REVIEWS. 
543 
away this fact — for one it undeniably is — are most bungling, and too transparent to 
lake 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 luxuriantly in such a tliickness 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 entirely ignored ? Not to mention the refutations from the Weal- 
den, the brown-coal, and all the pages of et coeteras one could write down from 
memory. 
As to the courses of the old rivers (about which the autlior 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. We 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 progress. 
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, Mantell, Page. 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, a? 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 
