The history and antiquities of Boston, and the villages of Skirbeck, Fishtoft, Freiston, Butterwick, Benington, Leverton, Leake, and Wrangle; comprising the hundred of Skirbeck, in the county of Lincoln. Including also a history of the East, West, and Wildmore fens, and copious notices of the Holland or Haut-Huntre fen ... sketches of the geology, natural history, botany, and agriculture of the district; a very extensive collection of archaisms and provincial words, local dialect, phrases, proverbs, omens, superstitions, etc. By Pishey Thompson. Illustrated with one hundred engravings.

GEOLOGY OF THE DISTRICT. 657
it would naturally relapse into its former state when these works were neglected.
The stormy period of intestine warfare which succeeded the era of the Roman
power in Britain would prevent that. attention being paid to those works, which,
from their perishable nature, they would constantly require. Excellent as is
the present state of the drainage of this district, what would be its condition if
all the public works were neglected, and the labour of man upon the sewers,
drains, and banks, suspended for only fifty years? When it is considered that,
from the time the Romans left England to the Conquest, a period of more than
six hundred years elapsed, during which time the kingdom was in a constant
intestine war; and when, to the neglect of all public works during that period
(a sufficient cause for the most disastrous effects), is added the ready means of
annoyance which any enemy possessed by the destruction of the banks, canals,
&c., there need be no wonder that this district should relapse into its ancient
state. Tradition asserts, that the sea-banks were cut by the Saxons. Be this
as it may, there is little doubt that the destruction of the country was occasioned by an irruption of the sea. STUKELEY and DUGDALE have supposed this
catastrophe to have been occasioned by an earthquake, which, by lowering the
level of the land several feet, exposed it to the inroads of the ocean. It may be
hazardous to oppose even the conjectures of such eminent men, but it seems
most philosophical to account for effects by the simplest adequate cause, and, no
doubt, the circumstances already detailed would be sufficient to lead to an
irruption of the sea, without the intervention of an earthquake. Mr. WHITAIER
attributes the formation of the soil on the eastern coast, and the different geological appearances and discoveries of boats, swarths of grass, &c., considerably
below the present surface, to the same causes as those which produced the formation of the Lancashire mosses; namely, the depositions of stagnant waters and
the aggregation and decomposition of vegetable matter.
Sir WILLIAM DUGDALE says,1" That the vast level of the fens was, at first, a firm dry land, and not annoyed with any
extraordinary inundation from the sea or stagnation of the fresh waters, I shall now
endeavour to manifest, which may, perhaps, seem strange to many; but when it is well
considered that timber trees will not grow and thrive where water, for the most part,
stands, or in moor, which by tract of time is bred and increased in such moist places, both
the one and the other may with much probability be granted.2 The case being then thus
stated, it now remains for me to prove that such have heretofore been bred and prospered
in sundry places of this now fenny country, which is no hard matter to do; divers persons,
yet living, being able to testify that in the late digging of those channels and drains, as have
been made for the exsiccation thereof, great numbers of such trees, of several kinds, have
been found, most of oak and fir, and few of them severed from their roots; but of such as
be so severed, the roots are observed to stand in the firm earth below the moor, of which
sort I myself have seen some that were taken up in the fens near Thorney, and have had
credible information of multitudes found in other places, whereof some were digged up at
the cutting of that large channel, called Downham Ea, which extendeth itself from Salter's
lode, about four miles northward, towards Linne.
"Moreover, in Marshland, about a mile westwards from Magdalen bridge, at the setting
down of a sluice, very lately, there was discovered at xvii feet deep divers furze bushes, as
also nut-trees, pressed flat down, with nuts sound and firm lying by them; the bushes and
trees standing in solid earth,below the silt, which hath been brought up by the inundation
of the sea, and in time raised to that great thickness; add hereunto what I have here
already observed in the Isle of Axholme, touching the trees of oak and fir found in such
great numbers at the making of those ditches and sewers for draining of that fen, which,
though it lie not contiguous to this, out of all doubt is on the like level, and was apparently
a woody country at the first. To give farther instance, therefore, to demonstrate so evident
1 Treatise on Embankment. tending each, as will be stated subsequently, ver.
2 Mr. ELSTOBB'S division of the Fen level into much dclears up the difficulty here started by DUGtwo districts, and his classification of the facts at- DALE.
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