heaths near London, and as far north-east as Lincolnshire; in which
case it will belong to the Germanic fauna. Now, here again we have
cases of animals which have just been able to get hither before the
severance of England and France; and which, not being reinforced
from the rear, have been forced to stop, in small and probably
decreasing colonies, on the spots nearest the coast which were fit
for them.

I trust that I have not kept you too long over these details. What
I wish to impress upon you is that Hampshire is a country specially
fitted for the study of important bio-geological questions.

To work them out, you must trace the geology of Hampshire, and
indeed, of East Dorset. You must try to form a conception of how
the land was shaped in miocene times, before that tremendous
upheaval which reared the chalk cliffs at Freshwater upright,
lifting the tertiary beds upon their northern slopes. You must ask-
-Was there not land to the south of the Isle of Wight in those ages,
and for ages after; and what was its extent and shape? You must
ask--When was the gap between the Isle of Wight and the Isle of
Purbeck sawn through, leaving the Needles as remnants on one side,
and Old Harry on the opposite? And was it sawn asunder merely by
the age-long gnawing of the waves? You must ask--Where did the
great river which ran from the west, where Poole Harbour is now, and
probably through what is now the Solent, depositing brackish water-
beds right and left--where, I say, did it run into the sea? Where
the Straits of Dover are now? Or, if not there, where? What, too,
is become of the land to the Westward, composed of ancient
metamorphic rocks, out of which it ran, and deposited on what are
now the Haggerstone Moors of Poole, vast beds of grit? What was the