WERE LAID DOWN 



insect life as we know it in field and forest was not yet 

 heard. It is rather an interesting fact that unmistakable 

 evidence has been collected of the existence in Devonian 

 times of those smallest of living things, the bacteria. 



Of the general distribution of the land we cannot 

 speak with great certainty. The violent disturbances of 

 Silurian times seem to have ceased, but movements of the 

 land did not cease. Great parts of England were rising 

 from the water, and stretching out above the waves to 

 Belgium and Northern France. There was no German 

 Ocean and no St. George's Channel at the end of the 

 period ; and Scotland, also rising above the waves, 

 was accumulating deposits of volcanic ash and lava. 

 While, however, the British Isles and great parts of 

 Belgium, Denmark, Scandinavia, and Western Russia, and 

 smaller areas in mid-France, mid-Germany, and the 

 Balkans were rising the rest of Europe was submerged 

 beneath the waters. In the United States there were 

 similar risings and sinkings of the land, but, on the whole, 

 the course of geological history seems to have been more 

 peaceful across the Atlantic. In Europe, as in America, 

 there do not seem to have been notable changes at the 

 end of the Devonian, though there was some alteration 

 in level in Russia, Bohemia, and Great Britain. The 

 rolling waste of waters south of the Bristol Channel 

 began to deepen. 



The continental area in which the Old Red Sandstone 

 lakes lay (a kind of far Western Europe without a 

 Russia) began now to sink in its turn. All of the British 

 Isles, except a very thin slice just cut across the Midlands 



217 



