times 10,000 years, and can with certainty be regarded as having been immensely in excess of such a lapse of time.
On the whole, it would seem that for the present, at least, we must judge of the antiquity of these deposits rather from the general effect produced upon our minds by the vastness of the changes which have taken place, both in the external configuration of the country and its extent seaward, since the time of their formation, than by any actual admeasurement of years or of centuries. To realize the full meaning of these changes, almost transcends the powers of the imagination. Who, for instance, standing on the edge of the lofty cliff at Bournemouth, and gazing over the wide expanse of waters between the present shore and a line connecting the Needles on the one hand, and the Ballard Down Foreland on the other, can fully comprehend how immensely remote was the epoch, when what is now that vast bay was high and dry land, and a long range of chalk downs, 600 feet above the sea, bounded the horizon on the south? And yet this must have been the sight that met the eyes of those primeval men who frequented the banks of that ancient river which buried their handiworks in gravels that now cap the cliffs, and of the course of which so strange but indubitable a memorial subsists in what has now become the Solent Sea.
Or again, taking our stand at Ealing, or Acton, or Highbury, and looking over a broad valley fully four miles in width, with the river flowing through it at a depth of 100 feet below its former bed, in which, beneath our feet, are relics of human art deposited at the same time as the gravels; which of us can picture to himself the lapse of time represented by the excavation of a valley on such a scale, by a river larger, it may be, in volume than the Thames, but still draining only the same tract of country? But when, to this long period we mentally add that during which the old fauna, with the mammoth and rhinoceros, and other to us strange and unaccustomed forms, was becoming extinct, so far as Britain was concerned; and also that other, we know not how lengthened period, when our barbarous predecessors sometimes polished their stone implements, but were still unacquainted with metallic tools; and then beyond this, add the many centuries when bronze was in use for cutting purposes; and after all this, further remember that the ancient and mighty
