THE GROWTH OF CONTINENTS. 145 
La Vendee, of Finistcre, of Longmynd, and of 
Morbihan. These names have, for the present, 
only a local significance, — being derived, like so 
many of the geological names, from the places 
where the investigations of the phenomena were 
first undertaken ; but in course of time they will, 
no doubt, apply to all the contemporaneous up- 
heavals, wherever they may be traced, just as we 
now have Silurian, Devonian, Permian, and Ju- 
rassic deposits in America as well as in Europe. 
The Silurian and Devonian epochs seem to 
have been instrumental rather in enlarging the 
tracts of land already raised than in adding new 
ones ; yet to these two epochs is traced the up- 
heaval of a large and important island to the 
northeast of France. We may call it the Bel- 
gian island, since it covered the ground of mod- 
ern Belgium ; but it also extended considerably 
«/ 
beyond these limits, and included much of the 
Northern Rhine region. A portion only of this 
tract, to which belongs the central mass of the 
Vosges and the Black Forest, was lifted during 
the Silurian epoch, — which also enlarged con- 
siderably Wales and Scotland, the Bohemian 
island, the island of Bretagne, and Scandinavia. 
During this epoch the sheet of water between 
Norway and Sweden became dry land, a consid- 
erable tract was added to their northern extrem- 
ity on the Arctic shore ; while a broad band of 
