And more: they found out, to their surprise, that the oozy mud of
the Atlantic floor was made up almost entirely of just the same atomies
as make up our chalk, especially globigerinas; that, in fact, a vast bed
of chalk was now forming at the bottom of the Atlantic, with living
shells and sea-animals of the most brilliant colours crawling about on it
in black darkness, and beds of sponges growing out of it, just as the
sponges grew at the bottom of the old chalk ocean, and were all,
generation after generation, turned into flints.
And, for reasons which you will hardly understand, men are beginning now
to believe that the chalk has never ceased to be made, somewhere or
other, for many thousand years, ever since the Winchester Downs were at
the bottom of the sea: and that "the Globigerina-mud is not merely _a_
chalk formation, but a continuation of _the_ chalk formation, so _that we
may be said to be still living in the age of Chalk_." {1} Ah, my little
man, what would I not give to see you, before I die, add one such thought
as that to the sum of human knowledge!
So there the little creatures have been lying, making chalk out of the
lime in the sea-water, layer over layer, the young over the old, the dead
over the living, year after year, age after age--for how long?
Who can tell? How deep the layer of new chalk at the bottom of the
Atlantic is, we can never know. But the layer of live atomies on it is
not an inch thick, probably not a tenth of an inch.
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