﻿Notices respecting New Books. 383 



by observation, correspondence, and reading, from all available 

 sources, especially from geography and history, ancient, mediaeval, 

 and modern. 



Nowadays most educated people can understand to some extent, 

 and are prepared to believe in, oscillations of the land, and can even 

 master the idea of the English Channel and the German Ocean having 

 enlarged their areas by subsidence within some appreciable period of 

 time ; such a book as the present gives them proofs enough of this 

 having occurred, and supplies much other matter for useful thought. 

 The geologist, of course, can accept the facts and conclusions 

 readily; for he knows that these changes which have happened in 

 the relative level of land and water during historic times are but 

 modern repetitions of movements that have long affected this por- 

 tion of the earth's crust. Some of the results of these normal dis- 

 turbances of level, in the prehistoric and pliocene periods, have been 

 described with scientific accuracy by Mr. R. Godwin-Austen (in the 

 Journal of the Geological Society of London, in 1849-51), well 

 known among geologists for his mastery of the geography of the past, 

 and as a delineator of the old hydrographical conditions of the earth's 

 surface, altered again and again by heavings and sinkings of the 

 land. Thanking Mr. Peacock most heartily, therefore, for the valu- 

 able repertory of facts his book presents, we need not be at all 

 astonished at the changes that have occurred in North-western 

 Europe in the last few centuries, whether ten, twenty, a hundred, 

 or more ; for already we have learnt from Godwin-Austen's good 

 geological observation and reasoning " that the area of the present 

 English Channel was in the condition of dry land previous to its 

 occupation by the waters of the Pleistocene sea, or during the period 

 of the Pliocene (Crag) accumulations of the German basin, and that, 

 together with a large area beyond, it served to connect the British 

 Islands with France on the south, and Ireland on the west, into a 

 tract which had a far greater amount of elevation than any portion 

 of it has at present." Books and parchments are wanting for these 

 long-past pre-historic times, but kitchen-middens and flint imple- 

 ments, and even human bones, have already supplied some indica- 

 tions of early man and his occupation of Europe and Britain when at 

 an elevation greatly differing from what now exists ; and much more 

 is still to be learnt of this highly interesting subject by careful work 

 in the line of research that has been followed by Mr. Peacock among 

 engineers and by Mr. Godwin-Austen among geologists. 



On Steam as the Motive Power in Earthquakes and Volcanoes, and on 

 Cavities in the Earth's Crust. By R. A. Peacock, Esq., C.E. 

 8vo. Jersey, 1866. 



Bound up with the foregoing, and accompanied with a Preface 

 dated 1867, is a tract with the title given above. In it the 

 well-known fact that the vapour of water is the cause of volcanic 

 explosions and other phenomena is enthusiastically insisted upon. 

 The many quotations from observers and writers brought forward in 

 illustration of this long-accepted theory would delight Woodward, 



