Man have been found in gravels which cannot have been derived exclusively from any existing river, and which consist in part of materials which must have been carried from a distance, and rolled by oceanic currents. This is a subject which cannot be pursued here. It is enough to say that the extensive discovery of gravels containing human weapons is a discovery which appears to have a bearing on the question of a Deluge that has been by no means yet worked out. It proves conclusively that some action of water of a powerful kind has been exerted over great areas of the existing land since Man was born. Much of this action has certainly been marine. It is impossible to examine the pebbles upon any garden. walk which has been gravelled out of the well-known Kensington deposit, without seeing that there are many of these pebbles which cannot have been derived from the present valley of the Thames. On the top of the hills which enclose that valley-at Cliveden, for example, near Maidenhead, where I have often examined them—there are masses of gravel full of quartz and other crystalline rocks, rolled and rounded, and brought from such distances as the hills of Wales. These are well-known to geologists as the "High Level Gravels," and appear to be the remains of a sheet which was once continuous before the existing valleys were excavated out of the surface which the sea had left. Upon those Welch hills themselves detached patches of gravel with marine shells have been found at an elevation of some 1300 or 1400 feet above the present level of the Sea. Such a submergence as this must have had all the effects of a Deluge in the whole area over which it prevailed. Nor do these facts stand alone. There are others connected with the destruction of " the Pleistocene Mammalia," and the curious way in which their bones are sometimes found closely packed in immense numbers in caves and fissures of rock-facts which all indicate death by drowning, and the transport of countless carcases by powerful currents of water running in particular directions, and depositing their spoils on particular spots. It is, indeed, most difficult to understand very clearly how the thing has been done. But this, at least, may be said with tolerable certainty, that the agency of water under unusual conditions of sweep and flow seems to be an indispensable element in any possible explanation.

On leaving Venice and stopping at Padua, I observed there the first bird indicative of spring. It was the Grey Wagtail (Motacilla flava), one of the most beautiful of our own British birds, which haunts every running stream in Scotland, and rears its young very often amidst the mist of waterfalls. For grace of form, for brilliancy of colour, and for liveliness of movement, there is no feathered creature more attractive than this Wagtail, which is much misnamed when it is called "grey." The clear sulphur yellow of its breast is about the most shining colour on the banks of our summer streams. I have seen stray individuals at Inverary in the middle of winter; but most of the birds leave us during that season and reappear some time in the course of April. In the winter of

1878-9 I observed it at Cannes. It is nowhere an abundant species, but widely distributed in Scotland.

The great plain of Lombardy, in summer and in a clear day, when the Alps are visible on one side and the Apennines on the other, has a charm altogether its own. The universal and rich cultivation, the vines trained from tree to tree among the shining mulberry leaves, the glittering snows of the Alpine peaks seen through the purple haze, the villas and the farms, and the ancient historic towns-all these form a combination of singular interest and beauty; and so far as some of these features are concerned the interest can never be lost. But the Lombard plain when seen in dull weather, and before the leaves have budded or the crops appeared above ground, is dulness itself. The perfect flatness, the monotonous repetition of trees reduced by pollarding to mere bushes with only a few straight sticky branches suffered to grow, and the dull colouring of the naked soil, make the whole very wearisome. As to birds, hardly any were to be seen, except indeed one flock of Rooks near Milan, which rather surprised me, as it is difficult to see where they could establish a rookery in such a country, and the bird is by no means common in Southern Europe. In driving from Milan to visit the Certosa of Pavia, we had an opportunity of seeing something of the fish fauna of the country, in the innumerable canals and runlets of water which are most ingeniously carried at all sorts of levels over the country for the purposes of irrigation. The water in these channels is generally beautifully clear, and many of them have the character of sharply-running streams, rich in aquatic weeds, and winding among the roots of willows. The fishing of these watercourses with nets at the end of long poles seemed to be the occupation of a class. On examining the basket of one of these fishermen, there was really a curious display of small fish of all sorts and kinds-Roach and Dace, Minnows and Eels, and small Pike, with a few unfortunate Frogs. A single pair of the Jay and a few Starlings, some Pied Wagtails, and a Pipit very like our Shore-lark, were the only birds I saw in a drive of more than forty miles.

