296 GEOLOGIES AND DELUGES 



as they are to one another we do not find the highest 

 bed of the Carboniferous series offering its upper surface 

 as a gently-sloping platform on which the Trias may rest ; 

 on the contrary, the Carboniferous bees are seen to lie in 

 great rolling folds, with the tops of the rising folds 

 absent, as it were sliced off, and it is on the edges, not on 

 the surface, of these beds that the red Trias layers are seen 

 to be spread out. 



This sudden change in disposition may well be called 

 a break in the succession of the rocks, and, as if to 

 emphasise and compel attention to it, we find it accom- 

 panied by a complete change in the character of the 

 fossils, those occurring in the Carboniferous rocks being of 

 entirely different kinds to those which are found in the 

 overlying beds. 



Evidently the Carboniferous beds could not have been 

 laid down in the sea in the steeply-folded form they now 

 present ; at first they must have been spread out in nearly 

 horizontal layers (Fig. 92 (1) ), and the folded form 

 (Fig. 92 (2) ) must have been subsequently impressed 

 upon them, no doubt by the action of some stupen- 

 dously powerful force. Subsequent, also, must have been 

 the removal of the upper parts of the folds and the general 

 planing-down which they appear to have undergone 

 (Fig. 92 (3) ). 



To the young geology all this might seem perfectly 

 clear, but in its impulsive explanations it assumed that 

 Nature must have frequently acted in a great and terrible 

 hurry : thus the folding of the rocks was supposed to have 

 been produced suddenly and violently by a single mighty 

 convulsion, which simultaneously changed sea-floors into 

 mountain-chains, split open the land in wide-gaping 

 chasms our present river valleys and with the same 

 blow destroyed every living inhabitant in the world. 



But the discordance between two sets of rocks is met 



