676 PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS. [ANNO 1702. 



the very tanners' knobs, &c. which shows that the surface of the country lay 

 anciently much lower than now, and has been raised by the seas throwing in 

 sand on the maritime parts, which are now mostly inhabited, and by the moor 

 or rotten sedge in the fenny parts next the high country ; the whole level is 

 about 50 miles in length, and 30 miles over in the broadest parts. No record 

 or tradition whatever informs us when these mutations happened. 



At the laying of the present new sluice or gout, as they call it, at the end of 

 Hamorebeck, at its fall into Boston Haven, on t.iking up the foundation of the 

 old sluice they met with the roots of trees, many of them issuing from their 

 several trunks, spread in the ground ; which when they had taken up, and the 

 roots and earth they grew in, they meet with a solid gravelly and stony soil, of 

 the high country kind, but black and discoloured by the change it had suffered ; 

 upon which hard earth they laid the foundation of this new sluice ; whicii was 

 certainly the surface of the old country before it was covered by the sea, and 

 was much deeper than that at Spalding, as the laml is there at present higher. 



I take this to be an experimental confirmation of Mr. Ray's sentiments, in 

 his Physico-Theological Tract, concerning the great changes made in the ter- 

 raqueous globe, viz. that the great level of the fens running through Holland 

 in Lincolnshire, the Isle of Ely in Cambridgeshire, and Marshland in Norfolk, 

 was sometime part of the sea, which by degrees had been raised up by earth 

 brought down by floods from the upper grounds, and by the great quantity of 

 mud subsiding there. The form of the shoe was much like those found with 

 some urns at Kirby Thore in Westmorland, as described in the Phil. Trans. 

 N° 158. 



Observations on the Class of Siveet Tastes, made bij comparing the Tastes Oj 

 Sweet Plants with M. Lemerys Chemical Analysis of l hem, in his 'J realise of 

 ■ Drugs. By Sir John Floyer. N° 279, p. 1 100. 



I observe that by our taste we may discern all the chemical principles in 

 plants before their distillation ; and that for want of a due observation of their 

 tastes, Mr. Lemery has not fully described the chemical principles which plants 

 yield in distillation. All watery plants show their phlegm as well to the taste, 

 as in distillation ; and in all dry woody tastes, we observe the earth, as well as 

 we can by the chemical analysis. By the mucilage and gumminess, or oily taste, 

 we distinguish the oil of plants, as well as by distillation. The aromatical smell 

 shows us the volatility of the oil and salt of plants; and by the foetidness we 

 also know that the oil and salt are in a volatile state. By the acrimony and 

 pungency we know that there is a volatile salt in plants; and by their burning 

 taste we find there is a corrosive salt in them. By a crude rough acidity we 



