Down Elbe or Weser he
must have floated, ice-packed, or swept away by flood, till somewhere
off the Doggerbank, in that great network of rivers which is now open
sea, he or his descendants turned up Ouse and Little Ouse, till they
found a mere like their old Prussian one, and there founded a tiny
colony for a few generations, till they were eaten up by the savages
of the table dwelling; or died out--as many a human family has died
out--because they found the world too hard.
And lastly, my friend Mr. Brady, well known to naturalists, has found
that many forms of Entomastraca are common to the estuaries of the
east of England and to those of Holland.
It was thus necessary, in order to account for the presence of some
of the common animals of the fen, to go back to an epoch of immense
remoteness.
And how was that great lowland swept away? Who can tell? Probably
by no violent convulsion. Slow upheavals, slow depressions, there
may have been--indeed must have been--as the sunken fir-forests of
Brancaster, and the raised beach of Hunstanton, on the extreme north-
east corner of the Wash, testify to this day.
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