BY HUGH MILLER. 327 



I would not be understood to argue that the country left the sea 

 unmarked. It may have been girded by coast lines and cliffs, 

 and broken into at various points. But in the region I describe 

 I find no evidence of this remaining ; and to those who consider 

 it impossible that the land could rise without it, I reply, so 

 much the more remote a state of things whose familiar signs 

 have been obliterated, and replaced by seams and scars of a dif- 

 ferent kind. 



Look at the proof of atmospheric action upon these watershed 

 crags. The Queen's Crag has not lost less, by a moderate compu- 

 tation of the debris visible at one point below it, than thirty feet 

 of solid face since the glacial period. The Sewingshields Crag 

 has a talus of broken basaltic shafts, apparently not smaller than 

 at most other points along its escarpment. The King's Crag gives 

 fewer signs of decay upon its talus-slope ; but corroding waste is 

 written along its whole length. It is broken throughout into 

 irregular semi-detached blocks, divided here by dark rent-like 

 recesses, and there by wide rectangular spaces, with fallen blocks 

 tending to group in lines below them. In places it abuts in 

 squares, like the peel-towers of the valley below ; elsewhere the 

 squares are wasted into rounded forms ; side by side with these 

 again, stand shapes constricted by waists and necks ; while al- 

 most everywhere its surface is cut, slashed, and corroded. Mucli 

 finer examples of '^ mushroom rocks" can be seen than in the 

 King's Crag, but atmospheric waste has stamped itself deep enough 

 upon it to attest its powers. 



Woodcut No. 7. — Diagram of King's Crag-, shewing its composite cliaracter and pre- 

 vious form. S. Sandstone. Sh. Shale. L. Limestone. 



All this is only disintegration of the main rock-bed of these 

 crags. But they rise, as I have said, in several stories. In the 

 King's Crag the upper sandstone is about fifty feet thick: below if 

 come other beds about equal in sum, including a limestone about 

 ten feet tliick, a sliiile, and probably a sandstone, ( Woodcut No. 7.) 



