520 The Tees, Wear, Tyne, &c. 



does not materially affect the next question to be 

 considered ; for if they did spread over part of these 

 Carboniferous strata, they must have thinned away to 

 a feather edge in times long before the Oolitic escarp- 

 ment began to be formed. 



Taken as a whole, from the great escarpment of Car- 

 boniferous Limestone that overlooks the Vale of Eden 

 on the east, all the Carboniferous strata from thence to 

 the German Ocean have a gentle eastern dip ; so gentle, 

 indeed, that, on Mallerstang and other high hills over- 

 looking the Vale of Eden, outlying patches of Millstone 

 Grit, still remain to tell that once the whole of the Coal- 

 measures spread across the country as far as the edge of 

 the Vale, and even far beyond in pre-Permian times, for 

 the Carboniferous Limestone on both sides of the Vale of 

 Eden, now broken by a fault, was once continuous, and 

 the Whitehaven coalfield was then united to that of 

 Northumberland. These gentle eastern and south-eastern 

 dips, caused by upheaval of the strata on the west and 

 north-west, gave the initial tendency of all the rivers 

 of the region to flow east and south-east. Thus it 

 happens that the Tees, the Wear, the Derwent, the 

 Tyne, the Blyth, the Coquet, and the Alne, have 

 found their way to the German Ocean, cutting and 

 deepening their valleys as they ran, the sides of which, 

 widened by time and subaerial degradation, now often 

 rise high above the rivers in the regions west of the 

 Coal-measures, in a succession of terraces of limestone 

 bands, tier above tier, as it were in Titanic steps, till 

 on the tops of the hills we reach the Millstone Grit 

 itself. 



I now turn to the western-flowing rivers, about 

 which there is far less to be said. 



First, the Eden : This river flows along the whole 



