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noes, too, it is necessary to admit that the sea once covered to some depth the belts of flat ground that run along the margin of the Clyde at Glasgow, and hence that, since the days of the aborigines, the land has here actually risen above the sea.

Apart from questions of science, it is not uninteresting to mark at how early an epoch the advantages of the Clyde, as a maritime station, were recognised. The number of canoes shows that the river must have been much frequented, although no record remains to indicate what may have been the traffic in which they were engaged. What a suggestive contrast, too, is presented to us by the present and the ancient aspect of the scene! To-day all is bustle and business. Ships from the remotest corners of the earth come hither with their merchandize. Vast warehouses and stores are ranged row upon row along the margin of the river, and in these are piled the productions of every clime. Streets, noisy

with the rattle of wheels and the tread of horses and the hum of men, stretch away, to the right hand and the left, as far as the eye can reach. The air is heavy with the smoke belched out from thousands of chimneys. And so, day after day, the same endless din goes on; every year adding to it, as the streets and squares creep outward and the tide of human life keeps constantly flowing. But how different the scene when the early races navigated these waters! Down in the earth, beneath these very warehouses and streets, lies the bed of the old river with the remains of the canoes that floated on its surface-silent witnesses of the changes that have been effected, not less on the land than on its inhabitants. We can picture that dim, long-forgotten time, when the sea rose, at least five-and-twenty feet higher in the valley than it does now, and covered with a broad sheet of water the site of the lower parts of the present city of Glasgow. We see the skirts of the dark Caledonian forest sweeping away to the north among the mists and shadows of the distant hills. The lower grounds are

flats of stunted bent, on which there grows here and there a hazel or an alderbush, or, perchance, a solitary fir, beneath whose branches a herd of wild cattle, white as the driven snow, browse on the scanty herbage. Yonder, far to the right, a few red deer are slowly pacing up the valley, as the heron, with hoarse outcry and lumbering flight, takes wing, and a canoe, manned by a swarthy savage, with bow across his shoulders, pushes out from the shore. The smoke that curls from the brake in front shows where his comrades are busy before their tents hollowing out the stem of a huge oak, that fell on the neighbouring slope when the last storm swept across from the Atlantic. And there stretches the broad river-its surface never disturbed save by the winds of heaven, or by the plunge of the water-fowl, and the paddles of the canoes-its clear current never darkened except when the rain clouds have gathered far away on, the southern hills, and the spate comes roaring down the glens and the waterfalls, and hurries away red and rapid to lose itself in the sea. Such was the landscape when our forefathers first looked upon it. How came it to undergo so total a change? It is not merely that man himself has advanced, that he has uprooted the old forests, extirpated the wild cattle, driven away the red deer to the fastnesses of the mountains, drained the peat-bogs, covered the country with corn-fields and villages, and built along the margin of the river a great city. True, he has done all this, and has undoubtedly been the chief agent in the general change. But nature, too, has helped him. Those vast forces that are lodged beneath the crust of the earth have slowly upheaved the land, and have converted a large part of the bottom of the old estuary into good, dry ground, covered with the richest soil, and fitted in no common degree for the growth of streets. And hence, where his ancestors floated their rude boats he builds his warehouses, and on tracts that were ever wet with the ooze of river and sea, and bore no other

with their congeners, he now plants his country villas and lays out his pleasuregrounds.

If such extensive changes can be traced so clearly on the west side of the country, it may easily be supposed that traces of a similar revolution are not wanting on the east side. The estuary of the Forth, in its upper part, is bounded, especially along the southern margin, by a broad, levél plain, known as the "Carse of Falkirk." This flat ground extends away up the valley for some fifteen miles above Stirling, and even at its upper limit, not far from where the Forth bursts from the Highland mountains, its surface does not rise to a height of so much as forty feet above the level of the sea. In the lower part of the carse the surface is about twenty-five feet above high-water mark, and its inequalities are so slight that it looks like a dead level. Here again the reader will have no difficulty in recognising the old raised beach; he can picture the sea flowing over the surface of the carse at high-water, and retreating again as the tide ebbed. Here, too, below the grassy covering, the clay contains thousands of marine shells, grouped in regular layers exactly as the animals lived and died upon the spot. In so far, therefore, the evidence corresponds with that of the Clyde, and leads us to infer an elevation of the land to the extent of at least five-andtwenty feet. Nor are proofs lacking that here, too, this uprise was actually beheld by man. In the upper layers of the carse clay of the Forth, fully twenty feet above the highest level of the tide, the skeletons of no fewer than three whales have been at different times exhumed. They measured from seventy to eighty feet in length, and, in at least one instance, lay with the head pointing up the estuary, as if the animal had got into shallow water and had stranded while ascending from the sea. The most remarkable circumstance in connexion with the discovery of these skeletons was that two of them

were accompanied by a piece of perfora

workmanship, one of the pieces having still attached to it a fragment of the shaft of wood to which it had been fastened. Now, no whale could have advanced some miles inland to a height of twenty feet above high water, and we may be quite certain that the skeletons (which were entire) could not have been carried inland by the natives. There is only one solution of the question. The land has actually risen; and the occurrence of the two horn implements in undisturbed clay beside the skeletons proves that, when the whales stranded, man was already a denizen of the country, and, consequently, that the upheaval to which the island owes its present configuration has taken place within the human period.

