1 20 Hillside. 



beings in the far distant past, have also been unearthed from 

 the same beds. 



But whilst the river is even now hollowing out and 

 deepening its bed in its upper reaches, the mud which it has 

 been continuously bringing down and depositing near its 

 mouth has for many years been raising the level of its bed 

 in the tidal portion ; this gradual upraising is still going on 

 in the lower reaches, whilst the bed gets wider as this takes 

 place. About two or three miles below the bridge yonder, 

 the bed has been raised by mud deposits some fifty feet 

 above its original level, and I could instance many conti- 

 nental rivers where the same action is going on, on a much 

 larger scale. 



As we think of the work that the river is at pre- 

 sent doing, our minds travel back to the time when it 

 was carving out the higher beds, those in which, as the old 

 gravel terraces teach us, the river used to flow, to the time 

 when the elephant and woolly rhinoceros existed in British 

 forests, when the British Islands were part and parcel of the 

 Continent, and the Medway ran into a Thames that flowed 

 onwards into the river Rhine, whilst the latter river tra- 

 versed vast alluvial flats, where the North Sea now rolls, and 

 emptied itself into the ocean, probably beyond the most 

 northerly confines of the British Islands of to-day. What 

 changes have taken place since then, even where we now 

 stand ! and as we look towards the north, far beyond the 

 point where the Medway enters the Thames, we feel inclined 

 to repeat with the poet 



" There rolls the deep where grew the tree ; 



O earth, what changes hast thou seen ! 



There where the long street roars, hath been 



The stillness of the central sea. 



