Page:The Zoologist, 4th series, vol 1 (1897).djvu/469

Rh Ouse, Spelman says:—'All these parts often suffer loss from the river overflowing the marshes, but yet the gain annually is not small (from the fertilizing nature of the waters), besides the great abundance of fish and other water creatures (as wildfowl that are there attracted). This river is, as it were, the milky way to many inland places, for by it they import and export largely merchandise and the necessaries of life.' But this is as nothing to his praises of Lynn, with his remarks on which earthly paradise I must depart out of the Fens. 'Lynn,' says Spelman, 'is so well provided by nature with esculents and drinks, that it may seem to be the storehouse both of Ceres and Bacchus; for on its eastern side there is a great abundance of corn, eggs, Rabbits, and land birds, while on the western side there is a like abundance of cheese, butter, Oxen, Swans, and marsh birds; and in the neighbourhood of fish—on the one side sea-fish, and on the other river and fresh-water fish; so that scarcely in all Britain, perhaps in all Europe, is so great an abundance of eatables to be met with in like space.'"

We will now cross the county, and visit the great alluvial plain intersected by sluggish rivers, and studded with open sheets of water known as "Broads," lying in the south-eastern corner, and extending southward to Lowestoft, in Suffolk. The rivers are the Bure, the Yare, and the Waveney, with their tributaries flowing through valleys excavated in the glacial beds, the alluvial deposit in which is of great depth, and the process of growing up is still rapidly progressing, whilst the drier portions known as mowing marshes year by year are becoming more solid. In the north are the Horsey and Waxham marshes, further inland the valley of the Bure has its miles of reed-rond and mowing marsh; but the finest stretch of all is the great level plain, affording in summer and early autumn pasturage for innumerable cattle and sheep, through which the traveller by rail passes in his journey from Reedham eastward to Yarmouth, or south-east nearly to Lowestoft. I do not know the extent of the marshes in the valley of the Waveney to which your correspondent, Mr. Farman, refers, there must be many thousands of acres; but, confining my remarks to the county of Norfolk, this great alluvial piain comprises some 14,000 acres. Again quoting from the address before referred to:—