The

The "human period," however, is daily becoming a more indefinite and extended epoch; for modern research tends to throw the early races of man farther back than the date which we have been in the habit of assigning to them. Is there nothing, then, in the nature or contents of the raised beach to tell about what part of this vast human period the last elevation of the Scottish coasts took place? If the space of this article permitted, it would not be difficult to show that the general bearing of the archæological evidence from the raised beach points to a not very remote era as the probable time when the elevation was effected. more finished of the Clyde canoes, the iron implements from the carses of the Forth and Tay, and the absence of what can be proved to be very ancient antiquities on the terrace of the old beach, are facts which indicate that the rise of the land was completed, not only after man had come to the country, but after he had passed out of his earlier stages of barbarism, and had become expert in the use of metal tools. Nay more, an examination of the Roman remains, more especially of the Wall of Antonine, where it terminates on the east at the Forth, and on the west at the Clyde, and the Wall of Severus at its end on the Solway Firth, will lead

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of level may even be, at least in part, later than the advent of the Romans to Britain. This fact, however, has not been hitherto recognised. The Antonine Wall has, indeed, been alleged to prove that since the time of the Romans no alteration of the relative level of sea and land has taken place. It is sufficient to reply, that the Wall, at both its eastern and western ends, lies above the limit of the raised beach. If we could restore the land to the position which it occupied when that beach was actually covered by the tides at high water—that is, if we could depress Scotland some twenty or five-and-twenty feet below the sea-level-no part of the Roman Wall would be submerged. So far from such a submersion overtaking any Roman antiquities along the Scottish coast, I believe it will really be found to explain various topographical difficulties, such as the position of certain Roman towns. and harbours.

Early in the summer of the past year, I was fortunate enough to light upon a sand-pit close to the margin of the Water of Leith, where that stream, after winding through the rich plains of Edinburghshire, enters the Firth of Forth, at Leith. In this opening were laid bare the various layers of sand, gravel, silt, and shells, to which reference has been so often made in this paper as the characteristic deposits of the raised beach. The height of these strata above the sealevel was about twenty-five feet, the same elevation as the surface of the Falkirk carse. The top of the sand-pit was probably about thirty feet. At a first glance, there was nothing to distinguish the section here displayed from the ordinary character of the old beach, where it runs up the estuary of a stream. The layers of sand and silt exactly resemble those which are at this moment being deposited along the neigbouring shores. In looking more narrowly, however, in company with my friend Dr. Young, of the Geological Survey, I succeeded, along with him, in detecting some fragments of pottery regularly imbedded in one of the silt beds, and overlaid by several feet

up this discovery, we obtained some additional pieces of the same kind of pottery, along with some fragmentary bones, which my friend regarded at the time as probably those of a deer. We submitted the pottery to the curator of the Antiquarian Museum, at Edinburgh, who allowed us to compare it with the collection of ceramic antiquities in the Museum. Its resemblance to the coarse yellow pottery of the larger Roman vessels was complete, in colour, texture, thickness, and, indeed, in its whole appearance. The curator, Mr. Macculloch, had previously indicated its apparently Roman character, and it was highly satisfactory to see the date of the fragments so clearly shown by the amphora and other utensils of the Museum. When we had ascertained that the pottery was really the work of Roman hands, the deduction that must be drawn from its occurrence where we found it, became clear enough. But, lest there should have been by any chance a mistake on our part as to the precise nature of the deposit in which the fragments lay imbedded, or as to the manner of their occurrence, we repaired once more to the sand-pit, taking another geological friend to assist. With the aid of a large pickaxe and spade we removed a considerable amount of the stiff, dark-coloured silt, and found a few more fragments of the same character as before. We fully confirmed our original observations. The fragments of pottery were imbedded in the silt horizontally, like the flatter stones and oyster valves, just es they would have been assorted by the tide upon the beach. Above them were thin layers of pure sand, intercalated in straight horizontal lines amid the silt, and over all came some bands of stratified shell-sand, with barnacles still adhering to some of the larger stones. These strata had thus never been disturbed since their deposition; and the fragments of pottery were so arranged as to preclude the possibility of their having been introduced from the surface through rents in the clay. The con

that these strata formed the shore when the fragments of pottery were thrown down where we found them, and that, since that period, the old beach has been elevated along with the rest of the country to a height of somewhere about five-and-twenty feet. The Roman origin of the pottery proved further that this elevation must have been effected since the year 80 of our era, that being the date of the first Roman invasion of Scotland.

