Natural History. 87 



from time immemorial a considerable colony, and doubtless 

 many young are born in the course of the season. The grey 

 seal is also found in the same locality, and with Mr. T. 

 Southwell, of Norwich,* remains the credit of adding this 

 interesting species to the respective faunas of the two 

 counties. f Of the smaller mammals the dormouse is found in 

 the south-west of the county ; J the harvest-mouse is rare, the 

 lesser shrew local, and the water shrew exceedingly plentiful. 

 Lincolnshire in the present day can boast of little of its 

 former ornithological pre-eminence ; it was truly described by 

 Fuller in his day as e the aviary of England, for the wild-foule 

 therein : remarkable for their Plenty Variety Delicious- 

 nesse.' Few and fragmentary are the records which have 

 come down to us concerning the treasures of the fens in the 

 Liber Eliensis,|| the Chronicles of Crowland,fT and from 

 William of Malm es bury** and Camden,ft and again more 

 recently in the writings of Gough,JJ Pennant, and Colonel 

 Montagu. Drayton also in quaint verse describes the 

 goodly fens and their teeming life. These passages from old 

 writers have frequently been quoted in descriptions of fen 

 scenery, and space will not permit us to do more than allude 

 to them in a general way. A glorious place in its wild natural 

 state was that old fenland before man had come in to bank and 

 drain, and a very paradise to the fowler and fisher were the 

 boggy flats where the c dark-green alders, and the pale-green 

 reeds stretched for miles round the lagoon, where the coot 

 clanked and the bittern boomed, and the sedge-bird, not 

 content with its own sweet song, mocked the notes of all the 

 birds around, while high overhead hung motionless, hawk 

 beyond hawk, buzzard beyond buzzard, kite beyond kite, as 

 far as the eye could see.'|||| Some idea may be formed of the 



* Trans. Norfolk and Norwich Nat. Soc., Vol. III., p. 670. 



f- We are afraid a similar joint claim cannot be set up in the north of the county 

 in respect to the recent occurrence of Sowerby's whale, Physeter bidens, within the 

 estuary of the Humber, cast up on the shore at Spurn Point in the autumn of 1885. 



J See Mr. G. T. Rope, Range of the Dormouse in England and Wales, Zoo/., 

 1885, p. 207. 



Worthies of England, Vol. II., p. 2. 



|| Ed. Stuart, 1848. 



f[ Ingulph's History of Crovuland, Bonn's translation. 



** Temp. 1 100. 



ft Camden's Britannia, i Ed., 1695. 



H Op. cit., Gough's Ed., 1806, Vol. II, pp. 380-1. 



Polyolbicn, Song 25 (Holland's oration). 



HI) Kingsley, Prose idylls the fens. 



