266 
Editorial Comment. 
from Finland on the east to the Rocky mountains on the 
west.” 
But in Europe as in America the calm of the Carbon¬ 
iferous was succeeded by a storm in the following age 
which Mr. Browne calls the Dyassic. Then were elevated sev¬ 
eral of the great mountain ranges which still form prominent 
features in the geography of both continents. The Alleghe¬ 
nies in the west and the Pennines in the east form, one of them 
the backbone of the eastern states and the other the backbone 
of England. Never since that epoch have these mountain 
masses ceased to be conspicuous in the geography of the two 
countries. The Dyassic map of the British Isles shows us a 
large lake occupying central England and extending north¬ 
west into Scotland and Ireland while an arm of the European 
sea stretches from the east into Yorkshire. All the rest of the 
area in question is dry land. The proportion is greater than 
at any previous epoch. 
But we must hasten. The Triassic era (Keuper) shows an 
increase of the size of the Dyassic lake which now extends 
from the south of England to the north of Scotland. The lower 
Jurassic sea is larger still and reaches into France while the 
later Jurassic shows us an almost complete drying of the area, 
the sea remaining only over a small space in the south of the 
country. A slight increase of sea marks the lower Cretaceous. 
Here too we see an inroad on the long existing continental area 
in the northwest. The Atlantic continent at last shows signs of 
passing away. A patch of blue sea appears off the northwest¬ 
ern coast of Ireland which in the later or upper Cretaceous has 
expanded into a considerable area while the eastern half of 
England is beneath the water of a European ocean. 
No change is discernible in the lower Eocene except the fur¬ 
ther enlargement of these two bodies of water but in the 
OligoCene a new water area appears in the north and the well 
known ridge, which in the present day is so conspicuous a fea¬ 
ture in the submarine geography of the Atlantic, was elevated 
above the surface. Norway, the North sea and the British is¬ 
lands with the intervening seas were then dry and a long 
isthmus reached past the Faroe islands to Iceland. 
But at the end of the Pliocene age subsidence had broken 
through this ridge and only the Faroe area was above water 
constituting a large island half way between Scotland and Ice- 
