very far from what I have taken to be its mouth. We are also indebted to Mr. Godwin Austen for the discovery near this spot of banks of shingle and littoral shells, which indicate the position of the ancient coast-line. [Illustration: FIG. 126.--Physiography of Great Britain in Late Pleistocene Age. Shaded area = land now submerged; dotted area = region occupied by animals; plain area = region occupied by glaciers.] The view that the 100-fathom line marks the limit of the pleistocene land surface to the west, is held by Sir H. de la Bêche, Mr. Godwin Austen, Sir Charles Lyell, and other eminent geologists, and it is supported by many facts that can be explained in no other manner. To pass over the discovery of a fresh-water shell at the bottom of the English Channel, quoted above, the distribution of fossil mammalia at the bottom of the German Ocean (represented in Fig. 126 by the dotted area) is analogous to that which we find in the river gravels and brick-earths on the land. The quantity of teeth and bones belonging to the mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, horse, reindeer, and spotted hyæna, and other animals, dredged up by the fishermen in the German Ocean is almost incredible. Mr. Owles, of Yarmouth, informed me in 1868 that off that place there is a bank on which the fishing nets are rarely cast without bringing up fossil remains. It seems most probable, that these accumulations have been formed under subaerial conditions near the drinking places, or below the fords, which were used for ages by the pleistocene animals. I might quote as an example of a similar deposit of fossils on the land, that discovered in 1866 by Captain Luard, R.E., in digging the foundations of the new cavalry barracks at Windsor, which consisted mainly of bones and antlers of reindeer, with a few carnivores, such as the brown bear and wolf, that usually follow reindeer in their migrations in Siberia.[240] Were this submerged it would be a case precisely similar to that off Yarmouth. The ancient forest, exposed at low water under the cliffs on the Norfolk and Suffolk shores, flourished when the land stood higher than it does now. Traces of a similar forest, also at, and below, low-water mark, have been met with on the shore at Selsea, near Chichester, in Sussex; and remains of the mammoth have been dredged up in several places off the coast, as for example in Torbay and in Holyhead harbour, or found in gravel beds near low-water mark, as in the Isle of Wight, and on the north coast of Somerset at St. Audries, near Watchet, where a skull with gigantic tusks rested in the gravel. In all these facts we have ample proof that Britain stood at a higher level in the pleistocene age than at the present day.