ON THE GEOLOGICAL AGENCY OF THE WINDS. 



199 



were attained, have to reach a stage far below that of the Dead 

 Sea level. 



The Lake Tadjura is now in the act of attaining such an equi- 

 librium. There are connected with it the remains of a channel by 

 which the water ran into the sea ; but the surface of the lake is 

 now five hundred feet below the sea-level, and it is salting up. 

 If not in the Dead Sea, do we not, in the valley of this lake, find 

 outcropping some reason for the question, What have the winds 

 had to do with the phenomena before us ? 



418. The winds, in this sense, are geological agents of great 

 power. It is not impossible but that they may afford us the 

 means of comparing, directly, geological events which have taken 

 place in one hemisphere, with geological events in another : e. g., 

 the tops of the Andes were once at the bottom of the sea. Which 

 is the oldest formation, that of the Dead Sea or the Andes ? If 

 the former be the older, then the climate of the Dead Sea must 

 have been hygrometrically very different from what it now is. 



419. In regarding the winds as geological agents, we can no 

 longer consider them as the type of instability. We should rather 

 treat them in the light of ancient and faithful chroniclers, which, 

 upon being rightly consulted, will reveal to us truths that Na- 

 ture has written upon their wings in characters as legible and en- 

 during as any with which she has ever engraved the history of 

 geological events upon the tablet of the rock. 



420. The waters of Lake Titicaca, which receives the drain- 

 age of the great inland basin of the Andes, are only brackish, not 

 salt. Hence we may infer that this lake has not been standing 

 long enough to become briny, like the waters of the Dead Sea ; 

 consequently, it belongs to a more recent period. On the other 

 hand, it will also be interesting to hear that my friend. Captain 

 Lynch, informs me that, in his exploration of the Dead Sea, he 

 saw what he took to be the dry bed of a river that once flowed 

 from it. And thus we have two more links, stout and strong, to 

 add to the chain of circumstantial evidence going to sustain the 

 testimony of this strange and fickle witness which I have called 

 up from the sea to testify in this presence concerning the works 

 of Nature, and to tell us which be the older — the Andes, watching 

 the stars with their hoary heads, or the Dead Sea, sleeping upon 

 its ancient beds of crystal salt. 



