NOTES AND QUERIES. 259 



the Dogger Bank, received the waters of the rivers from each 

 side. The North Sea, if you will take the trouble to look at Mr. 

 Olsen's map, is little more than a great plain covered by shallow 

 water; off the north-east coast of England it is twenty fathoms, 

 and as we go south even this depth is exceptional. The North 

 Sea contains some remarkable depressions, one of which, the 

 Silver Pit, is a narrow submarine valley fifty fathoms in depth, 

 forty miles off the north-east coast of Lincolnshire. The intrusion 

 of this great water, the North Sea, between ourselves and the 

 continent may have been very rapid, for when the chalk barrier, 

 which presumably at one time extended eastward from Flam- 

 borough Head (cropping out again around Heligoland) was once 

 breached and the central river taken in flank, there is no reason 

 why the great level plain of "intermediate" Lincolnshire should 

 not have been submerged in a period even of a few days. 



Before closing these remarks, — as we are now engaged in 

 rocking the cradle of the Lincolnshire Naturalists' Union, — 

 I should like to say a few words as to the possibilities of a future, 

 and the taking up of a useful position. There is no other county 

 in England in which the fauna and flora have so greatly altered ; 

 large numbers of birds, insects, and plants have been altogether 

 destroyed, or, in the former case, driven away by enclosure and 

 drainage. It becomes therefore an imperative duty to use our 

 best endeavours to preserve what is left, and to take care that our 

 scarcer mammals, nesting birds, and surviving plants are not 

 ruthlessly destroyed nor unnecessarily banished. 



NOTES AND QUERIES. 



Memorial to Gilbert White. — The new water supply for the village 

 of Selborne, which has been given to the inhabitants as a memorial to 

 Gilbert White (Zool. 1893, pp. 201, 290), was made free for public use on 

 June 8th, the inaugural ceremony being performed by Lady Sophia Palmer, 

 daughter of the Earl of Selborne. Hitherto the inhabitants have been 

 compelled to obtain their water at a fountain situated at the spring-head, 

 and in some cases a quarter of a mile had to be traversed to obtain a 

 bucketful. About £250 was raised by subscriptions, and by means of a 

 hydraulic ram at the spring-head the water is now forced into a reservoir 

 erected eighty feet above the level of the village, and by means of gravitation 



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