47 
Westbury. This road is about seven feet below the existing surface of the 
peat, and as birch and alder poles, of which it ia constructed, will rot, if 
exposed to the weather, in three or four years, it is evident that from 
some cause or ofher this road must have been covered with peat or 
water soon after its construction. At the same depth are found hazel 
bushes with leaves, and the fruit more than half ripe on them, and the 
roots and stumps of birch and alder bushes standing as they grew. 
The peat here, too, is from fifteen to twenty-five feet deep, and I have 
seen clay brought up from about fifteen feet deep, which was perforated 
in different directions by the fibres of plants. The upper beds of peat 
are cut out for fuel, to seven or eight feet deep, but below that the peat 
bed are not used for fuel. They seem to consist of beds of undecayed reeds, 
and are evidently formed of a different sort of vegetation from the upper 
beds. The human bones and pottery found at the canal basin shew that the 
subsidences of surface, of which the foregoing facts afford evidence, have 
taken place since this part of England was inhabited by man. There is 
reason to believe, nevertheless, that some of them at least must have taken 
place before the Mammoth and other great extinct mammalia had disappeared 
from this district, for in the year 1835 the skull ot a Mammoth was found 
projecting from the gravel on the beach at St. Audries, and some of the 
teeth were then secured, but Mr. Webb, who found it, did not secure the 
skull or search for the other parts of the body ; and Sir Alexander Hood, a 
few years since, found the tusks of the animal projecting from the shingle. 
This part of the coast is formed of lias reefs, and these remains were found 
in the shingle and mud deposited between the edges of two of them. The 
skull had disappeared when Sir A. Hood found the tusks. In other parts of 
the district bones of the Mammoth and lihinosceros have been found. When 
the excavations for the Gaol at Taunton were being made, the bones of a Rhinos- 
ceros were found there. These evidences of subsidence do not exhaust the 
evidence of change which this district affords. There are indications of a 
time when the line of beach against the sea was some twenty or thirty feet 
higher than it is now ; but I will not enter into that question now, except 
to say that these subsidences and elevations are not limited to this compara- 
tively small district, but I have traced both unmistakeably at Northam 
Burrows and Cornborough, in Barnstaple Bay, and the latter (I believe) also 
at Falmouth, on the opposite side of the Peninsula of Devon and Cornwall. 
It would be very interesting if some public society would invite information 
from all parts of the West of England, to throw light on these curious 
changes, and, if possible, to fix approximately the dates of them." 
At the conclusion of Mr. Poole's remarks, which were listened to with 
great interest, the members proceeded down the hill to East Brent, where, 
