071 the Coast of' Tirce, ^c. 137 



not occupy the same station in regard to the sea, which they 

 once did, but have been brought near it, by some cause suffi- 

 cient to raise the level of the waters of the ocean, or to depress 

 that of the land. 



If this be admitted, the whole difficulty of accounting for these 

 appearances, as well as for submarine forests, vanishes ; and if 

 we should be inclined to reason from consequences, the admis- 

 sion of such a fact, so far from being discordant with the obser- 

 vations made upon the conformity of strata in Norway, and the 

 North of Scotland, or militating against the conclusions which 

 geologists have founded on this and olher circumstances regard- 

 ing the former connection of these countries, is beautifully illus- 

 trative of these opinions, and, as far as I am aware of, incom- 

 patible with no ascertained fact. 



Whether the waters of the ocean have been acted upon, and the 

 level of their superficies raised in regard to the bounding lands ; 

 or whether the crust of the earth has been affected, and a gene- 

 ral depression of the level of its surface induced along the whole 

 extent of this island, may not be easily determined : Our pre- 

 sent knowledge of the changes which take place at the bottom of 

 the sea, does not entitle us to expect any considerable rise of 

 its level in a given time. The subject is not one of recent in- 

 terest. The changes in the relative position of the sea and land 

 have been observed and speculated upon for ages ; and there is 

 little doubt that the discovery of submarine forests would, at one 

 time, have been hailed as a trophy of victory by warm and zeal- 

 ous disputants, and received with some perplexity by the sup- 

 porters of a theory which was as wild as the facts it proceeded 

 upon were assumptive. 



When water was supposed to form the creating elements of 

 nature ; when the mountains of the earth, from the highest 

 of the Andes and the Himalayan range, down to the lowest 

 sandhill, was supposed to mark the different productions of the 

 same parent at different periods, generating, according to a rule 

 which M. Maillet, in his famous work entitled Telliamed, fixed 

 at three feet four inches in the hundred years, thus supposing 

 675,000 years to be the age of our highest mountains, then 

 Celsius, and many other eminent men, considered that the waters 

 of the ocean, as well as the level of their superficies, were dirai- 



