ELEVATION F SKA COASTS. 265 



having their timbers fastened together with wooden pegs, instead 

 of nail.?, indicating their great antiquity. The situation of the 

 hut seems only to be accounted for on the supposition of a change 

 similar to that on the shores of the Bay of Baise, first subsiding to 

 a depth of more than 60 feet, and subsequently being re-elevated. 

 Examples of this gradual elevation are by no means rare. The 

 coast of Newfoundland, in the neighborhood of Conception Bay, 

 and probably the whole island is rising out of the ocean, at a 

 rate which promises at no very distant period, materially to affect, 

 if not render useless, many of the best harbors on its coast. At 

 Port-de-Grave, a series of observations have been made, which 

 undeniably prove the rapid displacement of the sea-level in the 

 vicinity. Several large flat rocks, over which schooners might 

 pass some thirty or forty years ago with the greatest facility, are 

 now approaching the surface of the water, so that it is scarcely 

 navigable for a skiff. Dr. Jackson describes a deposit of recent 

 shells in clay and mud, with the remains of balani or barnacles, 

 attached to trap rock twenty-six feet above the present high- water 

 mark, on the margin of Lubec Bay in the State of Maine. 



Changes like these which we have just described, have been 

 of universal occurrence. Upon this subject Cuvier remarks, 

 " The lowest and most level lands, when penetrated to a great 

 depth, exhibit nothing but horizontal strata, consisting of various 

 substances, almost all of them containing innumerable product- 

 ions of the sea; similar strata, similar productions, compose the 

 hills, even to a great height. Sometimes the shells are so nu- 

 merous that they form, of themselves, the entire mass of the 

 stratum. They are everywhere so completely preserved, that 

 even the smallest of them retain their most delicate parts, their 

 slenderest processes, and their finest points. They are found in 

 elevations above the level of the ocean, and in places to which 

 the sea could not now be conveyed by any existing causes. They 

 are not only enveloped in loose sands, but are incrusted by the. 

 hardest stones, which they penetrate in all directions." Every 

 part of the world, the continents, as well as all the islands of any 

 considerable extent, exhibits the same phenomena; these animals 

 have, therefore, lived in the sea, and the sea consequently must 



