466 Reviews — Mackintosh's Scenery of England 8^ Wales. 



sand-bank and swampy delta here and tTiere, until all should be 

 engorged by the tyrant ocean : or the dreamy thoughts of some 

 would fancy the aged earth fretting away and disappearing in the 

 great sea's womb, whence the divine fiat had called it forth at first. 

 But other thoughts came in — the sandstones and loams of hill and 

 vale had too strong a likeness to the sand and mud of shore and 

 bank, not to be associated with them in some observing minds ; and 

 the fossil shells of the high grounds demanded water as the cause of 

 their deposit there, for they were like the living creatures of the 

 sea. And here, the floods of rain and rivers, and, may be, the storm- 

 flood and earthquake wave of the coast, were too strong in the 

 memory of individuals and races not to supply what seemed to be a 

 true cause for the heaping up of sea-spoils on the hills, mingled 

 too, as they sometimes are, with bones and teeth of land animals. 

 This imperfect notion of the part played by water on the earth — 

 misdirected too from a strict study of natural phenomena into 

 legends of fear and wonder — misled the mind into the false and easy 

 path of error, taking it for granted that the sea came and went over 

 all the earth, with more than the destructive force of all the torrents 

 and all the floods that ever could be thought of. Even at the pre- 

 sent day the tyro in geology falls readily into the same line of thought, 

 when told that the limestone of the hill -top consists of sea- shells, 

 — " Oh, yes, because the sea was here," he says ; not thinking at 

 first but that the configuration of hill and dale was always what it 

 is at present, and having yet to learn that the old shell-bed, now 

 cut up as outliers on separate hills and plateaux, was once con- 

 tinuous, and as far below the water-level as perhaps it is now 

 above it. " The sea was here " is true enough in one sense ; it 

 was in the district, this region ; but was it at this height, over this 

 hill-top ? No. When the sea was here there was the usual sea- 

 bed of ooze, or of silt, or of coral-reefs, or shell-beds, or of sand and 

 shingle, near to or far below the water-level, as the case may have 

 been ; and subsequently, when this region of the globe was in its 

 turn upraised (either by the swelling of hot rocks, and water 

 changed to steam in the fissures of the earth below, or by the crump- 

 lings due to the pressure of local contraction and subsidence), it rose 

 out of the sea, — but in what shape ? If it rose slowly for years and 

 centuries, it must have yielded a heavy tribute for its escape into 

 the bright air ; for the active servants of the sea, the cruel waves, 

 ceaselessly persecuted its heaving back, wearing away the sides of 

 each rocky protuberance with grooves, notches, caves, and cliffs, 

 often faintly marked, and merging into a general sloping flank, 

 but sometimes deeply engraved, as a permanent record of the ever- 

 active waves, gnawing at one level during a long rest in the up- 

 ward movement of the land. How far this horizontal eating of the 

 waves, or planing action of the sea, could extend over a land at rest, 

 we cannot tell : so much depends on conditions favourable for the 

 removal of the shingle, sand, and other debris, which, remaining, 

 would check the sea's advance. Some think they have discerned 

 such broad flat planing over elevated continental areas, or at least 



