THE STRUGGLE OF SEA AND LAND. 225 



rising and sinking of continents, and this solution of the prob- 

 lem has not been contradicted till very recently. There is a kind 

 of suggestion with which great men, to whose minds the world 

 pays deference, inspire their contemporaries when they give any 

 view the weight of their approval, which is at the same time detri- 

 mental to progress in science. In this way many an error has been 

 generally accepted without further proof. 



Suess does not ask for an unjudicial acceptance of his theory, 

 but has published the whole course of his investigations, with his 

 proofs, in a great work, the " Antlitz der Erde " (" The Face of the 

 Earth "), in which he has examined the signs of changes in the 

 level of the ocean, so far as they have been observed in all known 

 parts of the earth and through all the geological periods. His 

 exposition points to a synchronism of overflows and uncoverings 

 of the land over extensive regions. This result has impelled him 

 to oppose the prevailing doctrine of upheavals and depressions of 

 the land. Aside from the fact that the supposed elevation of the 

 continents is problematical in itself, such movements could not go 

 on over the whole earth at the same time and in the same direc- 

 tion. Changes in the level of the waters, on the other hand, 

 would be of the general character which the survey of the phe- 

 nomena indicates, for a free rising of the water, even under local 

 influences, would at once make itself felt over the whole surface 

 of the earth. 



Suess's studies of the causes of the rising and falling of the 

 waters brought him to the following conclusions : The ocean beds 

 were produced by the sinking of those parts of the earth's surface 

 that correspond with them. The uneven shrinking of the globe is 

 a consequence of its continuous cooling. Every new subsidence of 

 the sea-bottom causes a falling of the water. Elevations of the 

 ground take place too. The bottom of the ocean is incessantly 

 receiving detritus from the overflowed land, of which the water 

 brings down as much as it can hold ; this tends to raise the level 

 of the ocean. Yet Suess concludes that these processes are not 

 adequate to explain the full measure of the primitive movements, 

 and reserves judgment on that point. 



The present author has gone further into this subject, in an 

 article in the "Zeitschrift fur wissenschaftliche Geographie/' 

 although he has not concealed the existing difficulty. Unfortu- 

 nately, Suess's deductions were not before him when he prepared 

 his paper. That essay, building in part on similar researches, 

 accepts contraction as the sufficient cause for the fluctuations of 

 the sea. According to the now prevailing views, which have, how- 

 ever, been very recently contradicted by investigators of repute, 

 the constant loss of heat from the interior of the earth produces a 

 steady shrinkage of the globe. From time to time the tensions in 



TOL. XXXVI. 15 



