These questions have been touched upon by writers on the antiquities of our neighbourhood, but not in a very satisfactory way. The tradition that the Waveney, or a branch of it, used to enter the sea at Lowestoft, has been reproduced by several writers as part of a picture which represents Norwich and Beccles, and other places on the borders of our marshlands, as ports and fishing towns on the shore of a large inland sea or estuary over which ships sailed freely, and to which herrings innumerable used to pay their autumnal visit which they now confine to the sea outside. That the sea at some time flowed over at least a great part of this area is probably quite true. No tradition would be required to satisfy the most ordinary observer that such a condition of things might have once existed, nor would anything more be needed to give rise to such a tradition. The question is when did this condition of the surface exist, and when did it cease to exist. We will take as our guide to the solution of this problem a very interesting pamphlet by the late Mr. Edwards, the engineer employed in cutting out the channel for our harbour in 1829, entitled “The River Waveney—did it ever reach the sea via Lowestoft?” He thus commences his account of the physical history of the Waveney Valley— “First and in order of date, what can be gleaned from Geological evidence? It is universally admitted that the last great change of the surface of the earth, by whatever cause brought about, left the surface of the uplands very much in the same form in which we now find them.” p. 6. Mr. Edwards refrains from expressing any view as to the causes which brought about this last great change. He was probably not familiar with the explanation with which recent geological science has furnished us. If you refer to any of the more recent treatises on the geology of Great Britain, you will find somewhere in the later chapters an account of the subsidence and elevation of these islands during what is called the Glacial Period—movements due to what may be generally described as the settlement of the earth’s crust. {3}