erful
history. It is full of stumps of trees standing as they grew.
Fir-trees are there with their cones, and hazel-bushes with their
nuts; there stand the stools of oak and yew trees, beeches and
alders. Hence this stratum is appropriately called the "forest-bed."
It is obvious that the chalk must have been upheaved and converted
into dry land before the timber trees could grow upon it. As the bolls
of some of these trees are from two to three feet in diameter, it is
no less clear that the dry land thus formed remained in the same
condition for long ages. And not only do the remains of stately oaks
and well-grown firs testify to the duration of this condition of
things, but additional evidence to the same effect is afforded by the
abundant remains of elephants, rhinoceroses, hippopotamuses, and other
great wild beasts, which it has yielded to the zealous search of such
men as the Rev. Mr. Gunn.
When you look at such a collection as he has formed, and bethink you
that these elephantine bones did veritably carry their owners about,
and these great grinders crunch, in the dark woods of which the
forest-bed is now the only trace, it is impossible not to feel that
they are as good evidence of the lapse of time as the annual rings of
the tree-stumps.
Thus there is a writing upon the wall of cliffs at Cromer, and whoso
runs may read it. It tells us, with an authority which cannot be
impeached, that the ancient sea-bed of the chalk sea was raised up,
and remained dry land, until it was covered with forest, stocked with
the great game whose spoils have rejoiced your geologists. How long it
remained in that condition cannot be said; but "the whirligig of time
brought its revenges" in those days as in these. That dry land, with
the bones and teeth of generations of long-lived elephants, hidden
away among the gnarled roots and dry leaves of its ancient trees, sank
gradually to the bottom of the icy sea, which covered it with huge
masses of drift and boulder clay. Sea-beasts, such as the walrus, now
restricted to the extreme north, paddled about where birds had
twittered among the topmost twigs of the fir-trees. How long this
state of things endured we know not, but at length it came to an end.
The upheaved glacial mud hardened into the soil of modern Norfolk.
Forests grew once more, the wolf and the beaver replaced the reindeer
and the elephant; and at length what we call the history of England
dawned.
Thus you have, wit
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