639 
The subsoil of this district is Oxford clay, lying in waves, 
and once forming the surface. Over this has swept at some 
very remote period a vast and violent tide of waters from 
the N.W. to the S.E. portion of the county, which has left 
thick beds of drift behind it, consisting of white silty clay, 
boulders, large yellow water-worn flints, numerous beds of 
gravel, teeth and bones of elephants and various animals,* 
besides other deposits. Lincolnshire has, apparently, to 
thank Yorkshire for such a furious inroad. Through some 
convulsion or shrinking of nature a compound and chaotic 
marine flood has swept along the vale of York and the 
north-eastern portion of Lincolnshire, until, reaching that 
point of Cliff hills through which the Witham flows, at 
Lincoln, it burst over the whole tract of the lowlands of 
that county, and found an exit eventually in the sea. This 
will fully account for the layer of white silty clay often 
found above the Oxford clay, and filled with marine shells, 
as well as for the boulders and beds of gravel, &c, such as 
those near Lincoln, at Kyme, Tattershall, Edenham, Baston, 
and Deeping, &c. So far the sea had lorded it over a consider- 
able portion of the Lincolnshire soil, but a rival now became 
predominant, — fresh-water was in the ascendant, and has 
plainly left the mark of its reign behind it in the form of a 
soapy blue clay, varying in tint and abounding with fresh- 
water shells. This is doubtless the deposit of sluggish 
streams and prevalent floods occasioned by the continual 
run of waters from the higher lands of the county before 
they were assisted on their way towards the sea by the hand 
of man ; but the ocean was not tamed as yet, and we can 
* At Partney, a fossil tooth was found, weighing two pounds three ounces, in 
the gravel bed near Partney Mill, in 1822, twelve feet below the surface. It w T as 
supposed to have been one of the grinders of a hippopotamus or elephant,-— 
Oldfield Addenda, p. 20. Another similar tooth was found at Quarrington, a 
few years ago, also in the gravel ; and the skull of a cetacean, from the Lin- 
colnshire fens, now in the Cambridge Museum, was supplied by the late Mr. 
Hopkinson, of Morton. 
