giers 1755, Hawaii 1867) rush inland for miles, sweeping everything before them, and carrying along with them not only vessels (in 1868 an American corvette was swept inland a mile at Callao and left high and dry) but also masses of gravel and shingle. In this way beds of shells of living species are thrown up far beyond the shore, at heights of 60 or 80 feet above the reach of the tides, along with sea-weeds and shell-fish. This will account for the deposit of cotton thread, plaited rush, and an ear of Indian corn, found by Darwin on a hill near Lima.1 The tremendous force and volume of water thus set in motion also greatly alters the sea-bed near the shore, creating bars and sandbanks, and thrusting forward huge detached rocks 2 to places where before there was deep water. Hence the stories of rocks appearing above the water, and shell-fish exhaling odours on the shore. May not such waves have been the cause of the gently sloping beach which

1 Lyell, Antiq. of Man, p. 49; Mallet, Report, p. 61. In 1689, at Callao, one of these waves carried three ships inland over an intervening hill, so that they were left to rot there for want of means to take them back to the sea.

2 Lyell, after describing the rise of recent reefs in the harbours of Penco and Concepçion (Lyell, ii. p. 155), states that facts discountenance the idea of any permanent upheaval in that ancient port in modern times (p. 156).

was laid dry between the cliff and the sea immediately after the New Zealand earthquake?" affording ample space at all states of the tide for the passage of man and beast."-Lyell, p. 86.

We have now passed in review all the most prominent and important instances of earthquake action enumerated by Lyell, and have endeavoured to show, partly out of his own ever candid avowals and confessions, that they do not bear out the conclusions at which he arrived. We have also the support of the following decisive sentences from Mallet:"An earthquake, however great, is incapable of producing any permanent elevation or depression of land whatever. . . . Hence it is inexact, or rather untrue, to class earthquakes as among the causes of permanent elevation or depression of land.”—Mallet, Report on Earthquake Phenomena, p. 48. The reader, it is hoped, will not consider that we have devoted too much space to this discussion when he remembers the importance which Lyell attributes to earthquakes: “The integrity of the habitable world is presérved, and the very existence and perpetuation of dry land is secured, in a great degree, by subterranean movements."-Lyell's Principles, ii. p. 144.

CHAPTER III.

SUPPOSED ELEVATION OF MOUNTAINS BY GRADUAL

AND GENTLE IMPULSES.

THE difficulties of modern Geology are greatly increased owing to its undertaking to produce vast effects with means which, on investigation, appear utterly inadequate to perform them. However, these results are so stupendous that even its adherents show signs of incredulity as to their own theory, and a want of confidence in it. While professing

uniformity and quietude, and charging with ignorance and obliquity of vision those who still have faith in former operations of a more decisive character and on a grander scale than at present, they are compelled themselves to resort to these to account, in the first instance, for the creation of mountains, valleys, and river-beds, although laying the chief stress on denudation. Thus a stubborn repudiator of any but modern causes writes, "Valleys, lacustrine hollows, tablelands, and mountains, have all been, more or less,

"1

slowly formed by the forces we see even now at work in the world around us," but he adds,2 " It is evident that the great mountain-chains of the world are due, in the first place, to upheaval." Further on he invokes the subterranean forces which upheaved the solid crust into great table-lands or mountain undulations." Lyell also, in his Elements, describes and figures a remarkable ravine in the suburbs of Lewes, called "The Combe," which he says "is undoubtedly due to dislocation. . . . No outward signs of disturbance are visible, and the connection of the hollow with subterranean movements would not have been suspected by the geologist, had not the evidence of great convulsions been clearly exposed in the escarpment of the valley of the Ouse."

The Quietudinarian geologist will answer that these upheavals are due to tranquil and gentle disturbances, to "multiplied convulsions of moderate intensity"!a succession of uniform minor movements, repeated at distant intervals and after long pauses. A slight attention, however, to the laws of dynamics teaches us that enormous weights are raised

1 Chambers's Geology, by J. Geikie, p. 74. 2 Ib., p. 76. 3 Lyell, sixth edition, p. 361. It is unaccountably omitted in later editions.

4 Lyell's Principles, vol. i. p. 120.

D

and inertia is overcome only by a concentration and accumulation of force, and that pauses or intervals between the impulses inevitably produce loss of power. Moreover, as a wise modern geologist appropriately lays it down, "It is not possible for any number of minor forces, where the ultimate resistance exceeds each one taken separately, to accomplish in any time, however long, that which requires for its execution a force of infinitely greater power."-Prestwich, Past and Future of Geology, 1875. To overcome the resistance of a mountain mass, to lift the Alps or Andes, and at the same time to break them up into gorges and valleys, was assuredly due to no modified violence, no gentle taps renewed from time to time. In order fully to understand the magnitude of the work to be done by these gentle jogs, let us transport ourselves for a time into the midst of some of the grandest scenes of nature's operations. Listen to the evidence of an unbiassed geological observer possessing a minute knowledge of the highest mountain chain, the Himalayas.

"The whole mass," says Mr. Blanford, in a Report attached to the Geological Survey of India (p. 68), "has been broken and disturbed, the rocks on one side of the fracture having been lifted up many thou