Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. NEOLITHIC ENGLAND AND NEOLITHIC SURREY. The physical geography of Neolithic England was in sharp contrast with that of the1 Palaeolithic period, but bore a very close resemblance to that of the country as we know it today. Britain was now sundered from the rest of Europe. The severities of the Glacial epoch were gone, to return no more—that is, as we popularly reckon time. Yet there were considerable differences in the contour, climate, and occupants, which we proceed to indicate. If we would revert, in imagination, to Neolithic England, we must first extend the existing coast outwards to about the ten-fathom line, to undo the effects of the submergence which has since been going on. The Wash, part of the Thames estuary, and the Bristol Channel must become dry land. We must see thickets of scrubby oak, hazel, birch, and willow, thriving miles away from the modern coasts of Holderness, Lincoln, and Carmarthen ; we must uplift the sunken peat-bed off Walton-on-the-Naze, and unite the Isles of Wight and Anglesey to the mainland. The miry swamps and glittering meres of Somerset are to reappear, the wide woodlands of Wyre, Anderida, Arden, and Sherwood are to be real forests, untouched, save for a casual clearing here and there on the fringes. The present artificial drainage system, whether of the surface, as the result of scientific agriculture, or the deeper, vaster network of dykes and canals, the product of growing commerce, must be thoughtaway, so as to leave virgin forest and marsh-flat, formidable barriers to the wayfarer. Turning to Surrey, we shall find that the physiographical and zoological features have been influenced largely by those of geology. Starting at the Northern boundary, we have first the Thames, lazy and ill-defined, for the embankments, stre...