70 W J MCGEE — tTNIFORMITARlANiSM AND DEFORMATION. 



bility of the contractional hypothesis to the known earth movements 

 per se. The deposition areas of the great rivers are subsiding ; many 

 hands, particularly those from which the Pleistocene ice is not long re- 

 moved, are rising differentially ; the coastal zones of many countries are 

 a record of repeated oscillation ; the strata of the normal three-quarters 

 of the continent afford voluminous testimony, of undulatory rise and fall • 

 even the mountain ranges are rising vertically. The dislocations dis- 

 played by three-quarters of the earth indicate stratic extension ; only 

 one-quarter indicate contraction. It is vain to explain the seen in terms 

 of the unseen ; and the time is gone by for the primitive appeal to the 

 rare and remote in explanation of the common and the near at hand, to 

 the imaginery in explanation of the real. The vertical oscillations of 

 the normal earthcrust constitute a vast body of well ascertained fact ; 

 the rise and fall of the land during the geologic past, as in the present, is 

 hardly less firmly established than the endless action of running waters. 

 Already these characteristic movements are partly within the domain of 

 the most advanced geologic science in the form of genetic classification ; 

 yet earth-science will not be complete until the uniformitarianism intro- 

 duced by Lyell embraces the mass movements as well as the j^article 

 movements of the earthcrust. 



