258 Si)' H. Howorth — Recent Changes of Level. 



intermittent and not to continuous and uniform conditions and 

 forces we must attribute its greater features, its mountains, and its 

 ocean depths, its valleys and its scarped cliffs, its chasms and its 

 splintered pyramids, and needles of naked rock. 



I know of no more elementary fact in this behalf than that 

 presented by our own islands. That they have been subjected at 

 different times to vast movements of upheaval and subsidence is 

 as plain as the presence of the sun in a July sky ; yet if we 

 candidly question the evidence as to what has occurred here in 

 historic times, which means since the Romans planted themselves 

 here, we shall fail to find (at least I have after a diligent search 

 failed to find) any satisfactory evidence whatever to justify the 

 conclusion that there has been a change of level, or even any 

 material change of outline in these islands during the interval. 



No doubt there have been local invasions of the coast in Norfolk 

 and Suffolk and Yorkshire, as there have been depositions of silt 

 and mud in the Wash and in the marshy country round it. The 

 Wantsum has been silted up, and the Roman ports of Richborough 

 and Reculver are no longer ports. There have been small local 

 invasions of the coast at Rye and Winchilsea, and there has been a 

 corresponding accretion in Romney Marsh. The two processes have, 

 in fact, compensated each other. Erosion of the projecting head- 

 lands and of the land exposed to rough tides has been correlative 

 with the deposition of the products of erosion elsewhere. All this 

 is familiar and elementary. 



On the other hand, the continued existence of the Pharos at 

 Dover Castle and th-e continuance until recent years of the corre- 

 sponding Pharos of Caligula, at Boulogne, shows that the outline 

 and limits of the coast at these critical points, where the rush of 

 the Channel tide is greatest, must be very much what they were in 

 Roman times ; nor is there anywhere, so far as I know, either in 

 the North of England or the South, satisfactory evidence that the 

 land has risen or the sea has sunk since Roman times ; while there 

 is some evidence, like that of the Hythe canal, the terminating 

 portions of the Roman wall in the north, and the facts collected on 

 the Cheshire coast, to show that the respective levels of land and 

 sea have remained unaltered. 



While I am on this subject I am tempted to quote a not too 

 familiar passage from Hutton, with whom I cannot often agree. 

 "The description," he says, "which Polybius has given of the 

 Euxine, with the two opposite Bosphori, the M^otis, the Propontis, 

 and the port of Byzantium, are as applicable to the state of things 

 now as they were at the writing of that history. The Isthmus of 

 Corinth is apparently the same at present as it was two or three 

 thousand years ago. Scylla and Charybdis are still, as in ancient 

 times, rocks hazardous for coasting vessels ; the Port of Syracuse, 

 with the Island which forms the Greater and Lesser Port, and the 

 Fountain of Arethusa, the water of which the ancients divided from 

 the sea by a wall, do not seem to be altered .... on the Coast of 

 Egypt we find the rock on which was built the famous Tower of 



