Rev. E. mil — On Rapid Elemtmi. 407 



yard. Suppose that the power which did this prodigious work 

 within one minute, instead of exhausting itself in that minute 

 should continue with unabated violence for six long hours. In 

 those six hours it could have uplifted a mass of rock, in depth a 

 mile, under the surface of an English county, through less than a 

 couple of inches. The multiplications to obtain an adequate force 

 are not quite so immense as those required for the rate, but might 

 suffice to make a mouse as strong as an elephant. Besides, here we 

 are making comparison with paroxysms. The mouse is itself a 

 mountain in labour. Cotopaxi in eruption must be magnified by a 

 power of ten thousand. 



No such force then would be capable of uplifting southern Eng- 

 land through several feet even in a long summer's day. Accordingly, 

 we seem justified in regarding an elevation of twenty feet within 

 six hours as an elevation effected with very great rapidity according 

 to any reasonable use of the word. Most, indeed, would regard such 

 action as paroxysmal and catastrophic. But, whether so or no, there 

 is not the slightest doubt that the effects produced by the water as 

 poui-ed off from the land so elevated would not be catastrophic. Such 

 effects are not rare but common. They are matters of daily ex- 

 perience. More even than that, they may be seen produced, over a 

 large area, on a large scale, twice in every day. Twice in every 

 day for hundreds of miles along our coasts the level of the land 

 compared with the sea rises some twenty feet or more in six hours, 

 and twice in every day it again falls, through the same space and 

 in the same time. True, this is due to alterations in the sea level, 

 not in the land, but as far as regards the floio of waters off from or 

 on to the land the effects must be precisely the same. The action of 

 waters pouring away from a rising land can be seen, can be studied, 

 can almost be experimented upon, twice daily in the Tides. 



The tides along most of our southern and western coasts give us 

 the results of elevations up to twenty feet or more. In Jersey we 

 can examine elevations up to thirty feet ; at Chepstow up to forty ; 

 those who can travel as far as the Bay of Fundy will perhaps be 

 able to see what seventy feet could do. Thus, on the one hand, the 

 effects of the supposed exceptional agency would not be exceptional, 

 but common ordinary effects ; and on the other hand, it does not 

 seem necessary to invoke such exceptional agency ; for if the effects 

 be produced by it, then the daily work of the tides is capable of 

 producing daily the same sort of effects. " In the case [considered 

 in the paper] the area of elevation consisted of a variable and uneven 

 land surface," such a surface as is alternately covered and exposed 

 in the archipelago of the Channel Islands. •' Each hill or group of 

 hills formed a centre for the diverging currents," as in that 

 archipelago each islet, shoal, or group of rocks, for the ebb and flow 

 of the tide. " The velocity of [these currents] would further vary 

 according to the varying gradients and lengths of the slopes," but 

 much more according to the conformations of the subaqueous 

 channels. " Where the sediment is fine we may conclude that the 

 velocity was slow, and the rise which gave origin to it small. 



