256 EARLY MAN IN BRITAIN. [CHAP. vm. 



can boast the presence of any natural trees deserving of 

 the name. Cultivated saplings are protected by walls, 

 but they cannot raise their tops above the level of the 

 copestones. And yet the mosses and sunk forests of 

 those regions abound with fallen trees, many of which 

 equal in thickness the body of a man. When these 

 buried trees decked the now bleak island with their 

 greenery, the land stood at a higher level, and the 

 neighbouring ocean at a greater distance. A study of 

 similar appearances in the Inner and Outer Hebrides 

 will induce us to form a like opinion of the changes 

 which they indicate. The broad barren flats of Caith- 

 ness were also in ancient times overspread with a thick 

 growth of large-sized natural wood, the peat mosses 

 containing which pass below the sea. To have per- 

 mitted this strong forest growth we are again compelled 

 to admit a former elevation of the land and a corre- 

 sponding retreat of the ocean. And so on of all the 

 maritime regions of Scotland. 



" The same inferences may be drawn from the facts 

 disclosed by the mosses of Ireland and England. On 

 the coasts of France and Holland, as I have said, peat 

 dips underneath the sea ; and along those bleak mari- 

 time regions of Norway, where now-a-days the pine-tree 

 will hardly grow, we find peat mosses which contain the 

 remains of full-grown trees, such as are only met with 

 in districts much farther removed from the influence of 

 the sea." l 



From the great thickness of the bark of the Scotch 

 firs in the buried forests, Dr. Geikie infers that the 

 climate was more severe when the trees were alive than 

 now, and more like that of the wooded regions of 



1 Trans, Roy. Soc. Edinburgh, xxiv. p. 363. See also The Great Ice-age, c. xxvi. 



