88 MONOGRAPH OF DURA DEN. 



lis. There were times, within tlie range of mytliological history, when 

 volcanoes raged in almost every chain of mountains; when lakes were dried 

 up or suddenly appeared in many valleys ; when seas burst over their 

 boundaries and created new islands, or retired from their beds and increased 

 old continents ; when, in fine, there was a power of production and arrange- 

 ments on a great magnificent scale, when nature seemed employed not merely 

 in yearly renovation of plants and insects, but in the production from age to 

 age of the vaster and more massive elements of her sphere, — when her task 

 was not confined to embroidering the meadows in spring, or to paring away 

 of shores by the slow eating action of tides and currents, but when she toiled 

 in the great laboratories of the earth, upheaving mountains, and displacing 

 seas, and thus giving to the world its great indelible features." 



The distinguished author of the Siluria has expressed his 

 views upon the same point in similar eloquent terms. 



" As well," says Sir Roderick Murchison, " might the naturalist, upon 

 witnessing the gigantic growth of the African or American forests, compared 

 with the pigmy stature of our trees, calculate that, if the oak has required its 

 hundreds of years to reach its strength, they must have been rooted for thou- 

 sands in the soil, as the geologist conclude, that so many myriads of ages 

 must have been requisite to give to the systems of rocks their consistency and 

 consolidation." And again : " The uniformitarian who would explain every 

 natural event in the earliest periods by reference to existing conditions of 

 being, is stopped at the very threshold of the palace of former life (none being 

 before Silurian) which he cannot deprive of its true foundations. Nature 

 herself, in short, tells him, through her most ancient monuments, that though 

 she has worked during all ages on the same grand principles of destruction 

 and renovation of the surface, there was foi'merly a distribution of land in 

 reference to the sea, very different in outline from that which now prevails. 

 That primeval state was followed by outbursts of great volumes of igneous 

 matter from the interior, the extraordinary violence of which is made manifest 

 by clear evidences. Fractures in the crust of the earth, accompanied by 

 oscillations that suddenly displaced masses to thousands of feet above or 

 beneath their previous levels, were necessarily productive of such translations 

 of water as to abrade and destroy solid materials, and spread them over con- 

 tinents to an extent infinitely surpassing any change of which the historical 

 era affords example. I could here refer to the works of Leopold von Buch, 

 Elie de Beaumont, Sedgwick, Studia^ and numerous other geologists, for 

 countless proofs of this grander intensity of former causation, by which gigantic 

 masses were inverted, and strata forming mountains have been so wrenched, 

 broken, and twisted, as to pass under the very rocks out of whose materials 

 they were constructed. In the Alps there are signs of such former cata- 

 strophes, each of which resulted from convulsions utterly immeasurable and 

 inexplicable by any reference to those puny oscillations of the earth which 

 can be appealed to during the times of history."* 



* Silurlu. r.y Sir E. I. Muvcliisou, D.C.L. Third edition, p. 523. 



