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If we add to this, a slope in the fen rivers so extraordinarily slight, that the river at Cambridge is only thirteen and a half feet above the mean sea level, five-and-thirty miles away, and that if the great sea-sluice of Denver, the key of all the eastern fen, were washed away, the tide would back up the Cam to within ten miles of Cambridge; if we add again the rainfall upon that vast flat area, utterly unable to escape through rivers which have enough to do to drain the hills around; it is easy to understand how peat, the certain product of standing water, has slowly overwhelmed the rich alluvium, fattened by the washing of those phosphatic greensand beds, which (discovered by the science of the lamented Professor Henslow) are now yielding round Cambridge supplies of manure seemingly inexhaustible. Easy it is to understand how the all-devouring, yet all-preserving peat-moss swallowed up gradually the stately forests of fir and oak, ash and poplar, hazel and yew, which once grew on that rank land; how trees, torn down by flood or storm, floated and lodged in rafts, damming the waters back still more; how streams, bewildered in the flats, changed their channels, mingling silt and sand with the peat-moss; how Nature, left to herself, ran into wild riot and chaos more and more; till the whole fen became one ‘Dismal Swamp,’ in which the ‘Last of the English’ (like Dred in Mrs. Stowe’s tale) took refuge from their tyrants, and lived, like him, a free and joyous life awhile.

For there were islands, and are still, in that wide fen, which have escaped the destroying deluge of peat-moss; outcrops of firm land, which even in the Middle Age preserved the Fauna and Flora of the primaeval forest, haunted by the descendants of some at least of those wild beasts which roamed on the older continent of the ‘gravel age.’ The all-preserving peat, as well as the monkish records of the early Middle Age, enable us to repeople, tolerably well, the primaeval fen.

The gigantic ox, Bos primigenius, was still there, though there is no record of him in monkish tales. But with him had appeared (not unknown toward the end of the gravel age) another ox, smaller and with shorter horns, Bos longifrons; which is held to be the ancestor of our own domestic short-horns, and of the wild cattle still preserved at Chillingham and at Cadzow. The reindeer had disappeared, almost or altogether. The red deer, of a size beside which the largest Scotch stag is puny, and even the great Carpathian stag inferior, abound; so does the roe, so does the goat, which one is accustomed to look on as a mountain animal. In the Woodwardian Museum there is a portion of a skull of an ibex–probably Capra sibirica–which was found in the drift gravel at Fulbourne. Wild sheep are unknown. The horse occurs in the peat; but whether wild or tame, who can tell? Horses enough have been mired and drowned since the Romans set foot on this island, to account for the presence of horses’ skulls, without the hypothesis of wild herds, such as doubtless existed in the gravel times. The wolf, of course, is common; wild cat, marten, badger, and otter all would expect; but not so the beaver, which nevertheless is abundant in the peat; and damage enough the busy fellows must have done, cutting trees, damming streams, flooding marshes, and like selfish speculators in all ages, sacrificing freely the public interest to their own. Here and there are found the skulls of bears, in one case that of a polar bear, ice- drifted; and one of a walrus, probably washed in dead after a storm.

Beautiful, after their kind, were these fen-isles, in the eyes of the monks who were the first settlers in the wilderness.