A Day's FAaphant Hnntinr/ in Essex. '43 



lowered in heiglit, and the contours of the old land-surface 

 defaced and wrecked. Though hidden from sight, sub- 

 marine England had a history of no little import for the 

 soils of the future land-surface. At length, on rising 

 slowly from the sea, as islands and future continents are 

 rising above the waves to-day, the emerging land appeared 

 with many of its old valleys and river courses choked up 

 with sand and gravel and overspread with the moraine of 

 the ice, its bolder mountain ranges and hills worn or 

 effaced, its minor contours obliterated. But the greater 

 watersheds survived the long-protracted waste : they began 

 to resume their functions in the slowly enlarging area of 

 the landscape. 



Thus the larger of the ancient river valleys began to be 

 excavated afresh, and so the post-glacial Thames may be 

 an old river valley in part re-excavated, increasing in 

 width and depth as time went on. 



The Lea, the Roding, the Thames, belong then to the 

 period which succeeded this great marine submergence. 

 They were the gradual effect of the atmospheric forces 

 which are always at work on a terrestrial surface, sculpturing 

 it with hydrographical contours, and so forming the hills 

 and valleys of the landscape. 



But the land rose from an icy sea. The ice, which had 

 covered so large a part of the eastern and north midland 

 counties, retreated to the valleys of the mountain district 

 of the north of our island. East Anglia and Essex emerged 

 first from the waters, for here the submergence was only 

 a few hundred feet. How long the ice of the Chalky Clay 

 had held possession, excluding the return of vegetable and 

 animal life, we know not. Nor do we know how long the 

 land continued to be an island, or a group of islands. It 

 gradually became poorly stocked with the beginnings of 

 vegetable life, with a meagre herbaceous vegetation of 

 mosses and lichens. It was visited sometimes by sea-birds, 

 and in the severer winters by a few Arctic land animals— 

 by lemmings, hares, voles, and foxes, crossing the frozen 

 straits of Dover. It was only -by so continuous and per- 

 sistent a rise of the land as would unite it with the continent 







