July 1, 1896.] 



KNOWLEDGE. 



147 



lower bed described above. Under its trees there harboured 

 the wild boar, the wolf, the red deer, the uriis, the short- 

 horned ox, and perhaps the Arctic bear and the Irish elk. 

 After tlourishinrj for ages this forest, becoming water-logged 

 through subsidence, was engulphed by an upgrowth of peat, 

 and slowly perished as if by a malignant cancer. This peat 

 bed being in turn buried over by sea-silt and laminated 

 clay containing numerous marine shells, formed for a 

 time, after its elevation, a hospitable surface for the seeds of 

 various trees, and was in due time once more hveried with 

 alder and elm, fir and oak trees, larger in size and more 

 densely set together than in the lower forest, but sheltering 

 a much diminished fauna. " There seems," says Morton, 

 " to have been a successive growth of forest trees, until 

 the drainage became intercepted and peat accumulated and 

 formed the upper portion of the bed. It seems that the 

 trees had gradually fallen, and that the most recent broke 

 off near the ground in consequence of rotting in the wet 

 peat surrounding them." 



Borings, excavations for docks, and the sinking of weUs 



covered over — as at Dove Point, where our illustration. 

 Fig. 2, is taken — by beds of blue and yellow marine silt as 

 the shore continued to slowly subside. I'pon this silt 

 another band of peat accumulated through the stoppage 

 of the natural drainage by subsidence, and over it again 

 was laid down the remarkable peaty soil-lieil above 

 described.'^ Imbedded in the latter are the shells of fresh- 

 water molluscs which formerly lived in its surface-pools, 

 the remains of mammals — sheep, dog, and horse — not 

 found in the older forests, and the Saxon and Boman 

 antiquities already referred to. Most of these antiquities 

 belong to the thirteenth century, and there are some who 

 hold the opinion, according to Mr. Morton, " that some 

 great flood or disaster occurred at the close of the fourteenth 

 century, for very few articles have been found belonging 

 to the period immediately succeeding it." It is remarkable 

 that at the end of the thirteenth century there did take 

 place a great invasion of the sea, which destroyed the 

 Abbey of Stanlow, situated between Ellesmere Port and 

 Ince. " I am fully convinced," says Mr. Mellard Keade, 



Fig. 3. — The .liolian Bedding of the Sandliills near Dove Point. 



Mr. Charles A. Defieux. 



From a photograph kindly supplied bv 



in many parts of the district on both sides of the river 

 have revealed the existence below the present surface of 

 the ground of one or both of these buried forests. Beneath 

 what was earlier in the century known as Wallasey Pool 

 (now the great Birkenhead dock) the more ancient forest 

 lies buried, and from it fine heads of the urus {Bos primi- 

 iiniiun} and l!os lonijifnins (besides fragmentary human 

 remains) have been recovered, probably from the very spots 

 on which they died. Along the estuary of the Dee the lower 

 peat and forest bed has been seen lying on the boulder 

 clay. Along the northern coast from the mouth of the 

 Alt River, near Formby, where remains of the urus and 

 the Arctic bear have been found, and along the same side 

 of the Jlersey estuary, the yoimger forest bed has been 

 identified. The extensive excavations for the Manchester 

 Ship Canal traversed the same ancient forest. So that from 

 the Alt to the Dee, and from an unknown distance sea- 

 ward, then extending inland up the valleys of these rivers 

 '• as far as the Ince and Helsby marshes and the mouth of 

 the River Weaver," the country was clothed with trees, 

 which, after flourishing for ages, were gradually and slowly 



" that all the changes that have taken place since the 

 Roman occupation have arisen from the hurhoiilnl en- 

 croachment of the sea and the erosion of the post-glacial 

 land surfaces. ' ' Since then there has been neither elevation 

 nor subsidence. 



Topmost of all rests the blown sand, which in some 

 places, especially to the north of the Mersey, forms dunes 

 forty to one himdred feet in height and three miles in 

 width along the shores of Lancashire and Cheshire. 

 Fig. 3 gives a nearer view of a portion of one of these 

 accumulations lying behind the forest bed seen in Fig. 1, 

 to show its reolian stratification. 



The lower peat and forest beds rest very often directly 

 upon the boulder clay, or upon a liri/t saml re-formed out 

 of it ; and they date, therefore, from after the Ice Age. 

 The fauna of that time appears to have been richer in 



• For an account of the formation of peat mosses the reader is 

 referred to a very interesting series of articles by Sir EdwiirU Fry, on 

 "British Mosses," in Ksowlbdok, December 1st, IS'.tl, and subse- 

 quent numbers. 



