CHAPTER XIX 



OF SEVERAL RIVERS, AND SOME OBSERVATIONS 

 OF FISH 



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Pise. Well, scholar, since the ways and weather do both 

 favour us, and that we yet see not Tottenham Cross, you 

 shall see my willingness to satisfy your desire. And first, 

 for the rivers of this nation, there be, as you may note out 

 of Doctor Heylin's Geography, and others, in number 

 three hundred and twenty-five, but those of chiefest 

 note he reckons and describes as followeth : 



1. The chief is Thamesis, compounded of two rivers, 

 Thame and Isis, whereof the former, rising somewhat 

 beyond Thame in Buckinghamshire, and the latter near 

 Cirencester in Gloucestershire, meet together about 

 Dorchester in Oxfordshire ; the issue of which happy 

 conjunction is the Thamesis, or Thames ; hence it flieth 

 between Berks, Buckinghamshire, Middlesex, Surrey, 

 Kent, and Essex : and so weddeth himself to the Kentish 

 Medway, in the very jaws of the ocean. This glorious 

 river feeleth the violence and benefit of the sea more than 

 any river in Europe, ebbing and flowing twice a day, more 

 than sixty miles ; about whose banks are so many fair 

 towns and princely palaces that a German * poet thus 

 .truly spake : 



* Who this German poet was I cannot find ; but the verses, in the 

 original Latin, are in Heylin's Cosmography, p. 240, and are as 

 follow : 



Tot campos, sylvas, tot regia tecta, tot hortos, 

 Artifici excultos dextra, tot vidimus arces ; 

 Ut mine Ausonio, Thamesis, cum Tibride certet. II. 

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