T11E CENTURY'S PROGRESS IN GEOLOGY 



contrary, gigantic mountains may have heaped up their 

 contorted heads in cataclysms as spasmodic as even the 

 most ardent catastrophist of the elder day of geology 

 could have imagined. 



The atmosphere of that early day, filled with vast 

 volumes of carbon, oxygen, and other chemicals that 

 have since been stored in beds of coal, limestone, and 



SIR RICHARD OWEN 



granites, may have worn down the rocks, on the one 

 hand, and built up organic forms on the other, with a 

 rapidity that would now seem hardly conceivable. 

 And yet wh,ile all these anomalous things went on, 



155 



