390 Mr. S. V. Wood on the Effects upon Animal Life 



canic bands prevailed during the carboniferous epoch, beiDg 

 resumed, and that this direction has prevailed to the present 

 time, being that generally of the mountain systems and other 

 anticlinals which have an origin more recent than the cretaceous 

 period, as well as of the chief volcanic bands now in activity other 

 than the Andean and Rocky-Mountain band, which, as I have 

 shown, is of ante-cretaceous origin ; that this resumption of the 

 volcanic direction of the carboniferous epoch by no means repro- 

 duced the geographical features of that palaeozoic age (which were 

 those of low-lying lands having an insular rather than a conti- 

 nental character), but brought into existence those stupendous 

 upheavals of the earth's crust that have culminated at a very 

 recent date in the formation of mountain chains incomparably 

 exceeding in elevation, and consequently in their climatal effect, 

 any of the upheavals of the secondary periods* ; that this change 

 produced, during the intra- cretaceous and tertiary interval, a 

 vast continental extent of land uninterrupted by great mountain 

 chains, extending from America on the west, to the Bay of 

 Bengal on the east, if not perhaps to the centre of the South 

 Pacific, and accumulated mainly in low latitudes ; that the for- 

 mation of such a continent introduced climates the most unlike 

 those of the secondary period, and had its effect both on the 

 condition of the seas near the land, and on that of the land 

 itself; in the latter case by the introduction of alternations of 

 aridity and moisture such as now occur on the southern shores 

 of Asia; that the disappearance of the marine Saurians was 

 consequent upon that of the Cestraciont fishes, the destruction 

 of the latter having proceeded from the failure of the tetrabran- 



* The loftiest chain in the world (the Himalayan) has been formed since 

 the eocene epoch, its area at that epoch having been comprised within the 

 great nummulitic gulf, nummulites of a well-known European form (N. 

 Ramondi) having been found in Cashmere 15,000 feet above the sea. See 

 D'Archiac, Bull. vol. x. p. 380. Animaux foss. de VInde, p. 130.) The 

 theory so long upheld, that the convulsions which the surface of the earth 

 underwent in remote periods were on a far grander scale than those which 

 have taken place during recent ages, is scarcely reconcileable with the fact 

 that all the evidences which we have of mountain systems older than the 

 tertiary (other than the Andes, whose elevation is due at least as much to 

 tertiary as to older volcanic action) indicate not only a less entire disrup- 

 tion and inversion of strata than do many of the systems of tertiary origin, 

 but they are altogether puny in point of elevation when compared with 

 mountain chains whose grandest pinnacles are but the productions of a very 

 Lite period (Himalayah, Ararat, Caucasus, Turco-Persian Mountains, Alps, 

 &c), and sink in comparison with such stupendous volcanoes as those of 

 the Andes, of TenerifFe, of Timor, Hawaii, and the Antarctic Sea, and even 

 with that of Etna. See the views of Ami Boue on the increasing heights 

 of the mountains and depths of the seas in each successive geological epoch, 

 and his Table of Heights and Depths, in Bull. vol. xi. p. 62. 



