97 
as a sort of guide in fixing approximately the date of this geological 
event, so important in an inquiry like the present. 
Many geologists are inclined to place the last emergence of this 
district at a period somewhere in the very remote past, and at first 
sight there does not seem to be any valid reason why it should not 
have been so. But when we turn to a study of the great physical 
features of the Continent of Asia, and of America, and observe the 
nature and the extent of the effects that geological causes have 
produced within a comparatively modern period of the earth’s 
history, we may well pause before assigning too remote an age to 
the comparatively trifling series of events that can be recorded 
here. Who is there that has fully realised what geological causes 
have effected in the Alps, in Auvergne, in the Western Isles of 
Scotland, in the Himalayas, and elsewhere, since Miocene times, 
that is prepared to maintain that similar results cannot have been 
produced here in the same time? We get evidence of movements 
of elevation and of depression surpassing in extent almost anything 
we can point to here. We have clear evidence of a prodigious 
amount of denudation, and thus, of course, proof of a corresponding 
amount of deposition of sediment. Almost the entire aspect of 
many parts of the Continent has been completely changed by 
these causes since the Miocene period, and it does not seem to be 
going too far, if we say that, so far as physical changes known to us 
by their results are concerned, the interval that has elapsed between 
this Miocene period and the present day is one of the most impor- 
tant the geologist has to deal with. It would be no very difficult 
matter to bring forward proof that since the last great physical 
changes have affected this district as a whole, and therefore the 
particular part of it we are more immediately concerned with, a 
comparatively trifling amount of denudation has been effected. I 
will refer to one, which will, I think, well exemplify this. Most of 
us know that a great series of dislocations, known collectively as 
the Pennine Fault, ranges along the foot of the Cross Fell Escarp- 
ment. The plane of that fault marks off the limit of the rocks 
composing the Escarpment. It is because of the Fault that they 
are there. The Fault cuts them off from their equivalents under 
7 
