WE

CHAPTER II.

THE ORDEAL BY WATER.

E were too hasty in pronouncing it impossible that the little shell struck from the gorge-wall of the roaring stream could ever have belonged to a living animal. It is quite true that no being now exists in the waters of the land or the ocean which can be exactly identified with it. There are forms in the sea, however, which possess every characteristic by which we distinguished it from the river mussel. The resemblances are so close that we are compelled to admit that this may really be a marine form. We look again at the pile of rocks from which this specimen was taken. Layer after layer succeeds from the bottom to the top; and here and there are other similar forms imbedded between the sheets of shale. If these are marine forms, these strata are marine sediments. But here is the difficulty. This place is hundreds of feet above the surface of the sea, and if ever the sea stood at this level the greater part of the continent must have been submerged. But have we not a record of such a submergence? Yes, indeed; the sacred writers tell us of a deluge which destroyed the human family. A tradition of the same has been embalmed in Ovid's myth of Deucalion and Pyrrha; and nearly every nation under the sun, from the cultured Greek to the savage Koloschian of Alaska, has its legend under which the memory of the Deluge has been perpetuated. Shall we then content ourselves with the conclusion that this pile of strata was laid down by the waters of the Noachian flood, and that these molluscs were

the contemporaries of the beasts which inhabited the ark? A conclusion thus hastily reached would have suited the preceding age; but the spirit of modern research bids us examine farther. We lay down our little shell, and set out upon the search for evidences to confirm the suspicions already awakened, that it was once the home of a seadwelling mollusc.

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Go with me first to the coast of the Gulf of Naples. There, near the ancient town of Puzzuoli, at the head of an. indentation in the Bay of Baìæ, stand three marble pillars forty feet in height. Their pedestals are washed by the waters of the Mediterranean. The marble pavement upon which they stand, and which was, in the second century, the floor of a temple, or, perhaps, of a bath-house, is sunken three feet beneath the waves. Six feet beneath this is another costly pavement of mosaic, which must have formed the original floor of the temple. What does all this indicate? The foundations of a temple would not be laid nine feet beneath the level of the sea. They must have been built upon the solid land. As the land subsided a new foundation was laid, and a new structure was reared above the encroaching waves. But look upward and examine the surface of the marble. For twelve feet above their pedestals these pillars are smooth and uninjured. Above this is a zone of about nine feet, throughout which the marble is perforated with numerous holes. Exploring these holes, we find them to enlarge inward, and at the bottom of each repose the remains of a little boring bivalve shellLithodomus. This little bivalve is the same species which is now inhabiting the adjacent waters. We know well its habits. It does not live in the open water. It burrows in

the sand, or bores its way into the shells of other molluscs, or into solid stone. But it never climbs trees or marble columns to build its nest, like a bird in the air. How, then,

Fig. 5. View of the Temple of Serapis at Puzzuoli in 1836.

does it occur twenty-three feet above the surface of the water? There evidently has been a time when the whole column, to the height of these Lithodomi, was submerged. The oscillations of the surface, therefore, as shown by these indications, were, first, a subsidence and submergence of the original foundation, requiring the construction of the second one six feet above the other; the continuation of the subsidence till the original pavement was twenty-seven feet beneath the surface, at which depth it remained a sufficient time for the little stone-borers to penetrate to the heart of the pillar-a work which they required a lifetime to accomplish. Next occurred an elevation, raising the Lithodomi out of the water, and thus ending their existence. Nor is this all. Observations made since the beginning of the present century show that the foundations of this temple are again sinking at the rate of one inch per year.

Such an example, thus authenticated, throws a flood of light upon the problems of geology. It establishes the doctrine of the unstable condition of the land. The rock is no longer the emblem of firmness and stability. We have here a monument which perpetuates the remembrance of secular oscillations in the level of a continent. The little Lithodomus has graven the inscriptions upon the marble pillar, even at the cost of its own life. Such care has Providence ever exercised to leave in our hands a key by which to unlock the mysteries of past ages.

It is established, then, that the level of the land may vary-that the shores of a continent may be submerged, and that at a subsequent period they may rise again from the waves. But the doctrine does not rest upon an isolated example. The oscillations recorded upon the temple of Jupiter Serapis are only a clear and beautiful illustration of the nature of the proofs which exist upon every shore.

The columns of other temples are in a similar manner found submerged. Roman roads have been discovered many feet under water. Ancient sea-coasts have been observed far inland. On this continent the shore-line of the Atlantic is experiencing a series of slow, undulatory movements. At St. Augustine, in Florida, the stumps of cedar trees stand beneath the hard beach shell-rock, immersed in the water at the lowest tides. Some of the sounds upon the coast of North Carolina, which have been navigable within the memory of living sea-captains, are now impassable bars or emerging sand-flats. Along the coast of New Jersey the sea has encroached, within sixty years, upon the sites of former habitations, and entire forests have been prostrated by the inundation. In the harbor of Nantucket the upright stumps of trees are found eight feet below the lowest tide, with their roots still buried in their native soil. Similar ruins of ancient submarine forests occur on Martha's Vineyard, and on the north side of Cape Cod, and again at Portland. In the region of the St. Croix River, separating Maine from New Brunswick, the coast has been. raised, carrying deposits of recent shells and sea-weeds in one instance to the height of twenty-eight feet above the present surface of the sea. The island of Grand Manan, off the mouth of the St. Croix River, is slowly rotating on an axis, so that, while the south side is gradually dipping beneath the waves, the north is lifted into high bluffs. Near the River St. John is an area of twenty square miles containing marine shells and plants recently elevated from the sea. One hundred and fifty miles east of here, the shore is experiencing another subsidence. The north side of Nova Scotia is sinking, while the south is rising, insomuch that breakers now appear off the southern coast in places safely navigable years ago. The ancient city of Louisburg, on the island of Cape Breton, is another testi