38 
animal, designated latmmulites planuluta, whose habitat, 
during existence, must have been remote from the coast, at 
the bottom of a deep sea. It is a striking fact, also, that it 
was of like materials that the pyramids of Egypt were built. " 
Fossils found in sedimentary formations in England, prove 
that at one epoch of cataclysmal revolution, elephants, 
rhinoceroses, and other monstrous land animals were depo- 
sited amid pine forests, over which, when at a subsequent 
epoch submerged, an accumulation of the carcases of whales, 
nar-whals, and sea-horses, swept by oceanic overflow, were 
arrested, and fossilized, amidst the new sediment of another 
convulsion of nature, resulting in addition of their remains, 
entombed in an earthy deposit, to the continuously aug- 
menting strata. " Belemnites, fossils of the oolite, have 
been dug out of the sides of the Himalaya mountains 17, (WO 
feet over the level of the sea." "It is clear that all rocks 
which were formed at the bottom of the sea, and which arc 
now dry land, must have gained their present situation either 
by the sinking of the sea level, or by the uplifting of the sea 
bottom. We find aqueous rocks on the summits of some of 
our highest mountains ; and if these had been laid dry solely 
by the sinking of the sea, it is difficult to understand what 
can have become of a shell of water ten or twenty thousand 
feet deep enveloping the whole globe," unless, by change in 
the earth's centre of gravity, this was elsewhere equably 
disposed around the new centre. Sir C. Lyell remarks, 
" Geology demonstrates that the persistency of subterranean 
movements in one direction has not been perpetual through- 
out all past time. There have been great oscillations of 
level, by which a surface of dry land has been submerged to 
a depth of several thousand feet, and then, at a period long 
subsequent, raised again, and made to emerge. " Why must 
we longer ransack Nature in search of powers of igneous 
elevations, co-extensive with a hemisphere, when the hypo- 
thesis of change of centre of gravity furnishes a solution to 
the problem \ Why I Because, as La Place remarked, " The 
simplest truths are usually those which are the last to force 
themselves upon us." "It is," observes Sir C. Lyell, " by 
assuming such reiterated variations of level, each separately 
of small vertical amount, but multiplied by time, till they 
acquire importance in the aggregate, that we are able to- 
explain the phenomena of denudation. By such movements, 
every portion of the surface of the land becomes in its turn 
a line of coast, and is exposed to the action of the waves and 
tides. " By what agency of elevation, can we conceive the 
upward motion, if applied beneath the land, so equable and 
