18 Dr. J. W. Spencer — The Submerged Platform of W. Europe. 



determination of a marine horizon if one liad never studied a fossil. 

 Then the results ai'e so remarkable that there is a sort of crime in 

 presenting important facts which had escaped observation until 

 such a recent date. Had Mr. Jukes-Browne carefully examined the 

 data for himself, as Professor Hull has been doing — and it cannot be 

 accomplished without devoting a great deal of time to it — I should 

 be amazed to find him again writing, "I do deny (that the border" 

 — i.e. of the submarine shelf — " can properly be called an escarp- 

 ment or) that there is any proof of its having been fashioned by 

 subaerial agencies." The parentheses are mine, as only the question 

 of the sculpturing of the abyssal slopes is of any importance. Such 

 a denial (without the accompanying evidence of actual investigation 

 of the question), whether by an individual, or officially by the 

 President, or even the whole council of any learned society, in the 

 presence of the facts obtainable, can only cast reflection upon their 

 discernment and displays a considerable degree of complaisance in 

 denouncing the results of long and careful study in a new field of 

 investigation, though living near that field, to which the critics are 

 strangers. The investigator must have courage to continue in the 

 face of denials by critics and councils, whose criticisms are usually 

 the expressions of one man officially announced, and therefore of 

 little more real value than the harm which they do. Moreover, 

 human nature is the same among geologists as other men, and the 

 announcement of newly interpreted phenomena is often not to be 

 tolerated, except from the officials or critics themselves. It is the 

 more surprising that Mr. Jukes-Browne should desire to deny the 

 great subsidences of the continental margins, as he has been 

 the advocate of the elevation, in the West Indies, from abysmal 

 depths of the sea bottom, demanding a change of level of land and 

 sea quite as great as Professor Hull now claims. His conclusion 

 was based upon paleeontological evidence, and beyond this field the 

 objector certainly appears not to have grasped the researches of 

 Professor Hull. 



Considerations as to the point of time of the recent great 

 elevations, as shown by Professor Hull, Mr. Jukes-Browne's denial 

 of the elevation (in his last letter) would seem to render superfluous. 

 But it may be added that the evidence in America, at least, indi- 

 cates the late great changes of land and sea to have been in progress 

 between the later Pliocene days and in the Pleistocene period, but 

 that there is nothing showing the great changes (within that range of 

 time) to have been actually synchronous ; for in America, while the 

 east was elevated the west was depressed, and again, while the west was 

 lately being elevated, the east subsided ; and so it may have been that 

 the elevation of the two sides of the Atlantic were not simultaneous : 

 but these possible conditions do not modify the more general 

 hypothesis that some time in the early Pleistocene period the 

 continents on both sides of the Atlantic were hig^h. 



