course forms the watershed between the valleys of the Thames and the Ouse. The river gravel deposited by these streams rests usually upon the Gault, a bluish clay very finely comminuted and tenacious, and specially impervious to water. This bed is usually of considerable thickness, averaging 200 feet, and rests in turn on the Lower Greensand, which crops out at the western side of the county, and furnishes an abundant supply of excellent water, frequently rising in a fountain when artesian wells are pierced through the Gault. The chalk outliers are often capped by boulder clay, containing many travelled fragments of rock, usually ice-marked. The chalk itself is locally called "clunch," and is much used for building, some of the churches (e.g., Barrington) being entirely constructed of this material.

§ 6. The flora of Cambridgeshire is now poor in the extreme. Not a single fern, and very few wild-flowers, are to be found; while the interesting plants which once existed in the fens and on the chalk downs have vanished before the spread of cultivation, like the wild-fowl of the former and the bustard of the latter regions. The Great Copper butterfly, too, no longer brightens the reed-beds, and its companion, the Swallow-tail, is only found in remote nooks here and there.

§ 7. The whole county is rich in fossils; the river gravel furnishing remains of elephant, rhinoceros, hippopotamus, lion, hyæna, cave-bear, etc., and the secondary strata many species of birds, saurians, crustacea, and mollusca, with, in comparison, but few fishes, though sharks' teeth are found in extraordinary abundance, beautifully polished and as sharp as ever. These relics are chiefly contained in the Upper Greensand-a very thin stratum, full of green grains of glauconite and innumerable formless phosphatic nodules, locally, though mistakenly, called coprolites. They are probably concretions from the softer tissues of various animals and plants flourishing in a shallow sea,

and are so numerous and so rich in phosphate of lime that it has been found worth while to unearth and grind them for manure wherever they occur within twenty-five feet of the surface. A very large area of the Cam Valley has thus been turned over within the last half-century, to the great profit of the land-owners, these coprolites being usually worth some £150 per acre.

§ 8. To the coprolite industry we owe most of the materials for our sketch of the county in prehistoric periods. The systematic upturning of very large areas to the depth of from five to twenty-five feet has brought to light all relics of the past contained in the overlying soil; and though many objects of rare interest were lost or destroyed, especially in the earlier years of the excavation, by the ignorance and cupidity of the workmen, yet enough have been preserved in the University museums and in the custody of intelligent collectors to throw an unusual amount of light on the by-gone condition of the district.

§ 9. By the light thus afforded we get our earliest view of Cambridgeshire as a region of forest, sparsely wooded in the southern uplands, densely over the northern levels of the Fenland. It is strange to contrast the utterly treeless state of these reclaimed fens with what they were before they became fen. Below the peat of the marshes a forest bed covers the whole country, the stems and roots of oak, beech, hazel, and alder being found in abundance. The plain must therefore have been at that time not below the sea-level, as now, but sufficiently above it at least for the growth of all this timber. It is, indeed, fairly certain, on geological grounds, that the entire bed of the North Sea was then dry land-a vast plain through which our Eastern rivers meandered till they joined the great estuary of the Rhine near the present coast of Norway. Over this plain and through these forests wandered the rich fauna of the Pleistocene period; elephant, rhinoceros, and hippopotamus wallowing in the swamps

and browsing along the rivers; the red deer and the Irish elk, with his mighty horns, haunting the glades, along with the bison, the gigantic wild-ox (Bos primigenius), and their diminutive ally (Bos longifrons); while these and other ruminants furnished abundant prey to the great carnivora-lion, bear, and hyæna-whose remains are found intermingled with theirs in the débris of their native streams all over the county.

