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over nature. I am sorely tempted to multiply these interesting 

 examples ; but it will be preferable to limit what remains to be 

 said to the annals of our own country. 



First, let me draw your attention to the immediately pre- 

 historic geography of the British Isles as sho;,vn on this map. We 

 have them represented as at one of the stages of what the 

 geologists call " The Pleistocene Period." You see that our 

 islands, which are now about 1,000 in number, then formed a 

 connected area, and they were undoubtedly a part of the con- 

 tinent of Europe. The coast line, notice, stretched much farther 

 to the north and west than at present — 200 or 300 miles west of 

 Ireland, and thence onward to the inner angle of the Bay of Biscay. 

 All the sea within this line at the present time is less than 100 

 fathoms deep, but immediately outside it sinks rapidly to several 

 thousand feet ; this line then is in reality the true north-western 

 coast line of Europe, and the British Isles rise from the enclosed 

 area as from a submarine plateau or platform. If an elevation of 600 

 feet were to take place at the present time, this state of things re- 

 presented on the map would be restored. Let me point to one or 

 two interesting features in the map. The modern North Sea was 

 a broad undulating plain, rich in vegetation, the feeding ground of 

 the herds of animals whose bones and teeth now lie scattered 

 over its bed in profusion. The Dogger Bank, one of our great 

 fishing grounds was " a part of western Europe, its southern and 

 western sides washed by the waters of a large river," coming from 

 the south and flowing onwards to the deeper parts of the sea. 

 That river was the Rhine, which then received the Thames and 

 all the rivers of eastern Britain as tributaries. Tlie English 

 Channel had no existence, but was a wide valley similarly drained 

 by a large river flowing to the west. The Bristol Channel was 

 also a valley through which the Severn flowed to join a much 

 larger stream draining the lake and plain of the present Irish 

 Sea. 



Now it is pretty certain that the first human immigrants came 

 during this Pleistocene Age, if not earlier, and they certainly came 

 by land. Along with the mammals from the south wandered the 

 highest of them all ; very low as yet in the scale of humanity, 

 only a nomad hunter, but still a man, already asserting his 

 dominion over the fowls of the air, the beasts of the field, and 

 having within him, though undeveloped, ail the infinite pos- 

 sibilities of our nature. Long before Great Britain was an island, 

 man followed the chase up and down the valley of the Thames 

 while that stream still paid tribute to the Ehine. He has left his 

 flint weapons — knives and arrowheads — in no small numbers 

 buried up in the gravel beds formed by the river on either side. 

 *' Innumerable horses," says Boyd Dawkins, " large heads of 



