I ONCE went down to Aldeburgh, on the Suffolk coast, with a party of friends, which included an American writer, himself as delightful and charming as his stories. Why should I not give his name? It was Cable, the author of "Old Creole Days." We walked through the little town to the sea-front, and came upon the immense beach spreading out for miles towards Orford Ness. "Well, I never!" said he to me; "I suppose the hotel people have put those stones there to make a promenade for the visitors. It's a big thing." It took me some time to persuade him that they were brought there by the sea and spread out by it alone. It was his first visit to Europe, but he had seen the seashore on the other side, and there was nothing like this over there, he declared. A similar readiness to ascribe Nature's handiwork to the enterprise of hotel-keepers led a visitor to the Bel Alp, in the Rhone Valley, when he looked down from that high-placed hostelry on to the great Aletsch glacier, with its central "moraine" of huge rock masses and debris, to exclaim, "I see the proprietor has spread a cinder-path along the glacier to prevent us from slipping. It's a convenience, no doubt, but gives a nasty dirty look to the snow." Mr. Cable, when he once realized that the great Aldeburgh beach was a natural production, did what a true poet and naturalist must do--he fell in love with it, and spent hours in filling his pockets with strange-looking pebbles of all kinds until he was brought into the house to dinner by main force, when he spread his collection on the table, and demanded an explanation of "what, whence, and why" in regard to each pebble. Our companions--a great lawyer, a military hero, a politician, and two "learned men"--regarded him as eccentric, not to say childish. But I entirely sympathized with him, and when next day we sailed down to Orford and stood in front of the old Norman fortress, he further established himself in my regard by deeply sighing and exclaiming, "So that is a real English castle!" whilst several large tears quietly streamed down his undisturbed countenance.
To give an idea of what various rocks from far-distant localities may be brought together on an East Coast beach, take that of Felixstowe as an example. What is true of the East Coast is to some extent also true of the South Coast, and, indeed, wherever the sea makes the pebbles of a modern beach from the materials furnished by the breaking up of old deposits, which were in their day brought by ice-flows or torrential currents from remote regions. The most abundant kind of pebbles on the Felixstowe beach are small, rounded, somewhat flat pieces of flint, derived not directly from the chalk which is the "stratum" or "bed" in which flint is originally formed, but from the Red Crag capping the clay cliffs (London clay or early Eocene), and also from surface washings and "gravels" (of later age than the crag) farther north, whence they have travelled southward with many other constituents of the beach. All these flints are stained ruddy brown or yellow by iron--a process they underwent when lying in the gravels or in the crag in which they were deposited as pebbles, broken, washed, and rolled ages ago from the chalk. The iron is in a high state of oxidation, and stains not only flint pebbles but the sands of the Red Crag and later gravels a bright orange-red, or sometimes a less ruddy yellow. The iron comes originally from very ancient igneous rocks in which it is black and usually combined with silica. The chalk flints are always, owing, it seems, to minute quantities of carbon, quite black in the mass, but thin, translucent splinters have a yellowish-brown tint. The flints are free from iron stain when taken direct from the chalk. The commonest pebble next to flint is milky quartz, or opaque white quartz. This is derived from some far northern source, where there are igneous rocks traversed by veins of this substance (perhaps Norway). Quartz, like flint, is pure silica, the oxide of the element silicon. It appears in another form as rock-crystal, and also as chalcedony and agate. Opal also is pure silica, but differs from quartz and its varieties in being non-crystalline or amorphous, and in being less hard and of less specific gravity than quartz. Opal is soluble in alkaline water containing free carbonic acid, such as are many natural waters and the sea! But quartz is not so. The siliceous "spicules" and skeletons of many microscopic animals and plants are "opal." The gem known as "opal" is a variety owing its beauty to minute fissures in its substance which break up light into the prismatic colours.