By the Rev. John Adams. 279 



At length, in consequence of another upheaval of the land, the 

 gravel-bed (a) was left high and dry ; and then a wide river, guided 

 no doubt in its course by a depression caused in this upheaval, 

 swept across the plain. Whence it came and whither it flowed we 

 cannot even conjecture; but we may suppose that its remote springs 

 lay in hills far distant from those shores ; for this country was 

 then part of a great continent which extended we know not how 

 far, into the Atlantic. Very different must this river have been 

 from the peaceful stream which now winds its unobtrusive way 

 through the water-meadows ; for in course of time it completely 

 swept away the old gravel-bed (a), worked its way down through 

 the Tertiary Strata {b), and lined the valley from side to side with 

 debris (e), brought down by its tributaries from the adjacent country. 

 A similar process went on at the same time over a very extensive 

 area ; and there is reason to believe that most of the Wiltshire 

 valleys owe their origin to the river action of the same epoch ; 

 for the gravelly drift which many of them contain, abounds 

 with organic remains of precisely the same character as those 

 found in the valley beds of the Kennet and the Thames. Bones of 

 huge mammoths, far exceeding in size any existing elephant 

 — remains, too, of the hippopotamus, cave tiger, rhinoceros, 

 auroch, bear, hyena, ox, horse, rein-deer, stag and wolf, are 

 embedded here and there in the low level gravel over the whole 

 area of the drift deposit ; and from the fact that they seldom 

 bear traces of attrition, and could not therefore have been drifted 

 hither from any distant land, it may be inferred that the animals 

 to which they belonged lived and died on the banks of the wide 

 rivers, which once filled those valleys. The climate at the time is 

 supposed to have been much colder than it is at present, for indi- 

 cations have been found of contemporaneous glacial action amongst 

 the mountains of Wales and Scotland ; and though the testacea of 

 the period are mostly identical with our present land and river 

 shells, there are certain species amongst them which now exist 

 only in the Arctic regions. Some of the mammalia, too, such e.g. 

 as the auroch, bear, and reindeer, are animals found at the present 

 time only in northern climes; and the mammoth, which in 



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