Sir H. Howorth — Recent Changes of Level. 411 



continuous, but this slowness and continuity I cannot concede. I 

 do not find evidence anywliere that is satisfactory that the earth, 

 since it became solid, has behaved like a great mass of dough, 

 swelling here and subsiding there by continuous movements ; on the 

 contrary, it seems to me that wherever we have evidence of such 

 movements, and surely it is ample enough, that evidence points to 

 its having been by jumps and starts, involving great fractures and 

 dislocations, reversals and breaches of continuity. Just as I ventured 

 to argue that the upheaval of the Ural Mountains, of the Altai, and of 

 the American Cordillera was rapid, if not sudden, and marked by 

 every sign of cataclysmic change, so also do I hold the corresponding 

 subsidences to have been rapid, if not sudden. Evidence on such 

 a point is not always easy to find, but in some cases it seems to me 

 to be patent and conclusive, and I would quote them as samples 

 of the rest. Take the Channel Bridge, to which I have already 

 referred, or the sea-bottom between the Bear Islands and Siberia, 

 or the submerged forests occurring on many coasts. How is it 

 possible to understand, if the remains of these old land-surfaces were 

 submerged by slow and gradual sinking, that the sea with its sharp 

 chisels and hammers did not break down and wear away to powder 

 every Mammoth tooth and bone, and every tree trunk. Instead 

 of this, as I can testify from many examples in many places, espe- 

 cially in regard to the bones and teeth referred to, every slight 

 ridge and muscular attachment is beautifully preserved, and there is 

 no sign whatever of weathering. The bones are as sharp as the day 

 they were deposited, not in one place only, but over wide areas. 

 We cannot escape the conclusion that the land-surfaces on which 

 they lie, which are entirely out of the reach of any river portage, 

 were rapidly submerged, and thus protected from the gnawing tooth 

 with which the ocean between high and low water- mark grinds 

 hard rocks as well as soft ones into gravel, sand, and mud. The 

 same argument applies to the submerged forests and beds of soft 

 and easily eroded clay in which the trees are often rooted. Here, 

 also, I cannot understand how such beds could have survived the 

 battering of shingle and tide if they had been gradually submerged, 

 as some have argued. This is not my view only, but has been held by 

 much better men than myself, Godwin- Austen, Murchison, and others. 

 To quote one of them, Murchison, " it cannot surely be maintained," 

 he says, " that by the ordinary action of the sea and a gradual 

 depression of the lands now sunk beneath the Irish Channel, 

 England and Ireland were separated since the gigantic Elk (Cervus 

 magaceros) inhabited our lands. Nor by such gradual agency only 

 can we even account for the formation of the great channel which 

 now separates England from France. My firm belief, indeed, is that 

 these separations were effected in the first instance by powerful 

 breaks of continuity, caused by much grander earthquakes than any 

 of which history affords a record, due to expansive internal forces, 

 which gave rise to great upheavals and subsidences in the crust of 

 the earth. In more remote periods, or those of older geological 

 date, these forces have, we well know, produced still more intense 



