By G. Poulett Scrope, Esy., MP. 113 
a vestige of Man was impressed upon any portion of the earth’s 
surface. We are apt to pride ourselves on the possession in our 
county of the remains of some of the earliest human inhabitants of 
the island. But long before the first aboriginal ‘ran wild’ in our 
‘woods,’ all the changes I have rehearsed had ceased, the surface 
of the country had assumed its present form—its chalk hills, and 
their outlying patches of tertiary sands and gravels stood at their 
present high levels; its valleys had been excavated, and covered by 
land floods with more recent gravels of terrestrial origin filled with 
bones of elephant, hippopotamus, and other animals now foreign 
to England, and its surface occupied by the races of the vegetable 
and animal creation now existing here. These, be it remembered, 
are not imaginary speculations, but facts, attested by evidence quite 
as strong as that which: proves the early occupation of our hills by 
the unknown builders of Stonehenge, Abury, and the races whose 
remains fill our barrows. The strata that compose those hills and the 
vales at their foot, are, indeed, the mausolea of countless generations 
of the ancient living inhabitants of this area of the world’s surface. 
But they are chiefly of marine origin, and testify to the predomi- 
nance of the ocean over dry land in this district throughout the 
earliest ages to which its geological structure carries us back. Thus 
; 
is seen to arise the alliance between two of the subjects with which 
our Society occupies itself. Geology takes up the history of our 
district at the point where the local annals of its human inhabitants 
are obscured by the mists of antiquity, and carries it backward 
through infinite cycles of ages to an equally misty beginning, by 
the light of ‘Paleontological’ evidence disentombed from the 
bowels of the earth. No one can assert that this branch of our 
studies has not its own special attraction to every inquiring mind. 
_ Lhope that the rude sketch here offered of its chief points, may 
recommend it to the attention of some who have not yet become 
alive to the interest it is fitted to command. 
