72 
FLORIDA GEOLOGICAL SURVEY. 
hypotheses, involving the elevation of some of the Antilles 
and Florida many thousand feet and their submergence within 
a comparatively recent period of geological time. 
“The, on the whole, remarkable horizomtality of the Flor¬ 
idian strata indicates a freedom from violent changes of level 
from the time the Peninsular limestone first emerged from 
the sea. Landshells in the Ocala limestone show that the then 
dry land existed. South of the Suwannee Strait, closed in 
late Miocene time, there is no evidence of subsequent submer¬ 
sion to any serious extent. Two gentle flexures run parallel 
with the peninsula, having the lake district between them; a 
tilting of, at the most, thirty feet, up at the east, down at the 
west, which may have been contemporaneous with the flex¬ 
ures; and, for the rest, very slow and slight but probably 
'nearly continuous elevation never exceeding one hundred feet 
and perhaps less than half that, with dry land and fresh-water 
lakes constantly existing since the Ocala islands were raised 
above the sea; such is the geological history of the Florida 
peninsula. Denudation of the organic limestone by solution 
rather than erosion is the prominent characteristic of the 
changes in the surface. Soft, crumbling under the finger nail, 
the rocks of the plateau, if lifted five or six thousand feet, as 
claimed by Dr. Spencer, would have been furrowed by canyons 
and swept bodily into the sea. Indeed, to me the proposition 
is inconceivable as a fact and incompatible with every geologic 
and paleontologic fact of south Florida which has come to my 
knowledge.” 
In reply to Dali’s chief objection, that the peninsula 
if elevated would have been deeply scarred and cut by 
'Canyons, Spencer maintains (194) that part of Florida 
which now constitutes the peninsula was during the 
period of elevation a remnant of a plateau not yet dis¬ 
sected. 
