190 THE LJFE OF THE FIELDS. 



several little raised beaches showing where the level 

 had been, formed of washed gravel and stones the 

 counterpart, in fact, of the raised beaches of the 

 geologists. When the water was almost all drawn off, 

 then there was a deep winding channel in the mud of 

 the bottom, along which trickled a little streamlet 

 which fed the pond. The sun hardening the mud, it 

 was possible by-and-by to walk to the edge of the 

 channel, where it could be seen that the streamlet ran 

 five or six feet deep between precipitous banks of mud. 

 Near where the stream first entered the pond the 

 deposit was much deeper, for this five feet of alluvium 

 had, in fact, been brought down by one small brook in 

 the course of little more than fifty years. The pond 

 had been formed fifty years previously, but already in 

 so short a period, geologically speaking, all that end 

 was silting up, and the little brook was making a delta, 

 and a new land was rising from the depths of the wave. 

 This is exactly what has happened on an immensely 

 larger scale in the history of the earth, and any one 

 who had seen it, and knew the circumstances, could 

 comprehend the enormous effects produced in geological 

 time by rivers like the Ganges, the Amazon, or Nile. 

 Going by with a gun so frequently, one could not help 

 noticing these things, and remembering them when 

 reading LyelTs " Geology," or Maury's book on the sea, 

 or the innumerable treatises bearing on the same 

 interesting questions. "Whether en route for the 

 rabbit-ground, or looking for water-fowl, or later for 

 snipe, I never passed by without finding something, 

 often a fragment of fossil washed from the gravel or 

 sand by the last storm. 



