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grew warmer again. Now what proof is there of that? This. Underneath London--as, I dare say, many of you know--there lies four or five hundred feet of clay. But not ice-clay. Anything but that, as you will see. It belongs to a formation late (geologically speaking), but somewhat older than those Disco Island beds. And what sort of fossils do we find in it? In the first place, the shells, which are abundant, are tropical-- Nautili, Cones, and such like. And more, fruits and seeds are found in it, especially at the Isle of Sheppey. And what are they? Fruits of Nipa palms, a form only found now at river-mouths in Eastern India and the Indian islands; Anona-seeds; gourd-seeds; Acacia fruits--all tropical again; and Proteaceous plants too--of an Australian type. Surely your common sense would hint to you, that this London clay must be mud laid down off the mouth of a tropical river. But your common sense would be all but certain of that, when you found, as you would find, the teeth and bones of crocodiles and turtles, who come to land, remember, to lay their eggs; the bones, too, of large mammals, allied to the tapir of India and South America, and the water-hog of the Cape. If all this does not mean that there was once a tropic climate and a tropic river running into some sea or other where London now stands, I must give up common sense and reason as deceitful and useless faculties; and believe nothing, not even the evidence of my own senses. And now, have I, or have I not, fulfilled the promise which I made-- rashly, I dare say some of you thought--in my first paper? Have I, or have I not, made you prove to yourself, by your own common sense, that the lowlands of Britain were underneath the sea in the days in which these pebbles and boulders were laid down over your plains? Nay, have we not proved more? Have we not found that that old sea was an icy sea? Have we not wandered on, step by step, into a whole true fairyland of wonders? to a time when all England, Scotland, and Ireland were as Greenland is now? when mud streams have rushed down from under glaciers on to a cold sea-bottom, when "ice, mast high, came floating by, as green as emerald?" when Snowdon was sunk for at least fourteen hundred feet of its height? when (as I could prove to you, had I time) the peaks of the highest Cumberland and Scotch mountains alone stood out, as islets in a frozen sea? We want
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