Antediluvian Congelation of the Water of Bocks, 50 



vated rocks, which are in the neighbourhood of faults and 

 dislocations, there is a strong probability that they took place 

 contemporaneously with, or were occasioned by, the great 

 disturbances of the superficial strata. We may well conceive 

 that, when the different plateaux of the secondary or car- 

 boniferovis rocks were fractured and elevated by a more cen- 

 tral upheaving force, the tension of the incumbent strata 

 would first give way at the outer circumference ; and though 

 the force acting from beneath would principally expend itself 

 by the great lines of fracture and dislocation, yet a consider- 

 able amount of it would be distributed in dissolving the con- 

 tinuity of the sedimentary covering through the field sub- 

 mitted to its action. 



Simple mechanical concussion would account for simple 

 rents radiating from the somxe of violent action ; and where 

 actual upheaving took place also, the rents would become 

 fissures or gaps of less or greater width, according to the ex- 

 tent of vertical or even lateral displacement. In the carbo- 

 niferous or mountain limestone, the fissures are often found of 

 much greater extent than they are ever observed in the rocks 

 of the coal-formation — they being often extended so as to 

 form deep chasms and caverns. However much many of these 

 extensive fissures and chasms may, in the opinion of some, be 

 owing to the excavating action of bicarbonated water on the 

 limestone rock, I think a great deal of their comparatively 

 larger width and extent may be attributed to the greater verti- 

 cal displacement which these strata underwent when they were 

 upheaved from the beds of the ancient ocean. For, the greater 

 the elevation by an eccentric protruding force and volume, 

 the greater would be the solution of the rock's continuity, and 

 consequently the rents and fissures would be wider and more 

 extended. 



This explanation of these phenomena proceeds on the view 

 that all our displaced and disturbed strata have been elevated 

 above the level of their primitive line of stratification, which 

 appears to me to be most consonant with the historical and 

 actual condition of the relative levels of the land and the 

 ocean. But, if the great cataclysmal disturbances to which 

 we have alluded, have been of general siibsidence, the appt ar- 



