gaining upon it. The whole of Romney Marsh, in Kent and Sussex,
formerly constituted an arm of the sea, where vessels rode in deep
water, carrying produce to ports no longer in existence. Lydd and
Romney, though maritime still in name, retaining some of the ancient
privileges of the Cinque Ports, have become, through changes in the
coast-line, small inland towns; and the same has been the fate of Rye,
Winchelsea, and other places in that district. Again, the Isle of
Thanet, in the north-eastern corner of Kent, has practically ceased to
be an island. The wide estuary of the sea separating it from the
mainland, through which ships sailed from the English Channel into the
Thames, using it as the shortest route from the south to London, has
entirely disappeared, leaving only a flat lowland traversed by branches
of the river Stour to mark its former existence. The sea is encroaching
over a considerable extent of coast-line on the North Sea as well as on
the English Channel. Ravenspur, once an important town of Yorkshire,
where Bolingbroke, afterwards Henry IV., landed in 1399, is now
submerged; and Dunwich and other ancient ports in East Anglia have met
with the same fate. The process of destruction, slow in some places, is
so rapid in others that it can be traced even from month to month--the
incessant work of the waves washing away the soft strata at the base of
the cliffs and leaving the summits unsupported. Many cliffs of the east
coast, from the Humber to the mouth of the Thames, are suffering from
this destructive action, and instances also occur on the south coast. A
royal commission on Coast Erosion was appointed to inquire into this
question in 1906 (see _Report_, 1907 sqq.).

Except along the centre of the Irish Sea, at one point off the Tweed and
one between Devon and Normandy, the depth of water between England and
the nearest land nowhere exceeds 50 fathoms.

_Rivers._--The variations in length of the general slope of the land
towards successive natural divisions of the coast may be illustrated by
a comparative table of the mileage and drainage areas of the principal
English rivers. The mileage does not take account of the lesser
sinuosities of rivers.

With the exception of those in the Lake District (q.v.) the lakes of
England are few and insignificant. A number of small meres occur in a
defined area in Cheshire. (O. J. R. H.)

II. PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY

The object of this section is to give a physica