INTERIOR LAND CHANGES. 



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CHAPTER XII. 



INTERIOR LAND CHANGES. 



ND surely the mountain falling cometh to nought, 

 and the rock is removed out of its place." " The 

 everlasting mountains were scattered ; the per- 

 petual hills did bow. I saw the tents of Cushan 

 in affliction, and the curtains of the land of Midian 

 did tremble." " The sea saw it, and fled ; Jordan 

 was driven back. The mountains skipped like rams, 

 and the little hills like lambs. What ailed, O thou 

 sea, that thou fleddest ? thou Jordan, that thou wast 

 driven back ? Ye mountains, that ye skipped like 

 rams; and ye little hills like lambs?" This lan- 

 guage of the more ancient scriptures is not that of 

 poetical exaggeration, but derived from an acquaint- 

 ance with the physical history of the earth, obtained 

 by testimony or observation. The trembling of the 

 most solid masses the tottering of rocks, hills, 

 and mountains, are not imaginative pictures, but 

 representations founded upon the realities of nature ; 

 and when the earth is described as reeling to and 

 fro like a drunkard, when the wilderness of Kadesh 

 is declared to shake, and Lebanon and Sirion to 

 leap like the unicorn, we know the source to which 

 the statement is to be referred. The country of the 

 writers, in almost every century since the first 

 Hebrew patriarch pitched his tent upon its soil, has suffered from the eruption of violent 

 eternal forces, acting with greater energy, perhaps, in ancient than in modern times ; 

 and from the great physical changes consequent upon these convulsions, they drew those 

 lofty and terrible descriptions of terrestrial disturbance with which their songs, odes, 

 and elegies abound. Before referring to these subterranean causes of superficial derange- 

 ment and their phenomena, some of the more ordinary forms of interior land changes 

 may be noticed. 



In mountainous regions, the detachment of fragments of rock and earth from abrupt 

 and precipitous elevations is the gradual yet sure effect of the wear and tear of the 

 atmosphere, accelerated by the occurrence of severe storms, heavy rains, and intense frost. 

 Mam Tor, a hill on the Peak of Derbyshire, has become celebrated on account of the waste 

 of its mass ; and hence it is popularly called in the neighbourhood, the *' shivering moun- 

 tain." The summit of the hill rises about eight hundred feet above the level of the valley, 

 and commands an extensive prospect of the high eminences of the district and its beautiful 

 dales, retreats secluded from the bustle of the world, to which the imagination is ready to 

 assign the attributes under which the happy valley of Rasselas is described. According to 

 vulgar rumour, the shivering of the hill has been going on for ages, without occasioning 

 any diminution of its bulk ; but, apart from fable, Mam Tor is a mass consisting of alternate 

 layers of shale and gritstone, and the former readily decomposes under the influence of the 



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