> ee 
93 
Cambrian rocks were once more exposed to the day. The 
destruction of a hundred or more cubic miles of rocks, which was 
stripped off the surface of this part of the country at the period I 
am referring to, did not, we may feel sure, take place in a year, or 
a hundred, or a thousand years. On the contrary, everythiug 
points to all these great geological events of the past having gone 
on as slowly and as imperceptible as such changes are known to be 
taking place at the present day. The end of it was that the whole 
surface of the country was shorn off to one general uniform level ; 
depressions and elevations there were, beyond a doubt, just as there 
are both depths and islands left on a modern plain of marine 
denudation ; but in the main the surface was tolerably uniform. 
The history of this plain is an important part of the history of the 
surface around us, and much of the rock scenery here has been 
carved out of re-exposed portions of that plain itself. I have 
generally referred to this plain between the New Red and the 
rocks beneath as the Second Plain: the First Plain being the one 
at the base of the Carboniferous rocks. Both, of course, have 
undergone more or less disturbance since their formation, and 
these disturbances affect the character of the plains themselves 
when they are re-exposed by the removal of the rocks that once 
covered them. It must not be supposed, however, that the minor 
features of Greystoke Park began their history at the date I refer 
to. We have yet a long series of changes to take notice of. 
What happened after the formation of this plain nobody knows 
for certain. It is quite possible that it may have again sunk 
beneath the waves and received other deposits on its surface that 
have gone and left us no trace of their existence behind. All we 
do know for certain is that a very long interval of time elapsed 
between the time of formation of the last of the Carboniferous 
series and the commencement of the next or New Red Period; 
time enough to admit of the consolidation, the upheaval, and the 
subsequent denudation of well on to twenty thousand feet of 
Carboniferous rocks; and time enough to admit of the gradual 
substitution of quite different forms of life for the forms whose 
remains we find entombed as fossils in the Carboniferous series, 
