66 Flowers and their Pedigrees. 



by our ordinary human and historical chronology, 

 but which is quite modern when judged by the vast 

 timepiece of cosmical and geological cycles. 



All round the coast of England you will find end- 

 less traces of these submerged forests, especially 

 wherever the land shelves off slowly to seaward. 

 That most lively of mediaeval travellers, Giraldus 

 Cambrensis (whose amusing and somewhat slangy 

 diary would be much more read, I am sure, if people 

 did not incongruously mistake him for a dry chronicler 

 of the monastic sort), gives a full and really scientific 

 account of one which he came across in the course 

 of his Welsh peregrinations ; and ever since his time 

 the submerged forests have been noted in spot after 

 spot in every part of Southern Britain. Beginning in 

 the great bight between Wales and Scotland, they 

 continue round the coast at Holyhead ; turn up again 

 in Cardigan Bay ; fringe the whole Bristol Channel ; 

 fill in the bottom of the fiords at Falmouth, Dart- 

 mouth, Torquay, and Exmouth ; trend round the Isle 

 of Wight, Selsea, and Pevensey Bay ; appear sparingly 

 off the Essex coast ; and thence run up by Cromer 

 and the Wash to Holderness and Lindisfarne. They 

 are everywhere newer than the glacial deposits, and 

 so they give us a fair ground for believing that a 

 great general subsidence of the land has taken place 



