132 
NEWER PLIOCENE PERIOD. 
[Ch. X. 
my friend Captain Hall for additional details, and he imme- 
diately sent me his original manuscript notes, requesting me to 
make free use of them. In them I find the following interesting 
passages, omitted in his printed account. £ The valley is com- 
pletely open towards the sea ; if the roads, therefore, are the 
beaches of an ancient lake, it is difficult to imagine a catas- 
trophe sufficiently violent to carry away the barrier which 
should not at the same time obliterate all traces of the beaches. 
I find it difficult also to account for the water-worn cha- 
racter of all the stones, for they have the appearance of 
having travelled over a great distance, being well rounded and 
dressed. They are in immense quantity too, and much more 
than one could expect to find on the beach of any lake, and 
seem more properly to belong to the ocean.'' 
We entertained a strong suspicion, before reading these 
notes, that the beaches were formed by the waves of the Pacific, 
and not by the waters of a lake ; in other words, that they 
bear testimony to the successive rise of the land, not to 
the repeated fall of the waters of a lake. We have before 
cited the proofs adduced by M. Boblaye, that in the Morea 
there are four or five ranges of ancient sea-cliffs, one above the 
other, at various elevations, where limestone precipices exhibit 
lithodomous perforations and lines of ancient littoral caverns *. 
If we discover lines of parallel upraised cliffs, we ought to find 
parallel lines of elevated beaches on those coasts where the rocks 
are of a nature, to retain, for a length of time, the marks im- 
printed on their surface. We may expect such indications to 
be peculiarly manifest in countries where the subterranean 
force has been in activity within comparatively modern times, 
and it is there that the hypothesis of paroxysmal elevations, and 
the instantaneous rise of mountain-chains, should first have been 
put to the test, before it was hastily embraced by a certain 
school of geologists. 
W ?st Indian Archipelago. — According to the sketch given 
by Maclure of the geology of the Leeward Islands f, the 
* See above, p. 113. f Quart. Journ. of Sci., vol. v. p. 311. 
