350 UNIFORM MOVEMENT PREDOMINATES. chap. xvii. 



to the sea. Were it otherwise, we should not find conform- 

 able strata of all ages, including the primary fossiliferous of 

 shallow-water origin, which must have remained horizontal 

 throughout vast areas during downward movements of several 

 thousand feet, going on at the period of their accumulation. 

 Still less should we find the same primary strata, such as the 

 carboniferous, Devonian, or Silurian, still remaining hori- 

 zontal over thousands of square leagues, as in parts of North 

 America and Eussia, having escaped dislocation and flexure 

 throughout the entire series of epochs which separate palax)zoic 

 from recent times. Not that thc}^ have been motionless, for 

 they have undergone so much denudation, and of such a kind, 

 as can only be explained by supposing the strata to have 

 been subjected to great oscillations of level, and exposed in 

 some cases I'epeatedly to the destroying and planing action 

 of the waves of the sea. 



It seems probable that the successive convulsions in Moen 

 were contemporary with those upward and downward move- 

 ments of the glacial period which were described in the 

 thirteenth and some of the following chapters, and that they 

 ended before the upper beds of No. 5, p. 346, with its large 

 erratic blocks, were deposited, as some of those beds occurring 

 in the disturbed parts of Moen appear to have escaped the 

 convulsions to which Nos. 2, 3, and 4 were subjected. If 

 this be so, the whole derangement, although post-pliocene, 

 ma}' have been anterior to the human epoch, or leather to the 

 earliest date to which the existence of man has as yet been 

 traced back. 



