SOUTHERN AFRICA, 9 
mount with them in their beaks into the air ; shells thus carried 
are said to he frequently found on the very summit even of the 
Table Mountain. In one cavern, at the point of Mossel 
Bay, I disturbed some thousands of birds and found as 
many thousands of living shell-fish scattered on the surface 
of a heap of shells that, for aught I know, would have filled 
as many thousand waggons. The presence of shells there- 
fore is not, in my opinion, any argument for the presence 
of the sea. 
We should not, perhaps, be far amiss in assigning to Africa 
a prior creation to any of the other continents. Its vast anti- 
quity appears in the very extraordinary manner in which the 
superior parts of the great chain of mountains are corroded and 
worn away ; in the immensely deep chasms in which the rills 
of water trickle down to the sea ; in the disappearance of the 
water supplied by the heavy rains ; and, above all, in the com- 
plete decomposition of the feltspar into a kind of semi-indu- 
rated clay or lithomarga; and, as in the course of my travels 
I have seen in frequent instances, pyramidal crystals of quartz 
so loosely fixed by the base into masses of feltspar as easily 
to be drawn out with tiie fingers, and when so drawn out, 
appearing corroded, and wasted in their transition to some 
other state. 
I would not here be understood to suppose that the sea 
does not retreat from the shore ; on the contrary, it is a weli 
established fact, that in some parts of the world, and parti- 
cularly in the creeks of the Baltic, the sea has subsided in a 
very remarkable manner. But this retreat may be partial 
