Greenwood — On Valley Terraces. 207 



The terrace next above is the last formed, and the topmost terrace is 

 the first formed. The conical mountains, on which the remains of 

 the terraces rest, exist only because they are harder than the beds 

 which Jiave formerly surrounded them ; and, as I have said of the 

 Weald Hill and the North and South Downs — those all-powerful ex- 

 cavators, air and moisture, rain and rivers, have as much formed 

 these cones as the sculptor has formed the statue out of the Parian 

 or Carrara blocli. And the human and the natural operators have 

 worked on the same principle — that is, by the abstraction of external 

 parts. And these cones stand out a magnificent monument of the 

 enormous masses which have vanished by the disintegration of the 

 atmosphere and the erosion of rain and rivers. These cones, how- 

 ever, though the monuments are by no means the measure of this de- 

 nudation, since they have themselves been melting away for " an 

 eternity of time," and are day by day vanishing tenues in auras at 

 this instant. All this is going on now all over the world, and all day 

 long. These simple yet sublime truths are beneath the contempt 

 of poor marvel-seeking human nature. We must have a cata- 

 clysm, or a glacial epoch, or a " gravel period," to account for 

 every heap of rain-wash. In his description of the parallel ter- 

 races of the Himalaya, Dr. Hooker's facts exactly correspond with 

 my theorj^, that from the alternation of hard and soft strata across 

 valleys, an alternation of gorge and alluvial flat results : as each 

 gorge sinks and widens, the alluvium above is cut into two 

 parallel terraces. While on the Tambur river (page 199, vol. i.'). 

 Dr. Hooker says : ''I was almost startled with the sudden change 

 from a gloomy gorge to an open flat." Page 191, he says : " Above 

 these gorges are enormous accumulations of rocks, especially at the 

 confluence of lateral valleys, where they rest upon little flats like the 

 river terraces of the Mywa." Now these " lateral valleys " (longi- 

 tudinal as regards the stretch of the strata) are simply the consequence 

 of the erosion of rain and rivers in the soft strata above or behind 

 the hard gorges, as I first said of the lateral valleys in the Weald 

 clay above or behind the gorges of the North and South Downs. In 

 his description of the terraces of the Yangma valley (page 219, 

 vol. i. ibid.), Dr. Hooker begins with a gorge : "The scenery was wild 

 and very grand, over route lying through a narrow gorge choked with 

 pine trees, down which the river roared in a furious torrent." " The 

 path was very bad ; often up ladders and along planks lashed to the 

 faces of precipices, and overhanging the torrent wliich it crossed 

 several times by plank bridges." Above this gorge, and above other 

 " contracted parts of the valley," come his supposed ancient lake beds 

 and the parallel terraces which he depicts, and of which he says 

 (page 233) : " On the opposite flank of the valley were several ter- 

 races, of which the highest appeared to tally with the level I occupied, 

 and the lowest was raised very little above the river ; none were con- 

 tinuous for any distance, but the upper one in particular could be 



^ Himalayan Journals. Notes of a Naturalist in Bengal. The Sikkim and Nepal 

 Himalayas. By Joseph Dalton Hooker, M.D.R.N., F.Ii.S., London, 1855. Pub- 

 lished by John Murray. 



