REVIEWS. 



543 



a'^vay this fact — for one it undeniably is — are most bungling, and too transparent to 

 take effect. The chief stress is laid upon the thickness of the dirt-bed, which is 

 admitted to be from twelve to eighteen inches thick, being insufficient for the growth 

 of forest trees. Any one who has walked over a limestone or hilly district, will know 

 that forest trees will grow luxui-iantly in such a thickness of soil as this ; and even 

 on steep slopes trees of thirty and more feet in height will brave the storm, and 

 find ample support in a soil of considerably less than a foot in thickness. 



Again, are not all geologists cognizant of the lava- covered gravels of central 

 France ? And are all the well-known and familiar facts of the coal -fields at home 

 and abroad to be entii-ely ignored ? Not to mention the refutations from the AVeal- 

 den, the bi'own-coal, and all the pages of et cieteras one could write down from 

 memory. 



As to the courses of the old rivers (about which the author of this book 

 with such seeming confidence taunts geologists), that ignorance of them which he 

 imputes does not reign. Something, much, indeed, is known, and more is daily 

 gathering. 



The evidence of the coal-measures was also too powerful a " voice" not to be 

 listened to, but its speech has not been faithfully reported. ^Ye have, however, 

 neither space nor patience to follow up and explode every detail. Our business 

 is to fairly review the book, and to point out its merits or demerits ; but, for the 

 sake of geology, we cannot pass over some of the chief points used in support of an 

 argument that has for its object the overturning of established science, and a ten- 

 dency to subvert its real interests and progi*ess. 



But to pass to the third point — the alleged slow deposition of the strata of the 

 earth, than which, it is there said, " nothing in the whole system of modern geology 

 is so opposed to common sense. No one with common sense would agree in this 

 assertion after the perusal of any of the elementary treatises of Delabeche, Lyell, 

 Phillips, Ansted, IMantell, Paj^e. View a little chalk-dust through a microscope, 

 or a few grains of Virginian Tertiary marl, and the hundreds of minute organic 

 objects there visible would render it impossible — we repeat the word, impossible fov 

 any one with common sense, and using it, to doubt the slowness of the formation 

 of those deposits. The quantities of the larger and more evident organisms 

 embedded in all sedimentary strata, it is plain too, must have lived and died ; 

 each must have had its term of life. No one will, no one can, believe that they 

 were called into existence for the sole purpose of ornamenting a suddenly-formed 

 mud-bank, or that they are "plastic forms moulded by nature," as delusions and 

 ideal fictions that have never existed. 



Great stress is laid upon the imbedding of fossil trees in the sandstones of the 

 coal-measures at Craigleith, South Joggins, and other places. All the local details 

 of these and such-like instances, must be gone minutely into, to prove the correct 

 conditions under which such trees were entombed, and how it happens that they 

 extend through so many strata, the formation of which must have taken great 

 length of time. Suffice it to say, that these usually occur in sandstone, and we 

 know that accumulations of sand are constantly liable to alterations of position 

 and re-deposit, especially around even the slightest obstruction. Moreover, heavy 

 bodies have a tendency to settle down through deposits of loose sand. We have 

 seen large vessels wrecked on the Kentish coast swaddle down, as they there term it, 

 and become nearly totally submerged in the course of a few years, and this with- 

 out ever disturbing the level surface of the surrounding shore. Vessels wrecked 

 on sands which are quick, or in a state of seething, as it may be termed, at high 



