ON THE GEOLOGICAL AGENCY OF THE WINDS. 239 



669. The Lake Tacljura is now in the act of attaining such an 

 equilibrium. There are connected with it the remains of a chan- 

 nel 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 saltino- 

 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 ? 



670. 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. 



671. 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 Nature 

 has written upon their wings in characters as legible and enduring 

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

 events upon the tablet of the rock. 



672. The waters of Lake Titicaca, which receives the drainage 

 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 ; conse- 

 quently, 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. 



