forest, is never found here; simply because it had not worked northward till after the Channel was formed.  But there are three reptiles peculiar to this part of England which should be most interesting to a Hampshire zoologist.  The one is the sand lizard (L. stirpium), found on Bourne-heath, and, I suspect, in the South Hampshire moors likewise—­a North European and French species.  Another, the Coronella laevis, a harmless French and Austrian snake, which has been found about me, in North Hants and South Berks, now about fifteen or twenty times.  I have had three specimens from my own parish.  I believe it not to be uncommon; and most probably to be found, by those who will look, both in the New Forest and Woolmer.  The third is the Natterjack, or running toad (Bufo Rubeta), a most beautifully-spotted animal, with a yellow stripe down his back, which is common with us at Eversley, and common also in many moorlands of Hants and Surrey; and, according to Fleming, on heaths near London, and as far north-east as Lincolnshire; in which case it will belong to the Germanic fauna.  Now, here again we have cases of animals which have just been able to get hither before the severance of England and France; and which, not being reinforced from the rear, have been forced to stop, in small and probably decreasing colonies, on the spots nearest the coast which were fit for them.

I trust that I have not kept you too long over these details.  What I wish to impress upon you is that Hampshire is a country specially fitted for the study of important bio-geological questions.

To work them out, you must trace the geology of Hampshire, and indeed, of East Dorset.  You must try to form a conception of how the land was shaped in miocene times, before that tremendous upheaval which reared the chalk cliffs at Freshwater upright, lifting the tertiary beds upon their northern slopes.  You must ask--Was there not land to the south of the Isle of Wight in those ages, and for ages after; and what was its extent and shape?  You must ask—­When was the gap between the Isle of Wight and the Isle of Purbeck sawn through, leaving the Needles as remnants on one side, and Old Harry on the opposite?  And was it sawn asunder merely by the age-long gnawing of the waves?  You must ask—­Where did the great river which ran from the west, where Poole Harbour is now, and probably through what is now the Solent, depositing brackish water-beds right and left—­where, I say, did it run into the sea?  Where the Straits of Dover are now?  Or, if not there, where?  What, too, is become of the land to the Westward, composed of ancient metamorphic rocks, out of which it ran, and deposited on what are now the Haggerstone Moors of Poole, vast beds of grit?  What was the climate on its banks when it washed down the delicate leaves of broad-leaved trees, akin to our modern English ones, which are found in the fine mud-sand strata of Bournemouth?  When, finally, did it dwindle down to the brook which now runs through Wareham town?  Was its bed, sea or dry land, or under an ice sheet, during the long ages of the glacial epoch?  And if you say—­Who is sufficient for these things?—­Who can answer these questions?  I answer—­Who but you, or your pupils after you, if you will but try?