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 AA^eald at the 
close of the Coal Period ; and 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 
J urassic 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 bhe 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," 
on either side of which dwell those great and glorious nations of 
wliom 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 AVales, 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 
