The names of places are frequently very descriptive of their situation, as Wilton, near Salisbury, or, as it known in ancient records, Willytown—the town on the Willy, a river running through it to Salisbury, where it unites with other streams, and flows into the English Channel at Christchurch. We propose to take this as our guide on the present occasion, and establish our hypothesis by several concurrent facts. The term _Lav_ or _Lave_ may either mean watered—washed, left, or hidden; and the termination _ton_, which is a very general one, a town, as Easterton, Littleton, Maddington, and Shrewton. Situated as Lavington is at the foot of the downs, which rise to a considerable altitude above it, with hills on the opposite side of nearly equal height, seen from either it appears to lie in a complete basin, every way adapted to act as a drain or receiver of water from the uplands—a fact illustrated in the years 1841–2, when a great destruction of property-took place at Shrewton, through inundations occasioned by the accumulation of water by the rapid thawing of the snow in various natural basins in the vicinity, as at Candown Bottom and other places. The soil of the valley, so favourable to the cultivation of edible roots, being marked by the combined characters of the surrounding barriers. In some parts of the kingdom there are places where well-defined and specific geological features conduct to certain conclusions, such as the primeval deposits of virgin soil—the annual product of rank foliage where the foot of man for ages never trod, which, when brought to tillage, yields successive crops of abundance—the subsidence of a vast and overwhelming inundation—the retreat of the watery element after ages of possession, leaving its hitherto submerged bed high and dry. As an illustration, we may refer to the subsoil of Bath, which is stone of so friable a nature as to be easily affected by the elements, and, if examined, will be found a combination of various shells, which plainly tell its former state, or the severance of some great and terrible convulsion, forming vast chasms, and exhibiting the various strata of rocks far down in the womb of the earth. There is a very good display of this at villas in the neighbourhood of Frome, Somersetshire, and at Clifton Hotwells, near Bristol, or in places round the Isle of Wight, and in the coal-fields at Radstock, and each of these present their own peculiar characters; but here we have on either side of the valley a separate and distinct formation. The downs predominate in chalk, on a stony brackish soil, with but a thin layer of vegetable earth on a substratum of flint and gravel; the exception of the hollows no way interfering with the general state. On the opposite side there is sand to the depth of several feet resting upon sandstone, with occasional layers of granite, then again sand and sandstone, ultimating in a subsoil of granite, and this extends for several miles.