202 Mr. Robberds on the former Level of the German Ocean, 



If I had been disposed to avail myself of an argnmentum ad 

 homi7iem, instead of relying upon fact and reason, I might 

 have, referred at once to this passage : but I do not like to take 

 advantage of the admissions of a candid adversary ; nor should 

 I think my opinions worth maintaining, if they required the 

 support of a mere quibble or trick of debate. 1 cannot refrain, 

 however, from expressing some astonishment at Mr. Tayloi-'s 

 having charged me, not indeed in direct terms, but certainly 

 by implication, with ignorance of my subject, or at least vvith 

 inattention, to a most important feature of it, because I " over- 

 looked altogether " a circumstance, which, after all, he himself 

 admits to be " ijisignificant." It is surely no proof of defective 

 vision, that I was unable to discover a mountain, where he 

 acknowledges that there is scarcely a mole-hill to be found. 



Having now shown that the principal of Mr. Taylor's sub- 

 ordinate agents, viz. the wind, has not contributed materially 

 to raise the ground upon which the town of Yarmouth stands, 

 and indeed that it could not have acted in the manner which 

 he has described, unless the sea had previously retired; it is 

 not necessary for me to investigate very minutely the extent 

 to which his other auxihary, viz. vegetation, has been em- 

 ployed in the same work. Where the accretion of drifted 

 sand is, confessedly, of so little account, neither the " rise of 

 vegetable substances " to bind the flitting mass, nor their " de- 

 cay" to increase its bulk, can be worthy of much consideration. 

 It is, however, only by the first of these processes that the 

 most ardent imagination can for a moment suppose vegetation 

 to have aided in forming any part of the Yarmouth district; 

 for, as to vegetable mould, except where it has been artifici- 

 ally produced in the innnediate vicinity of the town, there is 

 about as much of it in the composition of the surrounding 

 dunes, as there is in that of the great African Desert. The 

 bare idea of vegetation presumes also the previous existence 

 of a compactly settled and unchsturbed bed, wherein plants 

 may take root and flourish ; neither the Arundo arenaria, nor 

 any of the grasses which bind the sand on our shores, will 

 grow in the sea, or even below high-water mark ; conse- 

 quently the ridges now covered with them, must have been 

 permanently abandoned by the waves, before these plants 

 could begin to shoot their fibres through them : and hence it 

 follows, that even if the effects of vegetation had been so de- 

 cidedly and extensively manifest, as to confirm Mr. Taylor's 

 representations of their importance, — still they could only have 

 been regarded as the work of a secondary agent and of a sub- 

 sequent period, and they must have been left entirely out of 



the 



