Madam How and Lady Why
C >> Charles Kingsley >> Madam How and Lady Why
What?
Why, there to the left.
There are high hills there now, as well as to the right. What are they?
Chalk hills too. The chalk is on both sides of us now. These are the
Chilterns, all away to Ipsden and Nettlebed, and so on across Oxfordshire
and Buckinghamshire, and into Hertfordshire; and on again to Royston and
Cambridge, while below them lies the Vale of Aylesbury; you can just see
the beginning of it on their left. A pleasant land are those hills, and
wealthy; full of noble houses buried in the deep beech-woods, which once
were a great forest, stretching in a ring round the north of London, full
of deer and boar, and of wild bulls too, even as late as the twelfth
century, according to the old legend of Thomas a Becket's father and the
fair Saracen, which you have often heard.
I know. But how are you going to get through the chalk hills? Is there
a tunnel as there is at Box and at Micheldever?
No. Something much prettier than a tunnel and something which took a
great many years longer in making. We shall soon meet with a very
remarkable and famous old gentleman, who is a great adept at digging, and
at landscape gardening likewise; and he has dug out a path for himself
through the chalk, which we shall take the liberty of using also. And
his name, if you wish to know it, is Father Thames.
I see him. What a great river!
Yes. Here he comes, gleaming and winding down from Oxford, over the
lowlands, past Wallingford; but where he is going to it is not so easy to
see.
Ah, here is chalk in the cutting at last. And what a high bridge. And
the river far under our feet. Why we are crossing him again!
Yes; he winds more sharply than a railroad can. But is not this prettier
than a tunnel?
Oh, what hanging-woods, and churches; and such great houses, and pretty
cottages and gardens--all in this narrow crack of a valley!
Ay. Old Father Thames is a good landscape gardener, as I said. There is
Basildon--and Hurley--and Pangbourne, with its roaring lasher. Father
Thames has had to work hard for many an age before he could cut this
trench right through the chalk, and drain the water out of the flat vale
behind us. But I suspect the sea helped him somewhat, or perhaps a great
deal, just where we are now.
The sea?
Yes. The sea was once--and that not so very long ago--right up here,
beyond Reading. This is the uppermost end of the great Thames valley,
which must have been an estuary--a tide flat, like the mouth of the
Severn, with the sea eating along at the foot of all the hills. And if
the land sunk only some fifty feet,--which is a very little indeed,
child, in this huge, ever-changing world,--then the tide would come up to
Reading again, and the greater part of London and the county of Middlesex
be drowned in salt water.
How dreadful that would be!
Dreadful indeed. God grant that it may never happen. More terrible
changes of land and water have happened, and are happening still in the
world: but none, I think, could happen which would destroy so much
civilisation and be such a loss to mankind, as that the Thames valley
should become again what it was, geologically speaking, only the other
day, when these gravel banks, over which we are running to Reading, were
being washed out of the chalk cliffs up above at every tide, and rolled
on a beach, as you have seen them rolling still at Ramsgate.
Now here we are at Reading. There is the carriage waiting, and away we
are off home; and when we get home, and have seen everybody and
everything, we will look over our section once more.
But remember, that when you ran through the chalk hills to Reading, you
passed from the bottom of the chalk to the top of it, on to the Thames
gravels, which lie there on the chalk, and on to the London clay, which
lies on the chalk also, with the Thames gravels always over it. So that,
you see, the newest layers, the London clay and the gravels, are lower in
height than the limestone cliffs at Bristol, and much lower than the old
mountain ranges of Devonshire and Wales, though in geological order they
are far higher; and there are whole worlds of strata, rocks and clays,
one on the other, between the Thames gravels and the Devonshire hills.
But how about our moors? They are newer still, you said, than the London
clay, because they lie upon it: and yet they are much higher than we are
here at Reading.
Very well said: so they are, two or three hundred feet higher. But our
part of them was left behind, standing up in banks, while the valley of
the Thames was being cut out by the sea. Once they spread all over where
we stand now, and away behind us beyond Newbury in Berkshire, and away in
front of us, all over where London now stands.
How can you tell that?
Because there are little caps--little patches--of them left on the tops
of many hills to the north of London; just remnants which the sea, and
the Thames, and the rain have not eaten down. Probably they once
stretched right out to sea, sloping slowly under the waves, where the
mouth of the Thames is now. You know the sand-cliffs at Bournemouth?
Of course.
Then those are of the same age as the Bagshot sands, and lie on the
London clay, and slope down off the New Forest into the sea, which eats
them up, as you know, year by year and day by day. And here were once
perhaps cliffs just like them, where London Bridge now stands.
* * * * *
There, we are rumbling away home at last, over the dear old
heather-moors. How far we have travelled--in our fancy at least--since
we began to talk about all these things, upon the foggy November day, and
first saw Madam How digging at the sand-banks with her water-spade. How
many countries we have talked of; and what wonderful questions we have
got answered, which all grew out of the first question, How were the
heather-moors made? And yet we have not talked about a hundredth part of
the things about which these very heather-moors ought to set us thinking.
But so it is, child. Those who wish honestly to learn the laws of Madam
How, which we call Nature, by looking honestly at what she does, which we
call Fact, have only to begin by looking at the very smallest thing,
pin's head or pebble, at their feet, and it may lead them--whither, they
cannot tell. To answer any one question, you find you must answer
another; and to answer that you must answer a third, and then a fourth;
and so on for ever and ever.
For ever and ever?
Of course. If we thought and searched over the Universe--ay, I believe,
only over this one little planet called earth--for millions on millions
of years, we should not get to the end of our searching. The more we
learnt, the more we should find there was left to learn. All things, we
should find, are constituted according to a Divine and Wonderful Order,
which links each thing to every other thing; so that we cannot fully
comprehend any one thing without comprehending all things: and who can do
that, save He who made all things? Therefore our true wisdom is never to
fancy that we do comprehend: never to make systems and theories of the
Universe (as they are called) as if we had stood by and looked on when
time and space began to be; but to remember that those who say they
understand, show, simply by so saying, that they understand nothing at
all; that those who say they see, are sure to be blind; while those who
confess that they are blind, are sure some day to see. All we can do is,
to keep up the childlike heart, humble and teachable, though we grew as
wise as Newton or as Humboldt; and to follow, as good Socrates bids us,
Reason whithersoever it leads us, sure that it will never lead us wrong,
unless we have darkened it by hasty and conceited fancies of our own, and
so have become like those foolish men of old, of whom it was said that
the very light within them was darkness. But if we love and reverence
and trust Fact and Nature, which are the will, not merely of Madam How,
or even of Lady Why, but of Almighty God Himself, then we shall be really
loving, and reverencing, and trusting God; and we shall have our reward
by discovering continually fresh wonders and fresh benefits to man; and
find it as true of science, as it is of this life and of the life to
come--that eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor hath it entered into the
heart of man to conceive, what God has prepared for those who love Him.
FOOTNOTES
{1} I could not resist the temptation of quoting this splendid
generalisation from Dr. Carpenter's Preliminary Report of the Dredging
Operations of H.M.S. "Lightening," 1868. He attributes it, generously,
to his colleague, Dr. Wyville Thomson. Be it whose it may, it will mark
(as will probably the whole Report when completed) a new era in
Bio-Geology.