gathers in its main tributaries, and the greater part of the surface is covered with recent alluvial deposits. The Trent runs north in the southern half of this plain, the Ouse runs south through the northern half, which is known as the Vale of York, lying low between the Pennine heights on the west and the Yorkshire moors on the east. Where the plain reaches the sea, the soft rocks are cut back into the estuary of the Tees, and there Middlesbrough stands at the base of the Moors. The quiet beauty of the rural country in the south, where the barren Bunter pebble-beds have never invited agriculture, and where considerable vestiges of the old woodland still remain in and near Sherwood Forest, has attracted so many seats of the landed aristocracy as to earn for that part the familiar name of "the Dukeries." The central position of York in the north made it the capital of Roman Britain in ancient times, and an important railway junction in our own. The eastern division. Five natural regions may be distinguished in the Eastern Division of England, by no means so sharply marked off as those of the west, but nevertheless quite clearly characterized. The first is the Jurassic Belt, sweeping along the border of the Triassic plain from the south coast at the mouth of the Exe to the east coast at the mouth of the Tees. This is closely followed on the south-east by the Chalk country, occupying the whole of the rest of England except where the Tertiary Basins of London and Hampshire cover it, where the depression of the Fenland carries it out of sight, and where the lower rocks of the Weald break through it. Thus the Chalk appears to run in four diverging fingers from the centre or palm on Salisbury Plain, other formations lying wedge-like between them. Various lines of reasoning unite in proving that the Mesozoic rocks of the south rest upon a mass of Palaeozoic rocks, which lies at no very great depth beneath the surface of the anticlinal axis running from the Bristol Channel to the Strait of Dover. The theoretical conclusion has been confirmed by the discovery of Coal Measures, with workable coal seams, at Dover at a depth of 2000 ft. below the surface.