The Ncir Forest : its Histori/ a ml its Sc<'/icri/. 



Long after this the Isle of Wight was altogether separated 

 by the Solent from the mainland, but still ages before the historic 

 period. The various traditions, as to the former depth of the 

 channel, how Sir Bevis, of Southampton, waded across it, how, 

 too, the carts brought the Binstead stone for building Beaulieu 

 Abbey over the dry bed at low water, have been previously 

 given. The passage, too, in Diodorus Siculus has been already 

 examined,* and there can be no doubt, notwithstanding his also 

 making it, like the traditions, a peninsula at low water, that his 

 Ictis is the Isle of Wight and not St. Michael's Mount. The 

 mere local evidence of the mass of tin, the British road more 

 like a deep trench than a road still plainly traceable across 

 the Forest, the names along it corresponding with that of its 

 continuation in the Island, would alone, most assuredly, show 

 that this was the place whence the first traders, and, in after- 

 times, the Romans, exported their tin. We must, however, 

 remember that the channel of the Solent was caused by de- 

 pression rather than by excavation; and that at this moment 

 an alteration in the levels, as noticed by Mr. Austen, f is going 

 on eastward of Hurst Castle. 



The drift, which spreads over the whole of the New Forest, is 

 not very interesting. No elephants' tusks, or elks' horns, so far 

 as I know, have ever been discovered. A few species of Terclra- 

 tula and Pecten, some flint knives, and the os inominatum, of 

 probably Bos longifrons, mentioned farther on, are the only 



* See chap, v., pp. 57, 58. It is just possible that by his "ra'e 

 i';;(Toue," Diodorus may mean the Shingle Islands, which we have described 

 in chapter xiv. p. 151, and whose sudden appearance and disappearance 

 would lead to the most extravagant reports. 



f " On the Newer Deposits of the Sussex Coast:" Geological Journal, 

 vol. xiii. pp. 64, 65. 

 236 



