622 PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS. [aNNO 1701. 



man, telling a story, which, when a boy 10 years old, he had heard from his 

 grandfather, who was QO years of age, of what Solon, long since dead, had 

 told him ; namely, that an Egyptian priest had, long before, told Solon, that 

 it appeared from some old Egyptian records, of which the Greeks had no know- 

 ledge, that such a thing had happened, in an age so long before, as in compari- 

 son of which the Greeks were but as children. And all this tradition, through 

 so many hands, and at such great intervals of time, is, at every step, reported 

 from the relator's present memory. And it is very possible, that some one or 

 other of these relators might so far mistake or misremember as to call that a 

 dissolution or disappearance of an island, which was only a tearing of it from 

 the continent. 



It serves however to the present purpose, if at least so much of the story be 

 true, that long before Plato's time, there had been some such dissolution or 

 rupture of an isle or isthmus, somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, that is, in the 

 northern sea, of which there were some symptoms yet remaining in Plato's time. 

 For, this being admitted, it is as applicable to the present case as to any we 

 know, of which there are so many symptoms yet remaining to this day. 



Further, Mr. Somner tells us, that this aestuary from Sandwich to Ashford, 

 might perhaps flow so much further, as to meet with that aestuary on Romney- 

 marsh, and both conjoined together become one level. There is, I think, 

 about 3 or 4 miles distance, between Ashford and the nearest part of Romney- 

 marsh. And if it be admitted, that the two sestuaries of Stoure and Romney- 

 marsh in former times did thus meet, this opens a new scheme, of which before 

 we were not aware ; for then we must say, that the two tides from the north and 

 west, which now meet at the Dogger Sands, did then meet at the confluence of 

 these two sestuaries ; and then, as before said of the Dogger Sands, bringing 

 on both sides earth, mud, and sand, to this place, and lodging it there, might 

 first form an isthmus there, and by degrees fill up those asstuaries on both sides ; 

 mean while, washing away that isthmus between Dover and Calais, and open- 

 ing a new passage, as now it is. 



There are many other sestuaries in England, where the sea now enters a 

 great way into the land ; and how far it might have entered further in former 

 times, cannot be known : as that sea near Bristol, between Wales and Corn- 

 wall ; that of the Humber, between Yorkshire and Lincolnshire ; and we may 

 reasonably suppose that the washes and the fens in Lincolnshire may heretofore 

 have been sea, or overflowed by the sea at high tides ; and that of the Thames 

 between Kent and Essex, which now flows above London and Brentford, within 

 a mile of Kingston, at spring tides ; it may perhaps seem too daring to think 

 that it may formerly have flowed as far as Oxford, between Shotover hill and 



