the London and Hampshire Basins, 373 



gTilar flints, without a solitary pebble amongst them to bespeak 

 the scene of a patient attrition ? But it is not so much my wish 

 to set aside the hypotheses of others as to establish my own 

 theory. I argue the unity of design and the totality of the 

 phsenomena of upheaval in all the long line (a line of 200 miles 

 extent) of the great anticlinal of which the denudation of the 

 Weald is a part, as proof of a sudden and uniform upward 

 movement, to which the water-shed, a systematic arrangement 

 of valleys, begun in fracture and enlarged by aqueous erosion, 

 lacerated escarpments and drift faithfully respond. I have else- 

 where said that " an act like the elevation of the anticlinal line 

 which formed the basins of London and Hampshire, or the sub- 

 sidence of these basins, would be alone sufficient to raise a wave 

 that would drown the habitable parts of half a hemisphere. A 

 few such actions coming into play contemporaneously, or in 

 quick succession, are cause sufficient for a deluge*.^'' And this I 

 venture to reassert ; and that the flux and- reflux of the waters 

 of such an inundation would be sufficient to remove all the mate- 

 rials here supposed to be excavated, — all the calculations of the 

 power of '^ waves of transport,^' or of denuding water-currents, 

 to the contrary notwithstanding. 



To those who are startled at the magnitude of such operations, 

 and who are unwilling to admit such a Deus ex machina into the 

 great scheme of nature, I recommend an inspection of Plate XL. 

 of De la Beche^s " Sections and Views,^^ — representing the insig- 

 nificance of mountain elevations, and of a depth of a hundred 

 miles, compared with the diameter of the earth,— and his obser- 

 vation, ^' How insignificant do our tremendous dislocations, stu- 

 pendous mountains, and the like, become, when we contemplate 

 such a figure as that before usf! ^' At the same time, it is not 

 unlikely that the very persons who advance such objections, 

 grounded on their observation of what is now passing under their 

 eyes, will indulge freely in a speculation on the bursting of a 

 planet, and the distribution of the asteroids so created ! There 

 is another class of objectors, who have more show of reason, who 

 would split the difference between the extremes of uniformity, or 

 the slow w^orking-hand of time and catastrophic action, who 

 think that nature has no need, and does not afford evidence of 

 operations of such magnitude, and so would have done that 

 which we see has been done, by a succession of minor convulsions, 

 piecemeal. Then what becomes, in a case like this of the Weald, 

 of a widely-extended and uniform class of phsenomena, combined 

 operations bespeaking unity of cause, acting toward and for a per- 

 fect and consistent whole ? No advance in our knowledge of the 



* Phil. Mag. vol. y. p. 119 (1829). 



t Sections and Views illustrative of Geological Phsenomena, by Henry 

 DelaBeche. London, 1830. \ :y. .. .. : 



