560 CHANGES OF THE SURFACE OF THE LAND. 



intercourse might have been carried on from the islands and adjoining country. This 

 speculation is apparently confirmed by the composition of the peaty soil, and from 

 its lying in a hollow upon gravel, supposed to have been the bottom of the ancient 

 lake. It is further imagined, that, in former times, this lake discharged its waters 

 into the river Tern, near Slean, and was converted into a peat bog by the bursting 

 of a dam, near Longdon upon Tern, where considerable heaps of gravel attest the 

 probability of such an operation. These tracts, after passing through a condition 

 of bog or peat moss, were gradually consolidated, and then became a waste, which 

 from ancient records, is known to have constituted part of the " Vasta Regalia," or 

 Royal Forest 1 , which included the Wrekin and the wild, or weald (woody) moors. 

 In corroboration of these views it may be stated, that stags' horns (Cervus Elaphus) 

 with freshwater shells and arrow heads, have frequently been found in the peat. These 

 speculations and the data on which they are founded seem to afford a good explanation 

 of the process by which many similar tracts in Lancashire, Cheshire, and the central 

 counties may have been drained. 



Whilst we thus trace the natural progress from lakes into bogs with forests, and from 

 these into land in its actual state, we are entitled to speculate on a more ancient ter-, 

 restrial condition, yet still subsequent to the last great elevations of the land from be- 

 neath the sea, when the fossil elk of Ireland and other gigantic animals of lost species 

 were in existence ; for although we have not yet heard of these remains being found in 

 Shropshire (where after all little search has been made to detect them), it is certain that 

 such have been discovered in the low parts of Lancashire, &c, tracts which we have 

 shown to have been laid dry at the same period with those the nature of which we have 

 been considering 9 . 



If the careful examination of such districts conducts the historical inquirer back to 

 the period immediately preceding the present, the geologist easily transports himself to 

 remoter conditions of dry land, when the mammoth, hippopotamus, rhinoceros, hyama, 

 and other wild animals of species now extinct, inhabited the regions, which were then 

 dry. 



■ " cumque 



Rara per ignotos errent animalia montes." 



Tracing the inquiry still further back, he discovers in the newer tertiary deposits, but 

 formed long anterior to our sera, the remains of mammalia still more distinct from those 

 of our own epoch, such as the Mastodon, and proves a yet more ancient condition of 



» Sir Humphrey de Eyton was ranger of this forest in 1390. 



■ It has been stated that portions of the Gigantic Elk, Cervus giganteus (Cuvier), have been found in the 

 gravel in the low flat of Awre, near Purton Passage, where the Severn is fast passing into an estuary. I am 

 not aware that this is correct, for in a list of remains found in this alluvium given by the Rev. C. Pleydell, 

 Quarterly Journal of Science, January, 1830; the animal remains, with the exception of fossils of has and 

 adjacent rocks, would appear to belong to existing species of deer, horse, hog, &c. 



