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masses floating down those currents, and by river action since the sea 

 passed away, and by atmospheric changes going on through untold ages, has 

 moulded the hills and dales, and rocks, and crags as you now behold 

 them. In comparatively late geologic periods too this beautiful vale was filled 

 ^vith the rolling waters of a great marine strait, and you might have sailed 

 from the mouth of the Severn to the mouth of the Dee, and the sailor over 

 those seas woidd, if he had landed on the coasts of the Malverns and Siluria 

 on one side or the Cotswold on the other, have seen the mammoth, the Irish 

 elk, and the reindeer, browsing on an Arctic vegetation, and perchance been 

 in danger of the cave lion or the still more ferocious tiger, the great Macharrodus. 

 The men he would have met with were probably as wild as the present race of 

 the Esquimaux, and their coracles floated above the sites of Worcester, 

 Tewkesbury, and Gloucester. They have left their weapons and rude im- 

 plements in many a cave of Western England buried with the bones of the 

 wdld animals which lived on those old shores in thousands, and some of which 

 no doubt often preyed on them. These our early British ancestors have passed 

 away for ages, and with them have gone the strange wild animals that once 

 frequented Great Britain ; the Severn straits have become the fertile vales you 

 now behold ; the climate has changed ; the vegetation has changed ; the 

 scenery has changed ; and if one of those old Britons could look now with 

 us over the distant country he woidd wonder indeed at the marvellous 

 alteration that has passed over the land and waters of his youth. He would 

 see towns and furnaces where once he hunted the mammoth and the elk, and 

 spires rising amid the busy haunts of men, where in his time there roUed 

 the waters of the Severn sea ; Deerhurst, the early home of the Saxon race, 

 burnt by the Danes after the massacre by Athelstane ; Pershore, the home of 

 Odo and Dunstane ; the battle-fields of Worcester and Tewkesbury ; the 

 old Glevum of the Romans, where now you behold rising the splendid 

 Cathedral of Gloucester; Bristol, with its marts and ships and teeming 

 multitudes, were all then below the waters that washed the shores of the 

 Cotswold Hills and Malverns, when the old hunter to whom I have alluded 

 chipped his flint weapons in Arthur's Cave above the silver Wye. Such are 

 some of the wondrous changes that have occurred since our British forefathers 

 roamed over these early lands and floated their coracles over bygone waters. 

 Is any romance more wonderful than these bygone records of our planet's 

 history ? 



At the close of IMr. Sjniionds's address, during which the weather propi- 

 tiously held up and during one portion of which the clouds cleared away, and 

 the Sim shone out above the Cathedral tower and the shining roofs of 

 Gloucester city (as if the good old city smiled upon new folk a-maying on May- 

 Hill), the President, the Rev. James Davies, in the name of the club, briefly 

 thanked Mr. Symonds for his able and gi-aphic adtkess, and congiatulated him 

 upon the comprehensive grasp of geology and other collateral sciences which 

 he had acquired since the days when they two, as he might say, were students 

 together in the classic groves of Christ's College, Cambridge. ]Mr. W. Swin- 



