174 



THE FORESTS OF ENGLAND. 



he descended shifted to another part of the river on his 

 return a few days afterwards. There also, islands appear 

 and disappear in a manner truly surprising; and in the 

 alternate loss and gain of the shores may be witnessed 

 the most capricious of phenomena. One example may 

 suffice : A field of fourteen acres, above Beverley, was 

 reduced to less than four acres in twenty years, although 

 the farmer during that time had constructed seven new 

 banks for the defence of his land." 



So is it also along the coast. Here the sea is gaining 

 on the land ; there the land is being extended. Natural 

 embankments have created inland lakes; but the embank- 

 ment has been washed away, and the lake has been 

 merged in the sea. Walking along the coast towards 

 Bridlington, at times you see on the beach numerous 

 rounded lumps lying about of many sizes, which at a 

 distance resemble sleeping turtles, but on a nearer view 

 prove to be nothing but masses of hardened clay, water- 

 worn and full of pebbles. These are portions of the 

 bottoms of lakes overrun by the sea; stubborn vestiges 

 which yield but slowly. 



So long may some lake or loch or fen have existed that 

 trees have grown upon its banks, this having been 

 submerged when the sea reclaimed it, it did so with all its 

 buried treasures, and this is how it comes to pass that we 

 find buried trees in the fens, arid submerged trees in the sea. 



And the forest land extended beyond even the present 

 limits of the land. In the volume of the Philosophical Trans- 

 actions for 1799, I find an account of an examination of a 

 submerged forest on the coast of Lincolnshire, by Joseph 

 Correa Sena, LL.D., F.R.S., &c., in company with Sir 

 Joseph Banks. The original catastrophe which buried 

 this forest was supposed to be one of a very ancient date, 

 but the inroad of the sea which uncovered the buried 

 trees it was computed, must have been comparatively 

 recent. The different sorts of wood were easily distin- 

 guishable, and wood was sometimes found by the people 

 of the coast. 



