Page:Early Man in Britain and His Place in the Tertiary Period.djvu/284

256 can boast the presence of any natural trees deserving of the name. Cultivated saplings are protected by walls, but they cannot raise their tops above the level of the copestones. And yet the mosses and sunk forests of those regions abound with fallen trees, many of which equal in thickness the body of a man. When these buried trees decked the now bleak island with their greenery, the land stood at a higher level, and the neighbouring ocean at a greater distance. A study of similar appearances in the Inner and Outer Hebrides will induce us to form a like opinion of the changes which they indicate. The broad barren flats of Caithness were also in ancient times overspread with a thick growth of large-sized natural wood, the peat mosses containing which pass below the sea. To have permitted this strong forest growth we are again compelled to admit a former elevation of the land and a corresponding retreat of the ocean. And so on of all the maritime regions of Scotland.

"The same inferences may be drawn from the facts disclosed by the mosses of Ireland and England. On the coasts of France and Holland, as I have said, peat dips underneath the sea; and along those bleak maritime regions of Norway, where now-a-days the pine-tree will hardly grow, we find peat mosses which contain the remains of full-grown trees, such as are only met with in districts much farther removed from the influence of the sea."

From the great thickness of the bark of the Scotch firs in the buried forests. Dr. Geikie infers that the climate was more severe when the trees were alive than now, and more like that of the wooded regions of