PART II. CHAPTER XIV. 



171 



Recent and Newer Pliocene Strata. 



depths, were detected various worlds of art implying a rude state 

 of civilization, and some vessels built before the introduction of 

 iron. These vessels and implements must have sunk to the 

 bottom of an arm of the sea, afterwards filled up with sand and 

 loam including marine shells, and the whole must then have been 

 upraised ; so that the upper beds became sixty feet higher than 

 the surface of the Baltic. There are, however, in the neighbour- 

 hood of these formations, others precisely similar in mineral 

 composition and testaceous remains, which ascend to the height 

 of between 100 and 200 feet, in which no vestige of human art 

 has been seen. Similar deposits reach an elevation of 500 and 

 even 600 feet in Norway, as in the neighbourhood of Christiania, 

 where they have usually been described as raised beaches, but 

 are, in fact, strata of clay, sand, and marl, often many hundred 

 feet thick, which cover the inland country far and wide, filling 

 valleys and deep depressions in the granite gneiss, and primary 

 fossil iferous rocks, just as the tertiary formations of England and 

 France rest upon the chalk, or fill depressions in it. 



All conchologists are agreed that the shells of the deposits 

 above mentioned are nearly all, perhaps all, absolutely identical 

 with those now peopling the contiguous ocean ; so that, in the 

 absence of any evidence of their being Recent, we must regard 

 them as Newer Pliocene formations. 



Along the western shores of South America, Recent and 

 Newer Pliocene strata have in like manner been brought to light. 

 These often consist of enormous masses of shells, similar to those 

 now swarming in the Pacific. In one bed of this kind, in the 

 island of San Lorenzo, near Lima, Mr. Darwin found, at the 

 altitude of eighty-five feet above the sea, pieces of cotton-thread, 

 plaited rush, and the head of a stalk of Indian corn, all of which 

 had evidently been imbedded with the shells. At the same 

 height on the neighbouring mainland, he found other signs cor- 

 roborating the opinion that the ancient bed of the sea had there 

 also been uplifted eighty-five feet, since the region was first peo- 

 pled by the Peruvian race.* But similar shells, or strata, con- 

 taining them, have been found much higher, almost everyvrhere 

 between the Andes and the sea coasts of Chili and Peru, in which 

 no human remains were ever, or in all probability ever will be, 

 discovered. These strata, therefore, may provisionally, at least, 

 be designated Newer Pliocene. 



In the West Indies, also, rocks both of the Recent and Newer 

 Pliocene periods abound. Thus, a solid limestone occurs at the 

 level of the sea-beach in the island of Guadaloupe, enveloping 



* Journal, p. 451. 



