64 . REPORT—1858. 
tain-cincture, studded here and there with volcanic vents, are found unsub- 
merged and inland (i. e. where the basin within its boundary is partly land 
and partly water), thus: Etna, Lipari, and Vesuvius, the Apennine chain, 
the southern and western Alps, the Pyrenees, and the great tableland and 
axial chains of the Spanish peninsula, with the mountains of Northern Africa, 
on through Pantellaria and Sicily, form one such basin. Closely connected 
with this is the adjoining basin of the Zgean with the volcanic Greek Islands : 
the Black Sea, with the volcanic regions of Armenia and the Caucasus, form 
a distinct basin extending on the north far into Russia; the Caspian, with the 
Sea of Aral and the plain of Tartary embracing Persia, another, having its 
own volcanoes near the former sea, while Central Asia, so little known, seems 
probably divisible into several vast saucer-like areas, north of the great table- 
land, of which the great lakes and the Altai chains, with their imperfectly 
described volcanoes, probably mark some parts of the cinctures, but which, 
in the absence of knowledge as to relative level, it would be premature to 
attempt to trace. Many of these basins further on to the north appear no 
longer bounded by closed curves upon land, but to open out along the great 
river-courses which run northward and become lost to our knowledge in the 
icy solitudes of northern Asiatic Russia. 
Northern Europe presents us with the great Scandinavian, German, and 
Russian saucer, whose features have been made so clear to us by the labours 
of Murchison and others; while, further north and west, a distinet oceanic 
basin appears in the Northern Sea, of which the Norwegian chain, Shetland, 
the Ferro Islands, Iceland, the west coast of Greenland, and the volcanic 
islands of Jan Mayen, are the marked boundaries. 
North America, so far as its surface has been ascertained, is divisible into 
several well-marked shallow basins, the most obvious being those of the 
Mississippi ; of the Arctic Highlands; the two deserts east and west of the 
Rocky Mountains (lat. 80° to 40° N.); and of the great lakes, to which may 
be added hereafter Labrador and the North of Canada with Hudson’s Bay ; 
the eastern talus of the great Atlantic slope falling into the boundary of the 
Atlantic basin. Enough, however, has probably been stated to indicate 
that, viewed upon the broadest scale, the surface of our globe consists, as 
respects its present solid surface, of a number of saucer-like depressions, 
when large, having also convex central areas, all having plan outlines 
approximating to extremely irregular ovals or other closed curves, and 
bounded by mountain-chains or mere rounded or flat-topped ridges or eleva- 
tions of the solid sphere, greater or less. Where three or more of these inoscu- 
late, the point between the junction is most frequently a group of mountains 
or a high tableland, or both,—as, for example, the knots (Cusco and others) 
of the South American Andes, upon which the suboceanic ridges abut. 
The greatest of these saucer-like concavities either form or subdivide the 
beds of the ocean, but other such shallow basins can be traced upon the 
existing land, and embracing seas or parts of seas, or great lakes, or river- 
courses within them, but still enclosed by girdling chains of mountains or 
the precipitous flanks of tablelands, which latter in their full development 
are the pedestals of the greatest mountain-chains. Amongst the wide- 
sweeping curves that indicate the dividing crests (if we may use such a 
word to designate elevations often, especially in the subdividing ridges of the 
oceanic sub-basins, so very low in relation to the areas they separate) of these 
vast oceanic basins, it appears impossible to trace any approach to parallelism, 
or, indeed, that such an arrangement could exist. 3 
We do, however, remark, that it is along these girdling ridges, whether 
mountain-ranges or mere continuous swelling elevations of the solid, which 
divide these basins beneath the ocean surface one from the ether, that all. 
