37 
with ripple marks, while others again are raised in little 
mounds, with intervening hollows ? Whence arise these 
changes in arrangement of what is to all appearance the 
same material, under the apparently uniform action of the 
gentle ripple of the advancing tide of a placid sea '? 
' ' Most of the sea-port towns of Great Britain and Ireland 
are built on a flat teiTace of unequal breadth, which runs 
around the shores, backed by an escarpment of varied height 
and character, which is known to geologists as the old-coast 
line. No geologist can or does doubt that this escarpment 
was at one time the coast-line of the island — the line against 
which the waves broke at high water in some distant age, 
when either the sea stood from twenty to thirty feet higher 
along our shores than it does now, or the land sat from 
twenty to thirty feet lower." . . . "Shells, not now 
British, are found in many parts of Britain at heights vary- 
ing from 200 to 1,400 feet over the existing sea level." . . 
" The table lands of the country were submerged in a sub- 
arctic sea, and Great Britain existed as but a scattered archi- 
pelago of wintry islands. " * 
" Nearly the whole of England would be under water, 
with, however, a few islands representing the higher peaks 
of Cornwall ; others scattered over the site of the West 
Riding of Yorkshire ; and a hilly tract of land over what is 
now Wales. A thick set archipelago would represent the 
Cheviot Hills, and the country south of the Forth and 
Clyde ; north of which would intervene a broad strait, with 
a comparatively large area of undulating land beyond, 
stretching across what is now the area of the Grampian Hills, 
in Scotland, "t 
In Dr. Lardner's " Popular Geology " there are diagrams 
of the supposed relative positions of land and water upon the 
continent of Europe and the British Isles during successive 
geological epochs, taken chiefly from the maps of M. Elie de 
Beaumont and M. D'Orbigny. The epochal variations are 
too numerous to be quoted. The evidence furnished by the 
sedimentary formations upon which the charts are based 
demonstrate that "the geological convulsions which took 
place between period and period, completely deranged the 
successively pre-existing outlines of land and water. One 
fact in the illustration may be noted, viz., that entire 
mountains in the Pyrenean chain are almost wholly com- 
posed of the fossiliferous remains of a minute conchiferous 
* " Testimony of the Rocks." 
t " Gleaniugs from the Note-Book of a Field Geologist," by A. 
Geikie, Esq. 
