306 SUMMARY OF GEOGRAPHICAL EVOLUTION. [CHAP. XIV. 



they may be said to date from this period, or from that of 

 the Upper Old Eed Sandstone, which immediately pre- 

 ceded it. The greater part of Wales and Shropshire, with 

 tracts of rock which are now buried beneath newer strata 

 in the counties of Stafford, Warwick, and Leicester, form 

 one such district ; the Lake District of Cumberland and 

 Westmoreland is another ; the southern uplands of Scot- 

 land are a third, and the Scottish Highlands seem to have 

 formed part of a continent which also included certain 

 tracts in the north-west of Ireland. Land appears also to 

 have extended from the borders of Wales across the Irish 

 Sea, and to have included small portions of the eastern 

 sea-bord of modern Ireland. 



But although we can truly say that the foundations of 

 our islands had been laid at or before the commencement 

 of the Carboniferous period, and though we can point to 

 certain districts which seem to be the worn-down remnants 

 of Carboniferous land-tracts, yet we must remember that 

 this period was a time when there was more land. than 

 water where the Atlantic Ocean now rolls, and when the 

 broad platform on which the British Islands now stand 

 did not exist ; it is true there was what might be termed a 

 British island, but it lay neither over England, Ireland, or 

 Scotland, the greater part of it occupying the place of the 

 sea which now divides them, while the continent to which 

 this island was subsidiary lay, not to the south and east of 

 it, but to the north and north-west of the British area. 

 Such a state of physical geography is so different from the 

 present order of things, that it would seem rather as if 

 the seas and continents of the Palaeozoic world had an 

 evolutional history of their own which culminated in the 

 geographical conditions of the Carboniferous period, than 

 as if we could treat this period as a phase in the evolution 

 of the existent oceans and continents of the world. But 

 whether such a view is correct or not, we know so little 



