of the Bearded Tit. 79 



broken through, snapped by a sudden earthquake, or 

 slowly mined by countless generations of boring 

 shellfish, until it gave way under the weight of the 

 accumulating waters of the estuary, choked to the 

 north by advancing ice, or tilted westward by some 

 submarine upheaval. There, with a very small 

 stretch of imagination, one may still hear mastodons 

 crashing through the reed-beds, and British hippo- 

 potami splashing and blowing in the pools ; and, 

 as every now and then an incautious footstep breaks 

 through the raft-like upper crust of soil, and im- 

 prisoned gases bubble up, one may, without any 

 stretch of imagination, smell the foul stenches of 

 Pliocene days. 



The climate in those days, geologists tell us, 

 judging by the fossil plants of the time, must 

 before the country was wrapped in ice have been 

 much what it is in Norfolk now. " If the various 

 sections of the upper fresh-water beds are examined, 

 we find," writes Mr. Clement Reid, who surveyed the 

 country round Cromer, where the Forest Beds are 

 most exposed, " that all appear to have been formed 

 in large shallow lakes like the present Broads, or in 

 sluggish streams connected with them." 



Three considerable rivers, the Bure, the Waveney, 

 and the Yare, after meandering through level 

 meadows and marshes none of the three, according 

 to Sir John Hawkshaw's estimate with a fall of more 

 than two inches in the mile join and meet the full 

 strength of the tide in Breydon Water. 



The outflow is checked and the volume of the 

 streams, finding no other way to dispose of itself, has 

 spread out into side- waters and back-waters, where- 

 ever the law of levels, the only law to which it owns 

 allegiance, has admitted a right of way. 



