24 
over nature. I am sorely tempted to multiply these interesting 
examples; but it will be preferable to limit what remains to be 
said to the annals of our own country. 
First, let me draw your attention to the immediately pre- 
historic geography of the British Isles as shown on this map. We 
have them represented as at one of the stages of what the 
geologists call ‘‘The Pleistocene Period.” You see that our 
islands, which are now about 1,000 in number, then formed a 
connected area, and they were undoubtedly a part of the con- 
tinent of Europe. The coast line, notice, stretched much farther 
to the north and west than at present—200 or 300 miles west of 
Ireland, and thence onward to the inner angle of the Bay of Biscay. 
All the sea within this line at the present time is less than 100 
fathoms deep, but immediately outside it sinks rapidly to several 
thousand feet ; this line then is in reality the true north-western 
’ coast line of Europe, and the British Isles rise from the enclosed 
area as from a submarine plateau or platform. Ifan elevation of 600 
feet were to take place at the present time, this state of things re- 
presented on the map would be restored. Let me point to one or 
two interesting features in the map. The modern North Sea was 
a broad undulating plain, rich in vegetation, the feeding ground of 
the herds of animals whose bones and teeth now lie scattered 
over its bedin profusion. The Dogger Bank, one of our great 
fishing grounds was ‘‘a part of western Europe, its southern and 
western sides washed by the waters of a large river,’’ coming from 
the south and flowing onwards to the deeper parts of the sea. 
That river was the Rhine, which then received the Thames and 
all the rivers of eastern Britain as tributaries. The English 
Channel had no existence, but was a wide valley similarly drained 
by a large river flowing to the west. The Bristol Channel was 
also a valley through which the Severn flowed to jom a much 
larger stream draining the lake and plain of the present Irish 
Sea. 
Now it is pretty certain that the first human immigrants came 
during this Pleistocene Age, if not earlier, and they certainly came 
by land. Along with the mammals from the south wandered the 
highest of them all; very low as yet in the scale of humanity, 
only a nomad hunter, but still a man, already asserting his 
dominion over the fowls of the air, the beasts of the field, and 
having within him, though undeveloped, all the infinite pos- 
sibilities of our nature. Long before Great Britain was an island, 
man followed the chase up and down the valley of the Thames 
while that stream still paid tribute to the Rhine. He has left his 
flint weapons—knives and arrowheads—in no small numbers 
buried up in the gravel beds formed by the river on either side. 
« Innumerable horses,” says Boyd Dawkins, “large heads of 
