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the real scooping force of the torrent, for torrents only really excavate when swollen by rain. torrent swollen by rain to perhaps twenty times the volume of its usual spring water, and hurling fragments of rocks along of all sizes, is, in point of excavating and destructive power, as much more formidable than its usual self as a shotted gun is more formidable than an unshotted gun. We never see the clear torrent set its rocky ammunition in movement, though the shape of this ammunition tells us how often, and for what distances, it has been projected. But when the torrent is turbid with the wash of rain, we can hear its huge cannon balls rattling down, and grinding each other and their rocky bed and banks, till what has started from the mountain's brow as a huge rock arrives at the sea in the form of pebbles or of sand. For although, as the flood of rain subsides, the flow of boulder stones ceases, this is only for a time; each rain sets them on a stage on their journey, as, in lower levels and gentler gradients, will be seen of soil, and the more minute particles formed by disintegration and vegetable chemistry.

And it is not only that districts of rocks are amply supplied with this ammunition which districts of softer subsoil are without; but as rocky subsoils have little power to admit rain by

absorption, it agglomerates in the ravines which it finds ready loaded to the muzzle with loose rocks and boulders. And thus the longitudinal cutting of ravines proceeds in rocky mountains perhaps as rapidly as in softer subsoils. But the widening of these longitudinal ravines into broad valleys by disintegration and the lateral wash of rain is a process infinitely slow in comparison to what takes place in districts of softer subsoils.

But as sure as dry land stands betwixt high heaven and the sea, the waters of heaven will wash it into the sea. And whether the dry land be of soft or of hard material simply makes the difference of the comparative time required for the operation. In soft and porous subsoils, as the tertiary and chalk, though nature does not make so much fuss about the affair, she proceeds equally surely.

The top of the same Hampshire hill, which may be chalk capped with tertiary strata, is on one side moving to the German Ocean, through the medium of the Thames, and on the other side to the English Channel, by the Itchen, forming one of Humbolt's fissures,' fissures,' or Mr. Hopkins's fractures.' From all sides of the tops of these hills, and from all sides of every height on the globe, there are dry river beds,

down which soil flows whenever rain is heavy enough to run; and all the infinite ramifications of these dry rivers, or ravines, or gorges, or. gullets, or coombs, or chines, or bottoms, or vales, or dales, or deans, or levants (qu. from labens), by whatever name they or any parts of them are locally called, all have descents graduated by water, and outlets to the running rivers (if not to the sea), without any abrupt junction of the lower ends of the dry valleys with the upper ends of the river valleys; and no drop of rain runs an inch on the surface of the earth without, as far as it goes, setting some soil forward on its road to the sea, and it wont run back again. No return tickets are given. It will wait there, and go on by the nex-t-rain. The very soil on which we tread, and which we cultivate, may be said to be on its road from the hill to the sea. Soil which is the disintegration or detritus of rocks (I use the term rocks in the wide geological sense) is in perpetual formation over the whole surface of the earth; and from the whole surface of the earth it is in perpetual movement, by the wash of rain, to the bottom of the sea.

This paragraph was scarcely printed in the second edition of the Tree-lifter,' before I had an opportunity of seeing the surface water flow

from the two sides of Filmere Hill, as I have supposed the soil to do. Frost set in a day or two before Christmas, 1853, and a great quantity of snow fell. In the night of Friday, the 6th of January, 1854, a rapid thaw began, with heavy rain. I walked from Rotherfield to Brookwood on Saturday. Owing to the hard frost the ground absorbed no water. It stood on the high road at East Tisted more than a foot deep, nature's gradient being dammed up by the cross road of man. Over this, the water flowed into the Lavant, from Farringdon, by Chawton and Maiden Lane, to the east of Alton, into the Wey and Thames. In following the high road from Tisted up the north-east side of Filmere Hill, I saw a continuous stream along the valley, running from near Ashen Wood. Where the valley was crossed by the new enclosures of West Tisted Common, the water was ponded back into lakes till it flowed over the small banks on which these fences stand. And (risum teneatis amici?) if left to nature precisely the same processes of filling up these lakes and cutting down their barriers would go on as have been described in the ancient lakes of Auvergne and in the valley of the St. Lawrence.

On descending the south-west side of Filmere Hill, I came to a stream below the Horse-shoes,

which continued along the Dean to Bramdean, through the Lavant, between there and Cheriton, to Tichborne and Southampton. The streams

of these two usually dry trunk valleys were joined by very strong streams from their usually dry branch valleys.

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In such a case, where the surface of the ground is frozen hard, one would suppose that very little of the soil would be washed away; yet whenever snow is drifted, be the ground ever so hard frozen, a great quantity of soil is drifted with it. 'White as the driven snow,' is an expression as trite as it is poetical. But as the driven snow melts, its surface becomes anything rather than white. The melting snow Aerial denudapercolates through itself in the form of water, posit. and the whole of the soil, which is mingled with its entire bulk, is gradually accumulated on the surface, giving the drift the appearance of soil rather than of snow. And when the drift has entirely melted, a residuum of earth is deposited on the ground. If this aerial denudation and deposit of soil take place in drifts, I think it probable that aqueous denudation may take place in rapid thaws, be the ground ever so hard frozen. In fact, neither wind nor water, under any circumstances, ever travels emptyhanded.