114 Mr. P. J. Martin on the Anticlinal Line of 



ocation and diluvial action in the relation of cause and effect. 

 Two years after^ a paper was read before the Geological Society, 

 the joint production of Dr. Buckland and Sir Henry De la Beche, 

 " On the Denudations of the Dorsetshire Coast," and published 

 in the fourth volume of the ' Transactions,' 3nd series, in 1836. 

 At p. 43 they use these words : — 



" If we look for the cause of all this removal in any natural 

 operations now proceeding within the district, we find not the 

 shadow of any satisfactory explanation of that vast destruction 

 of which it has been the scene. It is vain to appeal to the action 

 of rivers, for in many parts where the denudation has been great- 

 est there is not a streamlet or s, single spring. The greatest 

 streams we have in the district are the two insignificant rivulets 

 of the Wey and Bredy. It is equally vain to appeal to meteoric 

 agents, for we have a measure of the total amount of their effects 

 in the fragments accumulated in the form of talus and landslips 

 at the bottom of certain slopes and precipices, and in a few small 

 accumulations of mud and sand in the low grounds. 



" The only satisfactory solution we can find is in the waters 

 of a violent inundation, and in these we think we see a cause 

 that bears a due ratio to the effects that have been pi'oduced. 



" How far the causes of this inundation may be connected 

 with the elevation of the strata in the immediate neighbourhood 

 or in distant regions, is a subject which at present we conceive 

 it premature to enter into, further than to suggest that the rela- 

 tion of the one to the other may possibly be nearer than has 

 been hitherto apprehended." 



But these and similar views were speedily set aside by the 

 dictates of a school ever zealous in the substitution of another 

 order of causation, — a school which has become rather tyran- 

 nical in the maintenance of its dogmas ; not that they are not 

 based on great and universal truths, but that they are too rigidly 

 upheld, to the exclusion of all agencies of paroxysmal activity, 

 notwithstanding that their existence is attested by the occasional 

 occurrence of conglomerates of angular fragments, and the signs 

 of tumultuary stratification, from the lowest to the highest stra- 

 tified beds. 



In the admirable address of the noble President of the British 

 Association at Glasgow, he is reported to have said, " It is one 

 of the many observations of Sir C. Lyell, which have a much 

 wider application than that to which they were specially directed, 

 that the mistake of looking too exclusively to the grand results 

 of geological change, and of referring them too readily to sudden 

 agencies of tremendous activity and power, tended to check the 

 advance of that science by discouraging habits of watchfidness 

 over those operations which are contemporary with ourselves, 



