378 CANON GREEN WELL. [1894. 



plements, I am unable to express an opinion from personal 

 knowledge of the sites, &c. 



But that they have been made with intention I cannot have 

 the least doubt, for I know of no natural agency which has, or 

 indeed could, produce the signs of work so abundantly shown 

 upon them. 



I hope some time next year to have an opportunity of seeing 

 the places near Sevenoaks where they have been found. Yours 

 very faithfully, W. GREEN WELL. 



The following letter from Mr Gladstone is too inter- 

 esting to be omitted : 



W. E. Gladstone to J. Prestivich. 



HAWARDEN CASTLE, CHESTER, 2nd Oct. 1894. 



MY DEAR SIR, I thank you very much for the interesting 

 and able Address you have done me the honour to send me, and 

 I desire respectfully as well as sympathetically to mention a 

 circumstance which has long appeared to me worthy of some 

 notice, and which may have a relation to your doctrine of a 

 larger and late submergence. 



I am in no way competent to touch the relation of that doc- 

 trine to the tradition of the Noachian deluge. 



And it may seem daring for one who speaks from a standing 

 ground supplied by literature, to attempt joining hands with the 

 geologist across the gap which severs him from history and pre- 

 history as commonly understood. 



My fact is this : Homer was (in my confident opinion, dictated 

 to me by study of the text) possessed of, and thoroughly pos- 

 sessed by, a tradition, evidently the tradition of his day and 

 people, according to which there lay to the north of the Thracian 

 and Thessalian mountains an open sea ; and by this open sea 

 lay, for him, the communication from Western Greece nomin- 

 atim from Ithaca, with an Underworld to which the approach 

 was situated in the East, and was by his great river Okeanos 

 (in his ideas of which river were probably mixed together vague 

 notices of the Black Sea and Sea of Azof, the Caspian, and the 



