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C. J. Cornish - The Naturalist on the Thames
LONDON'S BURIED ELEPHANTS
SWANS, BLACK AND WHITE
CANVEY ISLAND
THE LONDON THAMES AS A WATERWAY
THE THAMES AS A NATIONAL TRUST
PREFACE
Having spent the greater part of my outdoor life in the Thames Valley, in the enjoyment of the varied
interests of its natural history and sport, I have for many years hoped to publish the observations
contained in the following chapters. They have been written at different intervals of time, but always
with a view to publication in the form of a commentary on the natural history and character of the valley
as a whole, from the upper waters to the mouth. For permission to use those which have been previously
printed I have to thank the editors and proprietors of the Spectator, Country Life, and
the Badminton Magazine.
C.J. CORNISH.
ORFORD HOUSE,
CHISWICK MALL.
THE THAMES AT SINODUN HILL
Fresh water is almost the oldest thing on earth. While the rocks have been melted, the sea growing salter,
and the birds and beasts perfecting themselves or degenerating, the fresh water has been always the same,
without change or shadow of turning. So we find in it creatures which are inconceivably old, still living,
which, if they did not belong to other worlds than ours, date from a time when the world was other than it
is now; and the fresh-water plants, equally prehistoric, on which these creatures feed. Protected by this
constant element the geographical range of these animals and plants is as remarkable as their high
antiquity. There are in lake Tanganyika or the rivers of Japan exactly the same kinds of shells as in the
Thames, and the sedges and reeds of the Isis are found from Cricklade to Kamschatka and beyond Bering
Sea to the upper waters of the Mackenzie and the Mississippi. The Thames, our longest fresh-water river,
and its containing valley form the largest natural feature in this country. They are an organic whole, in
which the river and its tributaries support a vast and separate life of animals and plants, and modify that
of the hills and valleys by their course. Civil law has recognised the Thames system as a separate area,
and given to it a special government, that of the Conservators, whose control now extends from the Nore
to the remotest springs in the hamlets in its watershed; and natural law did so long before, when the
valley became one of the migration routes of certain southward-flying birds. Its course is of such remote
antiquity that there are those who hold that its bed may twice have been sunk beneath the sea, and twice
risen again above the face of the waters.[1] It has ever been a masterful stream holding its own against
the inner forces of the earth; for where the chalk hills rose, silently, invisibly, in the long line from the
vale of White Horse to the Chilterns the river seems to have worn them down as they rose at the crossing
point at Pangbourne, and kept them under, so that there was no barring of the Thames, and no subsequent
splitting of the barrier with gorges, cliffs, and falls. Its clear waters pass from the oolite of the Cotswolds,
by the blue lias and its fossils, the sandstone rock at Clifton Hampden, the gravels of Wittenham, the
great chalk range of the downs, the greensand, the Reading Beds, to the geological pie of the London
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