92 
and it would also be seen that the minor inequalities of the surface 
that interrupt the general regularity of the slope do not much affect 
its character as a gently inclined plane. It hardly requires a 
trained eye to detect the evenness of this same plane where we 
catch its profile on the far side of the Eamont yonder between 
Hiuska and Cliburn. That slope is formed by the edges of well 
on to two thousand feet of strata, which strata once extended over 
the whole of this district, and which, thick as they are, form but a 
remnant of a once much greater mass. I believe we have evidence 
of the former existence here of some thousands of feet more of 
Carboniferous rocks than we now find around us, and a little 
reflection will convince any one that for this great thickness of rock to 
accumulate beneath the sea the rocks we are now upon must have 
been depressed to a corresponding depth beneath the surface. In 
other words, this limestone crag where we now stand, which is now 
well on to a thousand feet above the sea level, at one time went 
down several thousand feet below that level—probably as much as 
amile. We get evidence that the depression went on with extreme 
slowness, and that this depression was often interrupted, and the 
rocks sometimes remained stationary, or even oscillated between a 
movement downward and one in an upward direction. 
THE THREE PLAINS OF DENUDATION. 
At last came a time when the predominant downward movement 
of the earth’s crust at this point changed to a movement in the 
opposite direction. And, just as the downward movement had 
been unequal in various parts, so the rate of upheaval also was not 
by any means uniform over the whole district. The newly-formed 
rocks, in undergoing upheaval, may be said to have been bulged 
up from divers centres, and one of these centres, or groups of 
centres, lay over what is now the Lake District. So it happened 
that the sheets of newer rocks enveloping our Lake District were 
the first to be brought within the destroying action of the waves, 
and bed after bed was denuded—ground down into sand and mud 
and swept away to form rocks anew elsewhere—until in the end 
the very base of the series was cut through and the old Siluro- 
