I should like to take a foreigner down the Vale of Berkshire in the end of May, and ask him what he thought of old England.

But what shall we talk about?
I want to know about Coprolites, if they dig them here, as they do at Cambridge.
I don't think they do.

But I suspect they will some day.
But why do people dig them?
Because they are rational men, and want manure for their fields.
But what are Coprolites?
Well, they were called Coprolites at first because some folk fancied they were the leavings of fossil animals, such as you may really find in the lias at Lynn in Dorsetshire.

But they are not that; and all we can say is, that a long time ago, before the chalk began to be made, there was a shallow sea in England, the shore of which was so covered with dead animals, that the bone-earth (the phosphate of lime) out of them crusted itself round every bone, and shell, and dead sea-beast on the shore, and got covered up with fresh sand, and buried for ages as a mine of wealth.
But how many millions of dead creatures, there must have been! What killed them?
We do not know.

No more do we know how it comes to pass that this thin band (often only a few inches thick) of dead creatures should stretch all the way from Dorsetshire to Norfolk, and, I believe, up through Lincolnshire.