suspect,' 'I seem to see,' are the strongest forms of speech which
ought to be used over a matter so vast and as yet so little
elaborated.

'I seem to see,' then, an epoch after those strata were laid down
with which geology generally deals; after the Kimmeridge clay, Oxford
clay, and Gault clay, which form the impervious bedding of the fens,
with their intermediate beds of coral-rag and green sand, had been
deposited; after the chalk had been laid on the top of them, at the
bottom of some ancient ocean; after (and what a gulf of time is
implied in that last 'after!') the boulder-clay (coeval probably with
the 'till' of Scotland) had been spread out in the 'age of ice' on
top of all; after the whole had been upheaved out of the sea, and
stood about the same level as it stands now: but before the great
valley of the Cam had been scooped out, and the strata were still
continuous, some 200 feet above Cambridge and its colleges, from the
top of the Gog-magogs to the top of Madingley Rise.

In those ages--while the valleys of the Cam, the Ouse, the Nene, the
Welland, the Glen, and the Witham were sawing themselves out by no
violent convulsions, but simply, as I believe, by the same slow
action of rain and rivers by which they are sawing backward into the
land even now--I 'seem to see' a time when the Straits of Dover did
not exist--a time when a great part of the German Ocean was dry land.
Through it, into a great estuary between North Britain and Norway,
flowed together all the rivers of north-eastern Europe--Elbe, Weser,
Rhine, Scheldt, Seine, Thames, and all the rivers of east England, as
far north as the Humber.

And if a reason be required for so daring a theory--first started, if