366 ME J. GEIKIE ON THE BURIED FORESTS 



same appearances as are found to characterise the margins of the English Channel, 

 and the western and northern coasts of the British Islands. 



Tree-bearing Peat of Maritime Regions. — These facts, taken alone, prove a 

 general loss of land. But, even without the evidence of the sunk forests, we 

 should arrive at the same conclusion, after considering the nature of those trees 

 entombed in mosses that occur close to our sea- coasts. The great size of the oak, 

 and the dimensions attained by the pine, convince us that, during the period of 

 their growth, those trees were far enough removed from the sea to escape its 

 blighting influence ; in other words, that the land formerly extended farther 

 seawards. When we turn to the trees of the submerged forests, we find them in 

 like manner characterised by their large size. Hence, we are compelled to grant 

 a still wider area for the old sunk country. 



No island of the Orkney or Shetland groups, can boast the presence of any 

 natural trees deserving of the name. Cultivated saplings are protected by walls, 

 but they cannot raise their tops above the level of the copestones. And yet the 

 mosses and sunk forests of those regions abound with fallen trees, many of which 

 equal in thickness the body of a man. When these buried trees decked the now 

 bleak islands with their greenery, the land stood at a higher level, and the neigh- 

 bouring ocean at a greater distance. A study of similar appearances in the 

 Inner and Outer Hebrides will induce us to form a like opinion of the changes 

 which they indicate. The broad barren flats of Caithness were also in ancient 

 times overspread with a thick growth of large- sized natural wood, the peat 

 mosses containing which pass below the sea. To have permitted this strong 

 forest growth, we are again compelled to admit a former elevation of the land 

 and a corresponding retreat of the ocean. And so on of all the maritime regions 

 of Scotland. 



The same inferences may be drawn from the facts disclosed by the mosses of 

 Ireland and England. On the coasts of France and Holland, as I have said, peat 

 dips underneath the sea, and along those bleak maritime regions of Norway, 

 where now-a-days the pine tree will hardly grow, we find peat mosses which con- 

 tain the remains of full-grown trees, such as are only met with in districts much 

 further removed from the influence of the sea.* 



Continental Britain. — Thus, over a very large area, we have proofs of a process 

 of submergence which, to say the least, has materially diminished the extent of 

 dry land in the north-west of Europe. From other evidence, which it is unneces- 

 sary to recapitulate here, geologists have concluded that the area covered by 

 the German Ocean, the English Channel, and the Irish Sea, has been at no distant 

 date in the condition of dry land. After the deposition of the marine beds 

 of the Drift Formation, a movement of elevation ensued, which resulted in the 



* From information obtained in Norway, 1865. 



