THE HUMAN SPECIES. 133 



still so broad in latter ages that both the fleets of King John 

 and of Edward III. succeeded in attacking and destroying their 

 enemies within the port ; but in time that harbor became 

 marshy, and then meadow land. On the side of the Western 

 Scheldt, however, the land diminished, and between 1377 and 

 1477, upwards of forty villages were submerged, chiefly about 

 Biervliet. On the coast, the village of Scharphout was swept 

 away, in 1334, to the sands where now Blankenberg is built ; 

 and Terstreep, near Ostend, shared the same fate. In no part 

 of this vast space of alluvial deposit have fossil remains of 

 Pachyderms been observed. In the Rhine alone and about 

 the shores of that river, bones of two species of Bos and of 

 Cervus giganleus, or Irish Elk, were noticed, and one or two 

 Saurians, referred to Crocodile, have been detected in Upper 

 Flanders. 



GREAT BRITAIN. 



If we now turn to the British Islands, we find the whole 

 east coast of England marked by devastation and marine 

 encroachment. From Cromer, where the village of Shipden 

 was lost in the reign of King Henry IV., though it is said the 

 ruins are still discernible at very low tides, about half a mile 

 distant from the shore, and thence by Yarmouth and Harwich 

 to Reculver in the estuary of the Thames, the work of erosion 

 is everywhere conspicuous, and still proceeding. The soil is 

 evidently older than the alluvial of the German rivers, for 

 debris of Proboscidians, of Saurians, and Tortoises, are not 

 unfrequently found imbedded in it. At Dagenham, in Essex, 

 as mentioned in the Phil. Transactions, the Thames bank wall 

 having given way, the soil washed down, in some places, to 

 twenty feet in depth, when " many large trees became exposed 

 to sight, oaks, alders, and hornbeams, one of which bore 

 ' marks of the axe, and the head was lopped off.' " There is no 

 reason for rejecting the tradition concerning the Goodwin 

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