It remains as the work of future years to determine to what extent the rest of Britain participated in this movement. That the upheaval extended over the whole of the centre of Scotland cannot be doubted. That it may have included at least the north of England is rendered not improbable, from the fact that the western end of the Wall of Severus, which reached the sea on the shores of the Solway, is now a long way distant from the shore. This interval may, however, be to some extent, the result of a silting up of the estuary. We have still to learn, too, about what century the upward movement ceased, for during the last three or four hundred years, at least, there does not appear to have been any change in the level of sea and land. It probably went on very

slowly, during those long dark centuries about which we know so little, the land rising inch by inch and foot by foot, and the sea appearing to creep back from cliff and sluice, making islets of submerged rocks, forsaking clefts and caves wherein it loved to boil and foam, and leaving wide level tracts of marshy ground along the margin of the firths and bays. So gradual and tranquil a change was little likely to attract attention, during those ages of wild warfare, when Caledonian and Roman, Pict and Scot, Saxon and Norman, alternately strove for the possession of the lonely moors and mountains, and gloomy impenetrable forests of ancient Scotland. We are not to expect to find it recorded among the wars and battles that form the main subject of our older chronicles. Yet it is far from impossible that accidental notices may there be found, helping us to understand how the upheaval went on, and about what period the land came to be stationary. I commend the subject to those who addict themselves to archæological pursuits. Every fact that tends in any way to show the progress of the change has not only a geological importance, but possesses no little interest in relation to our history as a great seafaring people.

RAVENSHOE

66

BY HENRY KINGSLEY, AUTHOR OF GEOFFRY HAMLYN.”

CHAPTER XLVII.

LADY HAINAULT'S BLOTTING-BOOK.

IN the natural course of events, I ought now to follow Charles in his military career, step by step. But the fact is that I know no more about the details of horse soldiering than a marine, and, therefore, I cannot. It is within the bounds of possibility that the reader may congratulate himself on my ignorance, and it may also be possible that

Within a fortnight after Hornby's introduction to Lord Saltire and Lady Ascot, he was off with the head-quarters of his regiment to Varna. The depôt was at Windsor, and there, unknown to Hornby, was Charles, drilling and drilling. Two more troops were to follow the head-quarters in a short time, and so well had Charles stuck to his duty that he was considered fit to take his place in one of them. Before his moustaches were properly grown, he found himself a soldier in good earnest.

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piest time he had, for he had got rid of the feeling that he was a disgraced man. If he must wear a livery, he would wear the Queen's; there was no disgrace in that. He was a soldier, and he would be a hero. Sometimes, perhaps, he thought for a moment that he, with his two thousand pounds worth of education, might have been better employed than in littering a horse, and swashbucklering about among the Windsor taverns; but he did not think long about it. If there were any disgrace in the matter, there was a time coming soon, by all accounts, when the disgrace would be wiped out in fire and blood. On the Sunday, when he saw the Eton lads streaming up to the terrace, the old Shrewsbury days, and the past generally, used to come back to him rather unpleasantly; but the bugle put it all out of his head again in a moment. Were there not the three most famous armies in the world gathering, gathering, for a feast of ravens ? Was not the world looking on in silence and awe, to see England, France, and Russia locked in a death-grip? Was not he to make one at the merry meeting? Who could think at such a time as this?

In

The time was getting short now. five days they were to start for Southampton, to follow the head-quarters to Constantinople, to Varna, and so into the dark thunder-cloud beyond. He felt as certain that he would never come back again, as that the sun would rise on the morrow.

He made the last energetic effort that he made at all. It was like the last struggle of a drowning man. He says that the way it happened was this. And I believe him, for it was one of his own mad impulses, and, like all his other impulses, it came too late. They came branking into some pot-house, half-adozen of them, and talked loud about this and that, and one young lad among them said, that "he would give a thousand pounds, if he had it, to see his sister before he went away, for fear she should think that he had gone off without thinking of her."

street. As he walked his purpose grew. He went straight to the quarters of a certain cornet, son to the major of the regiment, and asked to speak to him.

The cornet, a quiet, smooth-faced boy, listened patiently to what he had to say, but shook his head and told him he feared it was impossible. But, he said, after a pause, he would help him all he could. The next morning he took him to the major while he was alone at breakfast, and Charles laid his case before him so well, that the kind old man gave him leave to go to London at four o'clock, and come back by the last train the same evening.

The Duchess of Cheshire's ball was the last and greatest which was given that season. It was, they say, in some sort like the Duchess of Richmond's ball before Waterloo. The story I have heard is, that Lord George Barty persuaded his mother to give it, because he was sure that it would be the last ball he should ever dance at. At all events the ball was given, and he was right, for he sailed in the same ship as Charles four days after, and was killed at Balaclava. However, we have nothing to do with that. All we have to do with is the fact, that it was a very great ball indeed, and that Lady Hainault was going to it.

He

Some traditions and customs grow by degrees into laws, ay, and into laws less frequently broken than those made and provided by Parliament. Allow people to walk across the corner of one of your fields for twenty years, and there is a right of way, and they may walk across that field till the crack of doom. Allow a man to build a hut on your property, and live in it for twenty years, and you can't get rid of him. gains a right there. (I never was annoyed in either of these ways myself, for reasons which I decline to mention; but it is the law, I believe.) There is no law to make the young men fire off guns at one's gate on the 5th of November, but they never miss doing it. (I found some of the men using their rifles for this purpose last year, and had to

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