326 TYJSTEDALE ESCAEPMENTS ; 



high above stream action, that the marine theory would probably 

 make its last stand. I make no apology for anticipating objec- 

 tions that will occur to others as they did to myself. 



The most exclusive advocates of Rain and Eivers admit that 

 currents of the sea possess great erosive power when streaming 

 through narrow straits. Colonel Greenwood, for instance, who 

 fiercely attacked Lyell for admitting that in possible cases the sea 

 may hollow a valley, allows that ''currents might decapitate a 

 continent as it arose ;" and of course it could carve grooves along 

 the softer lines in the process. The troughs between these crags 

 bear a sufficient analogy to the passes that often prolong valleys 

 over watersheds to place it somewhat in the same category ; and 

 of such passes Prof. Geikie, certainly not one to call spirits wan- 

 tonly ''from the vasty deep," says, that though "the first and 

 perhaps the main part was probably done by running water and 

 frost, the sea and other powers of disintegration may have lent 

 their aid."^* It would not be without reason therefore that the 

 theorist might point to these watershed troughs as the scene of 

 rapid cross-rushes of water, such as sweep among the Orkney 

 Islands at the rate, during storms, of thirteen miles an hour, 

 enlarging the channels and occasionally bursting chasms through 

 opposing barriers of rock ; and might indicate how the water, 

 forced into narrowing and shallowing space to and fi'o every tide 

 like a handsaw, could clear out the shales from among the harder 

 beds. 



I have put the case strongly that the reader may choose his 

 own hypothesis ; but to this view I believe there are fatal objec- 

 tions, in that it leaves untouched many escarpments at lower levels, 

 absolutely similar in character and in their relation to minor 

 watersheds. Before elevating forces could bring all these within 

 the range of "decapitating" currents the main watersheds would 

 have been raised into broadening stripes of land, which would in- 

 tercept the path of the tide. In truth nothing but that wide- 

 spread action of currents and waves advocated by Phillips could 

 account for all the features of which the King's and Queen's 

 Crags are typical. 



* Scenery and Geology of Scothiml, ji. 12-1. 



