292 



THE GEOLOGIST. 



jointed from the continent of Europe? When were the white cliffs 

 of England split apart from those of France ? 



A submerged or island dome, as we have already said, appears from 

 all we know to have existed over the site of the present Weald at the 

 close of the Coal Period ; arid from the indications we derive from 

 deep borings in the surrounding regions, it would be inferred that 

 the Triassic beds were certainly wanting, and that the Oolitic or 

 Jurassic formation was also absent, the Wealden beds reposing, in 

 all likelihood, directly on the coal-measures. 



That this region in the early Cretaceous age was in close proximity 

 to dry land is certain, from the fossil trees and the reptilian bones 

 found in the Lower Greensand quarries at Maidstone, and inversely 

 from the thinness of that division in the Boulonnais. 



Erom these and many other circumstances, it would appear that 

 England was not cut off from the great mass of land then stretching 

 away to the westward by Cornwall and Devonshire on the one 

 hand, and Brittany on the other, at the close of the Cretaceous 

 era ; while the evidence of the Pleistocene deposits proves that the 

 Assuring open of the whole extent of the English Channel was either 

 just prior to, or coincident with, those early tribes of the human race 

 whose remains and rude stone weapons are found associated with 

 the half-petrified bones of the gigantic beasts of that remarkable age. 



But whenever this may be supposed to have happened, the same 

 convulsions shook both countries alike, and the process which lifted 

 up the Wealds of Kent and Sussex raised also the hills of Boulogne 

 and Calais, and left them all portions of the same vast mound, until 

 that other and later catastrophe fissured out the " narrow stream," 

 ou either side of which dwell those great and glorious nations of 

 whom the poet wrote that they abhorred each other, but for whom 

 science now has changed the deadly war of mortal strife into an honour- 

 able rivalry for supremacy in the arts of peace. 



Strange thus that science should bring down the fracture of the 

 Channel to the age of man ! Have the old traditions of the Armoricans 

 aught of relation to this great event, — the rupture of the British 

 Channel ? Have the tales of the loss of " forty miles of land and 

 sea," so current in Brittany and Wales, been handed down from an 

 antiquity far more remote than that to which they are usually as- 

 signed ? Is there any probability of that submergence of the Leon- 

 nais that Norman troubadours sang of when they told the sad story 

 of Guinevra's falseness to her noble lord, being concurrent with the 

 isolation of the British Isles ? We do not, of course, take for true 



