A Day's Elephant Ilantlntj in Essex. 31 



hoed potatoes. Thus we reach the brmk of one of the pits. 

 Here, still accompanied by the ladies of our party, we begin 

 to descend to the realms below. We reach the lower terra 

 firma by a course of wheelbarrow planks. At length we 

 ^-re all assembled, first to receive instructions from our 

 guides, and then to unearth what game we can for our- 

 selves. It now begins to dawn on the minds of the unini- 

 tiated of our party that elephant hunting in Essex, ir. 

 these modern days, is an underground sport — a recreation 

 restricted to the subterranean world and no longer carried 

 on in the open. 



We have now descended from the upper air into the ex- 

 cavated bed of some ancient river or lake. It might be 

 misleading, as will hereafter appear, if we said we were 

 standing in the bed of the ancient Thames. And yet these 

 alluvial precincts of the Boding certainly lie within the great 

 shallow trough of what we now call the Thames Valley — 

 that old, incalculably old, line of drainage which has seen 

 so many and eventful changes in the physical geography of 

 south-eastern England. Enough for the present that this 

 excavation is the inlet to the zoological world beneath. 

 But let us be sceptical and take nothing for granted. We 

 are determined to sift to the bottom the strange stories 

 told of these Ilford pits. If we are really standing in an 

 old river-bed, we may demand to see some trace of the 

 various organic remains which a river is always depositing 

 with its sediment. We know that the Thames of to-day 

 is always embedding in its mud some specimens of the 

 aquatic or terrestrial life of the period — the shell-fish that 

 live and die in its waters, and the land animals that are 

 constantly, by accident or design, borne down in the 

 stream. As in some future deserted bed of the Thames, 

 milleniums hence, the fauna of to-day may be disembedded 

 by the Saturday afternoon naturalists of the period, so we, 

 in this Ilford excursion, should expect to discover in the 

 earth around us some relics of the ancient Thames Valley, 

 deposited milleniums ago. 



This then is what we see as we stand down below in the 

 pit looking up to the daylight. A perpendicular face of the 