One great interest to a geologist in the Lombard plain is the distinctness with which its perfect flatness of general level enables us to see how that flatness has been invaded by the protrusion of glaciers from the Alpine range during the great "ice age." All along the foot of that range, wherever there is the opening of any great glen or valley, there invariably we see long ridges, and mounds of low hills and hummocks, rising above the dead level of the plain. These have naturally always afforded the strongest military positions; and in the innumerable wars which have been waged in and for that fair land-which has had the "dono infelice di bellezza"-the great moraines, which have been left by ancient glaciers, have been the sites of some of the most celebrated battles. In the latest times, Solferino, Villafranca, and Custoza, have all been fought on the rubbish-heaps of old Alpine glaciers. And what

rubbish-heaps they are! Wherever the railway has cut through these mounds and hills, we see the rolled and broken fragments of every variety of rock which enters into the composition of the Alps. In a deep cutting near Como, the sections are particularly interesting. Great masses of granite, of all sorts and sizes, are jumbled up with limestones and schists and quartzites-all more or less ground and rubbed—and all brought there from some old peak or precipice which once was high in air, and which shed its fragments on the great river of ice below. The extent to which the smaller fragments are generally rolled and rounded is rather puzzling. This is not the work of glaciers so much as the work of water, and the existing streams show such pebbles in abundance; but these streams are not large enough to account for the enormous supply of material of .this particular form, which is distributed all over the northern area of the Lombard plain. It is, however, easy to conceive the scene as it was in the glacier age. The great valley of the Po was then occupied by the sea, into which enormous glaciers protruded, as they now do into the seas of Greenland and of Smith Sound, presenting continuous walls of ice opposite all the larger valleys, and discharging from the ends as well as from the sides, the rubbish which fell on them from the rocky walls under which they passed.

Among the conclusions arrived at by geological science, there is not one which rests on more assured evidence than the conclusion that a climate similar to that which now prevails in the Arctic Circle extended, at some comparatively recent time, to much more southern latitudes, embracing the greater part of England and extending to the Alpine chain in Continental Europe. The demonstration of this conclusion is various, abundant, and cumulative; but, like every other conclusion in respect to the great agencies which have been concerned in geological change, this one has been pushed to extremes which are extravagant. Amongst these is the theory that all or most of the fresh-water lakes of Europe. have been scooped out of the solid rock by the action of glaciers. That all valleys which have ever had a glacier have been deepened by its flow is quite certain; but glaciers have in all cases followed pre-existing lines of drainage, and these cannot have been originally determined by their action. Moreover, the contours shown by the soundings in the Lake of Como, for example, exhibit lines which cannot be accounted for by the action of a glacier. Flowing ice, bearing in its substance stones of all shapes and kinds, must have a powerful abrading action upon the slope down which it flows; it is competent to deepen the groove in which it lies, to rub down prominences, and, in proportion to the vis a tergo and to its own mass, may even ascend opposing elevations. But I have seen no evidence adduced to show that a glacier can dig out holes deep below the general slope of its own bed, these holes having almost precipitous sides. On the other hand, lake basins, such as that of Como, are easily accounted for if we suppose that the surrounding mountain forms have been mainly due to corrugations and foldings and subsidences of the

rocky strata, effected by the action of subterranean force. And who can doubt that this supposition is the true one, who looks for a moment at the disposition of the beds in the mountains of the Como range? The strata are all twisted and contorted, or inclined at every variety of angle-now seeming to plunge into the bed of the lake, now parallel with the bank,-now broken across it. Whenever these foldings and fractures were effected, they must have produced some corresponding effects upon the surface; that surface must have been raised into elevations at one place and must have fallen into hollows at another. There is nothing mysterious in the fact that these hollows should frequently fall below the general level of the pre-existing drainage of the country, and every such hollow would necessarily be filled with water, and so become a lake.

