SIR CHARLES LYELL. 269 



Lyell showed that the Alps, Andes, and Hima- 

 laya Mountains were all elaborated under water. 

 " The Alps have acquired four thousand, and even, 

 in some places, more than ten thousand feet of 

 their present altitude since the commencement of 

 the Eocene (dawn of recent) period. ... It is not 

 too much to say that every spot which is now dry 

 land has been sea at some former period, and every 

 part of the space now covered by the deepest ocean 

 has been land. The present distribution of land 

 and water encourages us to believe that almost 

 every conceivable transformation in the external 

 form of the earth's crust may have been gone 

 through. In one epoch the land may have been 

 chiefly equatorial ; in another, for the most part 

 polar and circumpolar." 



Lyell showed also the great age of the world by 

 the changes which have taken place in climate. In 

 Greenland are a multitude of fossil plants, which 

 show that it formerly enjoyed a mild and genial 

 climate. Fossil tulip and walnut trees have been 

 found within the Arctic circle. 



" On the North American continent, between 

 the Arctic circle and the forty-second parallel of 

 latitude," said Lyell, "we meet with signs of ice- 

 action on a scale as grand, if not grander than in 

 Europe." The drift covered from the Atlantic 

 border of New England and Labrador westward to 

 Dakota and Lake Winnipeg, and farther north, 

 across the continent. Some stones in this bed of 

 ice were thirty feet square, weighing over four 



