Part Vii. the Changing Land.

The North Sea is only a recent flood in an old river valley. We must consider it not as a tract of permanent water, but as a lost hunting ground of our own ancestors, a pasturage for horses not very long ago.

In the year 5200 B.C. the Scandinavian glaciers, shrinking at the rate of about one mile a year (the rate of shrinkage in the Alps of St. Elias), withdrew from the province of Finland and the Baltic Lake. Let us suppose that, in that year a traveller from civilised Egypt made his way down the Rhine, and so entered the valley of North River, which is now flooded by the North Sea. At first this river wound its level way between low chalk downs, but presently the Thames came in from the West, and forested swampy clay-lands extended northward. Abreast of Aberdeen came the last chalk downs, and beyond that lay Arctic tundras where the delta widened to an ice-drifted sea nearly abreast of Faroe.

The whole valley was as varied in rock and soil as Eastern England, with little lakes, ridges of boulder clay, and downs of gorse and bracken. Northward across this verdant land crept succeeding waves of the fir, the oak, and the beech.

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Out on the delta coast, far to the right, beyond a deep sea channel, rose the white Ice-cap of Sweden, whose Ice-flood filled the Norway fjords with berg-breeding glaciers. Far to the left rose the ice-clad Grampians.

The Delta people and those of the Baltic Lake were poor savages living upon shell fish, and making mounds of shell refuse round their hearths. Inland were stronger peoples who had lake villages or trenched encampments on headlands of the downs.

As the grass followed the advancing fir woods, the primitive stock of Cloudland returned to pastures from whence it had been driven by the cold. These were not Duns, Bays, or striped, but native Cloudland horses adapted to this region of little sunshine. Strong Dun was not needed to guard them from the actinic rays of sunlight, so their dull colour had yellowish, brownish and reddish tones which blended with the landscape, such colours as are worn by the Celtic ponies of Britain and other Atlantic isles.

The wild horses were evolving three utterly different types. On the chalk downs, and on the limestone tracts north of the Humber, there were lightly built, slender, graceful horses of fair height. On the clays there were {44} horses, heavy, coarse, and slow. On the Breton, British and Scandinavian moors there were Celtic ponies.

It needed but little sinking of this land to flood the Delta, and open a long channel up the North River valley. The sea washed out the clay foundations of the forests. The sea breakers wielded boulders of the glacier-drift and hurled them like battering rams against the dissolving limestone of low cliffs. The tide swung gravels to tear out bays in the foreshores. Winter frosts cracked the headlands, and summer rains melted the ice cracks so that the capes fell into the sea in landslides. Thus the sea widened, biting its way deep into Europe until men began their losing fight with dykes for the saving of doomed netherlands. The North Sea cut its way through chalk downs into the English channel. The tribes who held fortified headlands of the chalk downs and set up temples at Stonehenge and Avebury on the mainland of Europe, about 1800 B.C. found that their country had become an island.

The old horse pasture of North-western Europe was split into sundered provinces by the advancing sea, but the breeds, native to a lost valley are still almost identical on either shore. The Breton and British moors have {45} one type of Celtic pony whose ancestral range extended across the Straits of Dover. The clay fens of Lincolnshire and of Holland still have draught horses alike in build and in colour. The limestone districts north of the Humber have the same tall horses as the similar provinces across the water in Schleswig, Holstein and Jutland. The granitic lands of Scotland and Norway have one type of the Celtic pony. (Low's Domesticated Animals.)

It is none of my business, but I cannot help feeling that the flooding at about the same period of the Lower Yukon and North River Valleys is something more than a coincidence. The Geological people are always cocksure that the sea cannot rise, that an hemisphere--the Southern, for example, cannot be flooded, and they assume quite blandly that lands have sunk, without explaining why. Their theories never seem really to fit that mighty wilderness, to which I have seen them come as visitors or strangers. Science will never understand until it learns to love.