DYNAMICAL GEOLOGY. 1 87 



the natural historian, rather than from the more critical stand- 

 point of the physicist, chemist, or geologist, the French 

 scientists and their adherents were impressed by a sense of 

 the utter disproportion between the infinitesimal changes now 

 taking place under the eye of man and the magnitude of the 

 topographical and biological changes evinced in the remote 

 past. Changes of such magnitude must, they argued, have 

 been the result of stupendous revolutions in the organic and 

 inorganic world, revolutions whose causes and effects were 

 different both in kind and in degree from any known pheno- 

 mena of the present age. 



The " Catastrophal Theory" met almost simultaneously in 

 Germany, France, and England with strong opposition. In 

 the year 1818 the Royal Society of Sciences in Gottingen, 

 acting on a suggestion of Blumenbach's, offered a prize for the 

 best " investigation of the changes that have taken place in the 

 earths surface conformation since historic rimes, and the applica- 

 tion which can be made of such knowledge in investigating earth 

 revolutions beyond the domain of history" 



This subject was handled by Carl Ernst Adolf von Hoff with 

 brilliant success. The first volume of his great work treats 

 of the relation between land and sea in historic time, the 

 extension of the ocean surface owing to the erosion of the 

 coastal territories and invasions of the continents. The 

 Volume betokens complete mastery of all the literature on 

 the subject, from the authors of antiquity to the nineteenth 

 century. Von Hoff proves the baselessness of the tradition of 

 a buried city, Vineta, on the Pomeranian coast, and regards 

 with scepticism the alleged discovery of an old map in Heligo- 

 land with geographical details of this island in the ninth, 

 fourteenth, and seventeenth centuries. This map was found 

 afterwards to have been fabricated. The origin of the Bosphorus 

 and the Strait of Gibraltar as invasions of the Black Sea and 

 the Atlantic Ocean respectively is held to be probably correct 

 by Von Hoff, but he disputes the occurrence of these events 

 within historic time. With scholarly skill, Von Hoff proves 

 that the Platonic " Atlantis " and the submerged island of 

 "Friesland" can only be regarded as fables. An excellent 

 description is given of the changes occasioned along the sea- 

 board by the deposition of sediments, and is illustrated by 

 reference to the Nile delta, the recent formations on the north 

 coast of Africa, Syria and Asia Minor, the Black Sea, in the 



