Fordingbridge, we find them again occurring with remains of Elephas primigenius at about forty feet above the river.
The circumstances of the discoveries at Bournemouth seem at first sight almost irreconcilable with any river-hypothesis; as it is difficult to conceive how gravels capping the cliffs along the sea-shore for miles, and at an elevation of from 130 to 90 feet above its level, can have been deposited in such a position by the agency of a stream. And yet on a closer examination of the case, all such difficulties vanish, and the ancient existence of a river at such an elevation, and running in such a direction that it would leave these gravels to testify to its former course, seems absolutely demonstrable. Without being aware of the results at which others had arrived, I came, after due consideration of the facts of the case, to the conclusion that, as has already been mentioned in an earlier page, there must in ancient times have existed a river draining an extensive tract of country along the southern coast, and flowing in an easterly direction; and that of this river a portion still survives in an altered and enlarged condition as the Solent Sea, which separates the Isle of Wight from the mainland. Mr. Codrington, whose paper I have already so often quoted, arrived on independent grounds at substantially the same conclusion. But at an earlier epoch still—in 1862—before any flint implements had been found at Bournemouth, or indeed in any of the gravels of the South of England, the late Rev. W. Fox,[1] of Brixton, in the Isle of Wight, published nearly similar views as to the origin of the Solent. As his opinions cannot by any possibility be supposed to have been influenced by preconceived views as to the antiquity of man, I prefer stating the case, in the first instance, in his words rather than in my own:—"The severance of this island (the Isle of Wight) from the mainland, it appears to me, was effected under very unusual circumstances, and at a very distant period. The present channel of the Solent, being pretty nearly equally deep and equally broad throughout its entire length of twelve or fourteen miles, proves at once that it was not formed in the usual way of island-severing channels, that is, by gradual encroachments of the sea on the two opposite sides of a narrow neck of land" . . . "it is to be accounted for, therefore, not by the excavations of a gradually approaching sea, but, as I shall hereafter have to attempt to show, by its being originally the trunk or outlet of a very considerable river." . . . "Whoever, as a geologist,
- ↑ Geologist, vol. v. p. 452.
