128 NATURAL HISTORY OF 



hand of man, was followed by submersion beneath the n 



Continuous denudations of the sea-shore, or erosions of rivers, 

 famished the amber of the Baltic from very early age* j and 

 the check of that trade is now only as it n ry of 



it at son, but not inland. A prolonged depression on this coast 

 alone accounts for the absence of deltas al the mouths of the 

 Vistula and the Od<-r, and may be in combination with the 

 changes of surface, which, while the real plane of declivity of 

 the two last mentioned rivers became greater towards the 

 north, did not affect their watershed, and aided in throwing tlie 

 masses of the Lagoon Sea down the western Russian rivers 

 into the Euxine. 



WESTERN EUROPE. 



The whole of Northern and Western Germany is low and 

 of a sandy alluvial soil, which, without the aid of cultivation 

 and human care, might still be threatened with marine inva- 

 sion ; and Denmark, in its oldest poetical aspect, was appar- 

 ently less intersected by creeks and water channels than at 

 present. High sand hills are easily formed by the surf and 

 the wind ; they are no proof of antiquity, still less of dura- 

 bility, from the fact of the sand bank, eighty feet in height, near 

 Dantzig, being broke through in 1543, and forming a new 

 mouth for the river, during an unusually high flood of the 

 inland waters. 



Some part of the east and south of England was certainly 

 connected with the opposite coast, at a period preceding the 

 change of direction which the Rhine received, when, turning 

 from its ancient bed through the Cevennes, a channel was 

 formed to the north, and the waters first reached the sea by 

 the volcanic basin of Neuwied. Western Germany seems 

 then to have been indented with deep bays, estuaries, and 

 islands, the salt water reaching above Wezel, on the Rhine, 

 where the heaths still abound in sea-shells, in a perfect 



