We know that the neighbourhood of
the Isle of Sheppey, at the mouth of the Thames, was covered with
rich tropic vegetation; with screw pines and acacias, canes and
gourds, tenanted by opossums, bats, and vultures: that huge snakes
twined themselves along the ground, tortoises dived in the pools,
and crocodiles basked on the muds, while the neighbouring seas
swarmed with sharks as huge and terrible as those of a West Indian
shore.
It is all very wonderful, ladies and gentlemen: but be it is: and
all we can say is, with the Mussulman--"God is great."
And then--when, none knows but God--there came a time in which some
convulsion of nature changed the course of the sea currents, and
probably destroyed a vast tract of land between England and France,
and probably also, that sunken island of Atlantis of which old Plato
dreamed--the vast tract which connected for ages Ireland, Cornwall,
Brittany, and Portugal. That convulsion covered up the rich clays
with those barren sands and gravels, which now rise in flat and
dreary steppes, on the Beacon Hill, Aldershot Moors, Hartford Bridge
Flat, Frimley ridges, and Windsor Forest. That rich old world was
all swept away, and instead of it desolation and barrenness, piling
up slowly on its ruins a desert of sand and shingle, rising inch by
inch out of a lifeless sea. There is something very awful to me in
the barrenness of those Bagshot sands, after the rich tropic life of
the London clay.
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