utterly unable to escape through rivers which have enough to do to
drain the hills around; it is easy to understand how peat, the
certain product of standing water, has slowly overwhelmed the rich
alluvium, fattened by the washing of those phosphatic greensand beds,
which (discovered by the science of the lamented Professor Henslow)
are now yielding round Cambridge supplies of manure seemingly
inexhaustible. Easy it is to understand how the all-devouring, yet
all-preserving peat-moss swallowed up gradually the stately forests
of fir and oak, ash and poplar, hazel and yew, which once grew on
that rank land; how trees, torn down by flood or storm, floated and
lodged in rafts, damming the waters back still more; how streams,
bewildered in the flats, changed their channels, mingling silt and
sand with the peat-moss; how Nature, left to herself, ran into wild
riot and chaos more and more; till the whole fen became one 'Dismal
Swamp,' in which the 'Last of the English' (like Dred in Mrs. Stowe's
tale) took refuge from their tyrants, and lived, like him, a free and
joyous life awhile.

For there were islands, and are still, in that wide fen, which have
escaped the destroying deluge of peat-moss; outcrops of firm land,
which even in the Middle Age preserved the Fauna and Flora of the
primaeval forest, haunted by the descendants of some at least of
those wild beasts which roamed on the older continent of the 'gravel
age.' The all-preserving peat, as well as the monkish records of the
early Middle Age, enable us to repeople, tolerably well, the
primaeval fen.

The gigantic ox, Bos primigenius, was still there, though there is no
record of him in monkish tales. But with him had appeared (not
unknown toward the end of the gravel age) another ox, smaller and