorted, according to
their kind, like convict prisoners that have
fallen into trouble. The German Ocean
shuffles his cards most resolutely, but he
manages to get the different suits together
before the end of the game. And thus we
have at certain points, such as Weybourn,
Sheringham, and Southwold, those terraces
of pebbles that are raised upon the beach as
regularly as if they had been piled there by
the hands of men. But their state is not final:
at first they were rough and irregular; flints
from the chalk, granite boulders from the
rock; now they are smooth and rounded.
For though the sea behaves to them in various
style, sometimes only playing with them in
gentle mood, scarcely making them send forth
a pleasant rattle, and sometimes threshing
them with the flail of his angry billows,
causing them to spring, and clash, and shiver
into pieces: he never leaves them quite in
repose. Constant worry and want of rest are
sure to tell in time; he grinds and frets their
very hearts out; and the filings, the
sawdust, the raspings of his lapidary work, are
SAND; which thenceforth, as we have seen,
has its own proper course and destiny to
follow.

Sand, therefore, is rock and other hard
substances reduced into powder of various
degrees of coarseness. And there was, therefore,
no sand in chaos. While the earth was
still without form and void, materials of
which sand is composed had not assumed
their present peculiar character. For sand is
a highly manufactured article, and requires
time for its production. A bran-new planet
can no more have sands (unless ready-made)
spread over it, than a new park can be
adorned with symmetrical avenues of old
stag-headed oak trees. Allowing, then, for
the small proportion of sand which the winds,
the rains, and the rivers have ground out for
us, what an old-established concern the ocean-
wave mill must be, to have pounded thus
finely for us the immense quantity of sand
which we have in the world!

A small portion, then, of the sands of our
beach may be the result of last week's stormy
springtide; but they are not, like our coffee
for breakfast, all fresh ground for the occasion.
A much larger contribution may have
been conveyed from the crag at Bramerton,
or the cliff at Bacton, after having been
treasured in those storehouses for thousands
and thousands of years. Every handful of
sand on earth must have undergone this
process. Sometimes a natural cement reunites
these pounded morsels, and they become
arenacious rock, or sandstone. Old materials
are thus used up again, and are once more
serviceable in the world's masonry. Shell-
sand is now and then hardened into marble;
when the pearly lustre of the fragments is
retained, the specimens are quite gemlike.
Our beach happens, at this moment, to be
impressed by the ripple-mark of the waves, by
the indentation of the rain-drops which fell
in the last shower, and by the footsteps of