174 
SUB-AERIAL DENUDATION 
formation of which volcanic force would seemed to have played 
no part? Here, again, there would seem to be but one agent 
of power sufficiently magnificent to produce these physical 
features — the mighty ocean. Such a valley, writes the Dean 
(Trans. Geol, Soc.^ ser. ii., vol. 1, p. 96), “must be referred 
exclusively to the removal of the substance that once filled it ; 
and the cause of that removal appears to have been a violent and 
transient inundation. . . . The diluvian waters to which 
these effects must be referred (if we except the very limited and 
partial action of modern causes, such as of torrents in cutting 
ravines, of rivers in forming deltas, of the sea in eroding its 
cliffs, and of volcanoes in ejecting and accumulating their 
exuviae) appear to have been the last agents that have operated 
in any extensive degree to change the form of the earth’s 
surface.” 
Vulcan and Neptune, then, shared the honour of preparing 
for us the scenic beauty of the earth’s surface. Opinions differed 
as to the question to which deity we were most indebted for the 
production of our scenery. But no doubt the majority sided 
with old Buffon, who thus concludes the first book of his Natural 
History: — “From all these observations we may fairly 
conclude,” he says, “that it is the continual motion of the 
flux and reflux of the sea which has produced mountains, valleys, 
and other inequalities on the surface of the earth ; that it is the 
currents of the ocean which have hollowed valleys, raised hills, 
and given them corresponding directions ; that it is those waters 
of the sea which by transporting earth, &c., and depositing 
them in horizontal laj^ers, have formed the parallel strata ; that 
it is the waters from heaven which by degrees destroy the 
effects of the sea, by continually lowering the summits of 
mountains, filling up valleys, and stopping the mouths of gulfs 
and rivers, and which, by bringing all to a level, will, in the 
course of time, return this earth to the sea, which, by its 
