A Day's Elephant Hunting in Essex. 35
As no excavations are proceeding to-day (for the workmen
are enjoying their Saturday half-holiday), any fossils that
we may obtain must be got from the walls of the pit, or the
floor beneath us. These relics will not perhaps be of a
rare and startling character; but they will, nevertheless,
be genuine. Here are some to begin with. Projecting
from the wall of ferruginous, finely-laminated, bright-
coloured sand is a layer of shells. We all swarm to the
spot, ladies included. Hammers, chisels, and "jemmies"
are suddenly produced from even the most harmless-looking
members of our party, and we are speedily at work As if
prising open one of Nature's strong boxes to the tune of—
Hail to the hammer of science profound !
Flint-stone and rock
Quail at its shock,
And their fragments fly as the sparks around.
The fossil dead that so long have slept,
And seen world after world into ruin swept,*
Start at the sound
Of its fearful rebound.
The fossils before us need but little force to compel them
to quit their sandy matrix. They prove to be the shells of
the little bivalve Cyrena fluminalis. They are very brittle,
and perhaps to some eyes they may appear somewhat in-
significant as trophies of the celebrated elephant bed at
Ilford. But they are genuine relics of the ancient zoology of
the old Thames Valley—as genuine as the British pachy-
* Alas! for the good old cataclysmic geology, so regnant once in
the spectral kingdom of Diluvia and Nightmare, and even in the
verses of the period. (See Dr. Daubeny's excellent collection of
"Fugitive Poems," Parker & Co., 1869.) It is curious in these more
degenerate and pitiful days to see how complacently the catastrophists
looked upon the pre-Adamite earth as a periodic slaughter-house on a
grand scale. How ruthlessly were successive creations put an end to
under that malefic theodicy! Direness was once as familiar to the
slaughterous thoughts of the British geologist as it still seems to be to
our Continental brethren. And yet every virtuous catastrophist would
see in a familiar quotation from Horace at once a prophecy and a
rule of conduct in case such a crash should come in his own time :
" Si fractus illubatur orbis
Impavidum ferient ruinae."