The memory of a pleasant time separated from the present by an interval of thirty-seven years, led me to revisit Desinzano, at the southwestern corner of the Lago di Garda. It was not less beautiful than my recollection of it. Alone of all the Italian lakes, that of Garda extends far beyond the southern margin of the mountain range, and projects itself into what was once the Lombard plain. But the waters of the lake are held in check, and dammed up by vast mounds and low hills of glacial debris, through which the Mincio escapes into the valley of the Po. Old castles and towers of the Middle Ages crown some of the heights, whilst all are richly cultivated with "corn, and wine, and oil." The great expanse of the lake, at the lower end-its glorious breadth of greens and blues, with its far perspective among the mountains, and the gorgeous colouring of the large boats, with sails of golden yellow and of orange red, combine to make this, to my mind, the most beautiful and attractive of all the Italian lakes. We drove to the Promontory of Sermione-the ancient Sermio-which was the villa of the Latin poet Catullus, and has been celebrated by him in characteristic verse. It was

a glorious day as we drove along the sandy neck of land which connects the promontory with the shore, and passed under the picturesque machicolated towers and arches which guarded the entrance in the days of the Scalas of Verona. Seated on the top of the cliffs among olive trees and peach blossoms, we looked down into the green, and pellucid waters of the lake, and watched the Grebes which in small parties were fishing not far from shore. I could not make out the species, which was much darker in colour than any with which I am familiar. On returning to the little piazza of the fishing village where our horses had "put up," we noticed among some clothes hung up to dry a coverlet of a very unusual and beautiful pattern. It was made of pure white squares of knitted cotton, with a simple four-petalled flower, or "quatre-foil," raised in the centre of each square. One traces with pleasure in Italy, even in such small things as these, the taste and the sense of beauty which belong to her ancient civilization. An inquiry as to the owner and the knitter of this work, brought out a very pretty woman who parted with it

for forty francs. She seemed modestly pleased with the commendation of the stranger, who with a happy ambiguity as to the object of admiration addressed to her the words, "è molto bella."

The whole country about the Lago di Garda was curiously destitute of birds. But at Bellagio on the Lake of Como I saw a few of our commoner species-the Blackbird, the Tree Creeper, some Titmice of a species I could not determine, and a fiue pair of Ospreys which were wheeling overhead. On the morning of the day-the 15th of March-on which we left this lovely place, a single pair of Swallows had arrived. But it was the Crag Martin (Hirundo rupestris), a species unknown in England, and which remains throughout the winter at Nice, if not at some other spots of the Riviera. I do not know the range of this species northwards, but I have never seen it north of the Alps.

There is one point of curious interest connected with the fauna of the Italian lakes, and that is the fish, the excellence of which every visitor must have appreciated, and which goes under the local name of the Agoni. It is a small fresh-water Herring, of excellent flavour, much larger than the Sardine, but a good deal smaller than the Pilchard. The account which was given to me on the lakes was, that this fish was purely freshwater and never left the lake; that at certain seasons it retired to the deeps, and approached the shores about the month of May. Now, on inquiring of my friend Dr. Günther of the British Museum, I found it to be his opinion that this fish is identical with the British Twaite-shad (Clupea finta), which is a marine species, although at times it ascends the course of the rivers, running up the Rhine as far as the junction of the Neckar, and the Nile as far as the Lower Cataracts. The Agoni is therefore a survivor in the Italian lakes from the times when these lakes were either actually arms of the sea which occupied the Lombard plain, or were at least easily accessible from that sea by rivers which presented no obstacles to the migration of this fish. Shoals of Agoni would certainly have small chance of ever reaching their destination if they had to run the gauntlet of ascent and descent through the present course of the Mincio, the Adige, and the Po. Every case in which fish now confined to fresh waters, whether fluvial or lacustrine, can be identified as a species which has been marine, is of the highest interest both in a zoological and geological point of view. It exhibits, and in some degree it measures the extent to which species can be adapted to great changes in physical conditions. The change, however, is, of course, not so remarkable in the case of fish which are migratory from one kind of water to the other.

At Parma I had an opportunity of observing that the migratory Thrushes which are so largely consumed all over Italy, had not yet disappeared from the country. I have found these species to be almost exclusively the Red-wing, the common Song-thrush, the Blackbird, and the Rock-thrush. I have never observed the Missel Thrush in the markets. The common Song-thrush of the British Islands never wholly