264 A HUNDKED YEARS 



teresting, but still more interesting are the many objects 

 found preserved in it. What excitement there is when 

 in Eg5rpt or at Pompeii there are found grains of wheat 

 in a mummy, or well-preserved figs or walnuts are taken 

 from under twenty feet of volcanic ash ! Why should 

 I, in my humble way, not be quite as much elated when, 

 from the bottom of one of my bogs, I take out handfuls 

 of hazel-nuts as perfect as the day they dropped off the 

 trees; or, still more wonderful, when I find the peat full 

 of countless green beetle wings, still glittering in their 

 pristine metallic lustre, which may have been buried 

 in these black, airtight silos before Pompeii was 

 thought of ? 



To mark the manner in which the climate of our earth 

 has changed at different periods must always be an 

 interesting subject to the student of Nature, ancient Or 

 modern. I cannot help thinking that, if the lower 

 strata of some of our very deepest peat-bogs were care- 

 fully examined, with the help of the microscope, etc., the 

 botanist and entomologist would derive information 

 which would give us some approximate idea of their age, 

 and prove that a somewhat different vegetation covered, 

 the earth when the peat began to form, and that our 

 country was then the abode of plants and insects (if not 

 of still higher forms of animal life) which are either very 

 rare or quite extinct with us now. 



One bird has become extinct even in my day — viz., 

 the great auk; and what were indigenous plants are 

 becoming extinct from various causes, chiefly, I fancy, 

 climate. I know as a fact that, in my grandfather's time, 

 the woods of this country were full of Epipactis ensifoUa, 

 a lovely white orchidaceous plant, which is so rare now 



