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JOURNAL OF THE PLYMOUTH INSTITUTION. 
of having heard that other horns and trunks of trees were found 
at the same time j and a few weeks since applied to our late towns- 
man, Mr. Alexander Hubbard, by whose firm the excavation for the 
docks was carried out, for any information he might be able to 
give. Fortunately he had the information needed ; and he very 
kindly sent me not only a statement of what he recollected of the 
facts, but a sketch of the site before the works commenced. The 
original water-line ran at an angle Avith the Saltash Road, in such 
a manner that the whole of what is now the South Basin, and all 
except the north-eastern corner of the North Basin, were below high- 
water mark. Where the tide flowed the slate rock of the locality 
was covered with mud, and at the south-western corner of the 
South Basin the rock was fifty feet below high -water springs, and 
buried in mud to the depth of twenty-five feet. At the north- 
western corner of the North Basin the rock was about eighteen 
feet below high-water springs, with very little mud covering it ; in 
fact, at extreme low tides the rock was visible. The mud was of a 
fatty, alluvial character; and (I quote here Mr. Hubbard's own 
words) " there was scarcely any vegetable remains or anything like 
a peat bed, except in one place, where there was nearly one foot of 
it and an old trunk of a tree blackened, somewhere near the centre, 
between the two basins." The evidence therefore is ample, that 
although the extent of the portion left could not have been large, 
the remains of a true submerged forest in the estuary of the 
Tamar were discovered when the Keyham Docks were made. 
And the chief interest to us here is that this ancient forest 
bed, like those in Barnstaple, Bridgwater, and Tor Bays, and those 
KEYHAM PICK. 
