86 
THE GEOLOGIST. 
of the simplest and probably of tbe earliest kind in nietal_, a mere 
flat piece of brass^ sliaped into the form of a double axe and 
intended to be fixed in a cleft handle ; I met with it at Southery 
in this county. Fragments of Querras_, and a few in good pre- 
sen^ation^ are very commonly founds constructed of a Breccia or 
pudding-stone, analagous and probably identical with that of 
Hertfordshire. 
We learn also, as already noticed_, that canoes have been dis- 
covered, and it seems, in various parts of the Level. On cut- 
ting a drain parallel with the river Witham, about two miles 
east of Lincoln, between that city and Horsley deeps, an ancient 
canoe was found in April 1816, at the depth of eight feet from 
the surface; it seemed hollowed out of an oak tree, thirty 
feet eight inches long, and measures three feet in the widest 
part ; the thickness of the bottom is between seven and eight 
inches. Three other canoes of the same character, have been 
removed from the fens around Lincoln, one of these is deposited 
in the British Museum. 
In a " Cambridge Chronicle,^^ published in June 1841, the 
following paragraph appeared, " As some men were employed 
digging gault last week in Haddenham fen, and had got about 
five feet below the surface, their spokes came in contact with a 
hard substance which they imagined would prove to be an old 
oak tree, many of which have been frequently found in the fens, 
within a few feet of the surface, but to their great astonishment, 
on removing the soil around it they discovered it to be an ancient 
canoe, bottom upwards, in length twenty-six feet, and in breadth 
something above four feet, with ruUocks for three pairs of oars j 
about five feet in length was broken off the canoe in getting it 
out. It appeared on close inspection to be hollowed out from 
the trunk of a single tree.''^ Tumuli are to be seen in some 
parts of the level ; in the Norfolk and Cambridge portions they 
are rarely to be found, indeed, in those districts, the country 
was so entirely a morass, that scites could scarcely be met with, 
eligible as depositories for the remains of the revered patrician. 
