LAND AND WATER 31 



along the littoral of the Gulf of Lions, where it invaded the whole 

 valley of the Rhone as far as la Bresse, then occupied by a large 

 lake. The straits of Gibraltar, the Dardanelles, and the 

 Bosphorus were formed at this time. 



The Earth thenceforth became what we know it to-day. 

 No doubt modifications still continue. We know that at the 

 present day certain coastlines are becoming submerged, while 

 others are rising. Scandinavia has been regarded as subject to 

 a sort of sea-saw movement, but this opinion is not strongly 

 held to-day. 1 The south coast of Brittany and the west coast of 

 France are sinking beneath the Atlantic ; the Channel Islands 

 have become separated from the continent within historic 

 times ; the town of Ys has been engulfed by the waters of the 

 Bay of Douarnenez ; certain parts of the Italian coast have 

 become raised, and numerous regions where earthquakes and 

 volcanic eruptions still take place clearly indicate that the 

 activity of the earth's crust has not yet ceased. All these 

 changes, however, are so gradual and of such slight extent that 

 geographers' maps are scarcely modified. Events moved just 

 as leisurely in earlier times, and the greatness of the changes 

 that have taken place is not to be explained by those 

 tremendous cataclysms of which Cuvier has given us so 

 grandiose a description at the beginning of his discourse on 

 the Revolutions of the Earth, but rather by the extreme 

 duration of the geological periods in which they occurred. 

 This great duration, already invoked by astrologers in support 

 of their cosmogonic conceptions — this stupendous length of 

 time which Cuvier accused Lamarck of abusing in the interests 

 of transformism, may be accepted as an established fact to-day. 

 Attempts have been made to measure it in figures by taking 

 various phenomena into consideration, but in spite of the 

 hypotheses put forward to enable this to be done, and in spite 

 of the objections of the last partisans of the chronology of 

 Biblical commentators, to whom Cuvier lent the support of his 

 remarkable erudition, the agreement between the results arrived 

 at from very different starting-points, bearing no relation to one 

 another, is such that it is impossible to escape from the evidence 

 that the interval between two geological periods represents a 

 stupifying succession of centuries. Time itself has been the 

 great architect of the transformations of the earth. 



1 V, 656. 



