SUPEKPOSITION NOT PARENTAL RELATION. 201 



the wader family stalked mid-leg deep when plying for food ; 

 and on one occasion a small porpoise, losing his way, and 

 getting entangled amid its shoals, perished on it, and left his 

 carcass to be covered up by its mud and silt. That elevation 

 of the land, or recession of the sea, to which the country 

 owes its last acquired marginal strip of soil, took place, and 

 the shallow bank became a flat meadow, raised some six or 

 eight feet above the sea-level. Herbs, shrubs, and trees, in 

 course of time covered it over; and then, as century succeed- 

 ed century, it gathered atop a thick stratum of peaty mould, 

 embedding portions of birch and hazel bushes, and a few 

 doddered oaks. When in this state, at a comparatively re- 

 cent period, an Italian boy, accompanied by his monkey, was 

 passing over it, when the poor monkey, hard wrought and 

 ill fed, and withal but indifierently suited originally for brav- 

 ing the rigours of a keen northern climate, lay down and 

 died, and his sorrowing master covered up the remains. Not 

 many years after, the mutilated corpse of a poor shipwrecked 

 sailor was thrown up, during a night-storm, on the neigh- 

 bouring beach : it was a mere fragment of the human frame, 

 — a mouldering, unsightly mass, decomposing in the sun; 

 and a humane herd-boy, scooping out a shallow grave for it, 

 immediately over that of the monkey, buried it up. Last of 

 all, a farmer, bent on agricultural improvement, furrowed 

 the flat meadow to the depth of some six or eight feet, by a 

 broad ditch, that laid open its organic contents from top to 

 bottom. And then a philosopher of the school of Maillet and 

 Lamarck, who had chanced to come the way, stepped aside to 

 examine the phenomena, and square them with his theory. 



First, along the bottom of the deep ditch, he detects ma- 

 rine organisms of a low order, and generally of a small size. 

 There are dark indistinct markings traversing the gray silt, 

 which he correctly enough regards as the remains of fucoids ; 

 and blent with these he finds the stoav cuU^ of flustra. ^-he 