10. Nor are traces wanting to show the presence, even in those remote times, of human intelligence. The roughly-shaped unpolished flint axe-heads and arrowheads, ascribed by archæologists to the "river-bed men," are found in the same strata as the bones of these extinct monsters. The bases of stag's horns-sometimes shed in the course of nature, sometimes broken from the skullare also found in these strata, with the antler laboriously sawn off by the repeated cuts of some soon-blunted implement (such as a fragment of oyster-shell might be). Some specimens of these, dredged up off the coast of Essex, are in the British Museum. In the gravels of the Cam they are numerous, and, from the uniformity with which they have been treated, were evidently in common use amongst the savages of that period, though what purpose they can have served is still an undiscovered problem in archæology. But it is interesting to note that reindeer horns are to this day habitually so treated by the Esquimaux, with a view to utilizing the upper part of the antler. A pair of these sawn-off deer's horns form an essential part of the equipment of every dog - sledge. When the hunter has occasion to leave his team for a while, he drives these antlers deep into the snow, and thus anchors the sledge, which the dogs would otherwise be very likely to run away with.

II. As the ages passed on, land and sea assumed their present boundaries. Britain became an island, with the hills and dales, the shores and the rivers, which still

endure. The larger animals earliest became extinct; but the bear, the elk, and the wild-bull survived almost to historic times in the district. The skull of one of the last-named, wounded by a flint implement, a portion of which still remains embedded in the bone, was found in Burwell Fen in 1863, and is now in the Woodwardian Museum at Cambridge.

§ 12. The fashion of this implement shows a marked change from those met with in the earlier periods. It is no longer a mere flake, roughly chipped into the desired. shape, as of old, but a smoothly-polished weapon ground to a fine edge and bespeaking in its manufacture a great advance in art and intellect. This passage from the Palæolithic age of rough flakes to the Neolithic, with its well-wrought implements, marks, in fact, a greater step in human progress than any other change within our ken. From the "river-bed" savages we are separated by an absolute gulf; we know neither whence they came nor whither they disappeared, nor whether they were the progenitors or the victims of the later race whom we find occupying their ground. Some writers, indeed, have identified them with the Lapps and Esquimaux of our Arctic regions, but on such slender grounds as to be little better than pure conjecture. But from the Neolithic period onwards the advance of the human race can be traced; we meet with no further break in its history. Stone was succeeded by bronze, and bronze by iron, in the armoury of mankind, but each age passed gradually into the next, with no such gulf between as severs the two Stone Ages.

§ 13. The Neolithic weapons found in Cambridgeshire are sometimes discovered by the plough in the open fields, sometimes unearthed from the tombs of those who wielded them. These tombs are oblong barrows, distinguishable by their shape from the round tumuli of the subsequent Celtic interments, and the skulls of their oc

cupants show the same diversity. It is, indeed, a rule in archæology: "Long barrows, long skulls; round barrows, round skulls." This long-skulled race of flint-users is commonly known by the name of Ugrian, and tradition has preserved, in the fairy-tales of our childhood, many of its characteristics. The savage Ogre, the spiteful woodland Brownie, the crafty subterraneous Pixie, are reminiscences, filtered through many a tale round the winter fire, of the cannibalism, the complexion, the character, the habitations, and the stature, of this early

race.

§ 14. We can picture them to ourselves, by the flickering light of these old traditions: brown-skinned beings, sometimes of huge stature (as the owner of the famous Neanderthal skull must have been), but mostly diminutive, dwelling in the recesses of the forests, like the brown dwarfs (not improbably of the very same race), in Central Africa at this day, and like them savage, spiteful, crafty, skilful in the manufacture of murderous weapons, and thus dreaded by the superior races forming settlements amongst them.

§ 15. The legends which tell how Brownie and Pixie would flee from the very sight of iron teach us by what means the prehistoric flint-wielders were exterminated, driven to seek refuge in the chalk-pits whence their flints were procured, forced to remain unseen during the day, and only venturing above ground at nightfall, till finally the race became utterly extinct. The iron weapons of the incoming Aryan tribes, and their vast superiority both in physical force and in civilization, proved atogether too much for the earlier savages. Yet their extinction was probably a matter of centuries; and, indeed, there are not wanting authorities who contend that to this day there remain, notably in Ireland, many non-Aryan characteristics amongst the population of our islands, derived from this forgotten source.