SUBTERRAJTEAN WILLOWS. 109 



bearing every mark of a gradual deposition, and obviously contem- 

 porary with the general surface of the country, is a circumstance 

 that could only be brought about in the slow evolution of undefined 

 centuries. 



A more satisfactory explanation, however, may be offered, for the 

 occurrence of those trees, as they were found, beneath what had been 

 originally a mass of fluviatile silt and clay. From the vestiges of 

 roots in situ, there cannot be much doubt of their having formed, in 

 the days of their primeval growth, a detached portion of a salictum 

 or sallow grove, that once ruffled its dense cinereous foliage, amid the 

 dank, quivering marshes of the Tyne, at an age when the plains of 

 Britain .lay in fen and jungle, and its heights reared their broad 

 backs, gloomy and wild, beneath the entangled bewilderment of oak 

 and pine, birch and hazel, and a thorny undergrowth, ere Agricola 

 and his pioneers, or the legions of Severus, had penetrated the 

 thickets and the wastes of woody Albion, or the axe and fire of the 

 sacrilegious husbandmen had violated the solitary retreats of the 

 forest. Pieces of the Pinus sylvestris^ with the bark still adherent, 

 disclosed in excavations along the banks of the river, of nearly the 

 same depth as those in which the willows occur, afford support to 

 this view of the remote period whence they derived their origin, and 

 the nature of their associated scenery in " those prime of days." A 

 tempest, a rush of water, or the silent overthrow induced by time, 

 accelerated by the attacks of insect foes, may have been the causes of 

 their downfall. Some of the neighbouring hedges, shew trees of 

 equal magnitude, brought to the ground by these means. The Me- 

 lanotus fulvi2>es, and, particularly, the Sinodendron cylindrxcum, to 

 whose ravages the insecure stability of the gates and palings in the 

 vicinity supply abundant testimony, spare not even living trees ; and 

 besides the damages which they, in the perfect and larvse state oc- 

 casion, in " eating to the core their eager way," and reducing to 

 powder whatever obstructs their passage, they permit access through 

 such of their perforations as communicate with the atmosphere to 

 moisture, frost, fungi, — to each separate and combined mode of 

 noxious agency. Levelled with the soil, the gradual envelopment of 

 the trees beneath successive layers of mould was a consequence result- 

 ing from their position. Previous to the construction of the Rail- 

 way, which dams back the floods, and allows of tillage being applied 

 to what was formerly a profitless and hopeless swamp, during the 

 Miohaelmas season, when the tides are at their extreme, the waters 



