Note 3230 — THE PLACE OF CAESAR’S LANDING IN BRITAIN (continued 2)

See pp. 605-11, supra. Heller (Zeitschrift für allgemeine Erdkunde, xviii, 1865, pp. 116-25), after an elaborate argument, which, if his premisses are correct, is unanswerable, arrives at the conclusion that, assuming high water to have occurred at Dover on the 27th of August, 55 B.C., at 7.31 a.m., the stream off Dover turned between 4.26 and 5.21 p.m.; and that, as the turn must have been accelerated by the favourable wind which Caesar mentions (B. G., iv, 23, § 6), ‘one may say, without fear of error, that the stream turned at 4.26 p.m.’: but it is unnecessary to examine his argument, because he was not acquainted with the results of the observations which, as we have seen, were made in 1862 by Surveyor Calver.

Neither have I taken any notice of the argument by which the late Professor Cardwell (Archaeol. Cant., iii, 1860, pp. 14-7) endeavoured to prove that if high tide had occurred at Dover on the day of Caesar’s landing at 7.31 a.m., he must at 3 p.m. ‘have gone up Channel on the first of the flood and proceeded to the eastward’; for the evidence upon which the professor relied has been shown by Airy (Archaeologia, xxxix, 1863, pp. 304-6) to have been misleading.