To speak further of this river it may be mentioned, incidentally, that to-day its upper reaches still exist and that the relatively small stream remaining is called the Thames. Beside and across it lies the greatest city in the world and its mouth is upon what is called the English Channel. At the time when the baby, Ab, slept that afternoon in his nest in the beech leaves this river was not called the Thames, it was only called the Running Water, to distinguish it from the waters of the coast. It did not empty into the British Channel, for the simple and sufficient reason that there was no such channel at the time. Where now exists that famous passage which makes islands of Great Britain, where, tossed upon the choppy waves, the travelers of the world are seasick, where Drake and Howard chased the Great Armada to the Northern seas and where, to-day, the ships of the nations are steered toward a social and commercial center, was then good, solid earth crowned with great forests, and the present little tail end of a river was part of a great affluent of the Rhine, the German river famous still, but then with a size and sweep worth talking of. Then the Thames and the Elbe and Weser, into which tumbled a thousand smaller streams, all went to feed what is now the Rhine, and that then tremendous river held its course through dense forests and deep gorges until it reached broad plains, where the North Sea is to-day, and blended finally with the Northern Ocean. The trees which stood upon the bank of the great river, or which could be seen in the far distance beyond the marsh or plain, were not all the same as now exist. There was still a distinctive presence of the towering conifers, something such as are represented in the redwood forests of California to-day, or, in other forms, in some Australian woods. There was a suggestion of the fernlike but gigantic age of growth of the distant past, the past when the earth's surface was yet warm and its air misty, and there was an exuberance of all plant and forest growth, something compared with which the growth in the same latitude, just now, would make, it may be, but a stunted showing. It is wonderful, though, the close resemblance between most of the trees of the cave man's age, so many tens of thousands of years ago, and the trees most common to the temperate zone to-day. The peat bogs and the caverns and the strata of deposits in a host of places tell truthfully what trees grew in this distant time. Already the oak and beech and walnut and butternut and hazel reared their graceful forms aloft, and the ground beneath their spreading branches was strewn with the store of nuts which gave a portion of food for many of the beasts and for man as well. The ash and the yew were there, tough and springy of fiber and destined in the far future to become famous in song and story, because they would furnish the wood from which was made the weapon of the bowman. The maple was there with all its symmetry.