ABSTRACT
The power of limestone, one formation among many, to bestow on lands the generalized image or character, is not to be explained without reference to its various aesthetic qualities, and to the decisive part limestone plays in water supply. As has been said, water is the weathering agency that grips the imagination, and the sculpting effects of water upon limestone are better apprehended than in the case of other stones. Granite or basalt cliffs are more resistant: they do not appear to have the same communion with the seas that make our soft chalk cliffs so clean and sheer, or that expose the joints and beds of so many carboniferous limestones and other calcareous rocks along our shores. As for the noncalcareous sedimentary rocks, clays, shales and sandstones, though they often display carven joints no less sculptural than those of some limestones, yet from the imaginative angle inspired by human need they do not equal limestone in their communion with water. For limestones, whether they are porous, or impermeable yet loose-jointed, are pre-eminently the rocks that allow water to accumulate in the earth. Limestone countenances the formation of springs and wells, of small-scale and well-distributed waters. And in temperate lands, at least, it is this question of the scale of water distribution
