1834.4 GEOLOGY OF PATAGONIA. 174 
sometimes even a foot in diameter. These beds are covered by 
others of a peculiar soft white stone, including much gypsum, 
and resembling chalk, but really of a pumiceous nature. It is 
highly remarkable, from being composed, to at least one- 
tenth part of its bulk, of Infusoria: Professor Ehrenberg: has 
already ascertained ‘in it thirty oceanic forms. This bed extends 
for 500 miles along the coast, and probably for a considerably 
greater distance. At Port St. Julian its thickness is more than 
800 feet! These white beds are everywhere capped by a mass 
of gravel, forming probably one of the largest beds of shingle in 
the world: it certainly extends from near the Rio Colorado to be- 
tween 600 and 700 nautical miles southward; at Santa Cruz (a 
river a little south of St. Julian), it reaches to the foot of the 
Cordillera; half way up the river, its thickness is more than 200 
feet ; it probably everywhere extends to this great chain, whence 
the well-rounded pebbles of porphyry have been derived: we 
may consider its average breadth as 200 miles, and its average 
thickness as about 50 feet. If this great bed of pebbles, with- 
out including the mud necessarily derived from their attrition, 
was piled into a mound, it would form a great mountain chain ! 
When we consider that all these pebbles, countless as the grains 
of sand in the desert, have been derived from the slow falling of 
masses of rock on the old coast-lines and banks of rivers; and 
that these fragments have been dashed into smaller pieces, and 
that each of them has since been slowly rolled, rounded, and 
far transported, the mind is stupified in thinking over the long, 
absolutely necessary, lapse of years. Yet all this gravel has 
been transported, and probably rounded, subsequently to the 
deposition of the white beds, and long subsequently to the under- 
lying beds with the tertiary shells. 
Everything in this southern continent has been effected on a 
grand scale: the land, from the Rio Plata to Tierra del Fuego, 
a distance of 1200 miles, has been raised in mass (and in Pata- 
gonia toa height of between 300 and 400 feet), within the period 
of the now existing sea-shells. The old and weathered shells 
left on the surface of the upraised plain still partially retain 
their colours. The uprising movement has been interrupted by 
at least eight long periods of rest, during which the sea ate deeply 
back into the land, forming at successive levels the long lines of 
