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1
HARVARD UNIVERSITY
GEOLOGICAL SCIENCES
LIBRARY
S^^^^^i^
Transferred to
CABOT SCIENCE LIBRARY
June 2005
HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARY.
Deposited in ijhe Library of the M^iiseum of
Comparative Zoology.
XJnder a vote of the Library Covmcil
IVEay 27, 1901.
JVL.V. 190^-
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SCEPTICISM IN GEOLOGY
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PLAN OF THE FALLS OF THE ZAMBESI, CENTRAX AFRICA, THROUGH A FISSURE NOT
MADE BY RUNNING WATER.
Fro7itisplece.
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o
SCEPTICISM IN GEOLOGY
AND
THE KEASONS FOR IT
AN ASSEMBLAGE OF FACTS FROM NATURE OPPOSED TO
THE THEORY OF "CAUSES NOW IN ACTION,"
AND REFUTING IT.
BY
VERIFIER 4^c<ar-.^c>
-. • /
" Ama nesciri."— Thos. a-Eiemfis.
SECOND EDITION.
.!) LONDON
JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET
1878
[Tk. rigkt o/translatUn u »„,v.4.] ^,^, ,^^^ ^^ GoOglc
f yX / / /
SPEC
VH7
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PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION.
It has been alleged by some of the critics who
have noticed Scepticism in Geology, that many of the
objections raised by it against existing Systems are
abeady adopted and supported by the more advanced
geologists of the day. If this be the case, these new
lights have penetrated but a short way into the
general darkness, else why are the fallacious assump-
tions and old errors still enounced by professors in
lecture-rooms, and taught in Manuals and School
Primers ? The chief aim of this volume is not to
discuss doubtful questions but to settle them, if
possible, for ever ; in fact, to separate what is true
from what is false. Surely it is a work worthy of
such learned societies as the Geological of London
and the British Association to aid in removing this
reproach from an uncertain science, and to ascertain
by observations and experiments in various parts of
the world the extent and limits of Atmospheric and
Eiver Erosion, the real nature, tendency, and effects,
whether permanent or not, of Earthquake shocks,
the present Eise of Land in any part of the world.
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VI PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION.
the actual formation of Chalk in deep sea bottoms, etc.
The time has surely come for competent scientific
observers, with minds free from prejudice or hypo-
thesis, to test and try these natural phenomena in
the Bay of Naples or in the Baltic, in S. America,
New Zealand, on the borders of glaciers, gorges and
waterfalls, where nature may be caught in the act.
The duties of these agents should be to observe and
record facts, leaving others to draw conclusions ; let
them undertake to settle the results.
The following wise words should serve as a
stimulus for this further exertion in the cause of
truth.
" Men of science, to render themselves worthy of
the licence given them in what they communicate
to the world, should carefully distinguish between
truths which are definitely established by unquestion-
able proof, and ideas which are as yet mere problems
or opinions.
" Facts should be taught ; conjecture, if communi-
cated at all to those still studying the rudiments,
should be mentioned as conjecture. Were a different
method pursued science would run the risk of being
misled, and, moreover, might fall into disrepute and
have its freedom curtailed by those in power." ^
^ Professor van Virchow's Freedom of Science, 1877. ,
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PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION.
The geological theory of Modern Causes was
presented to the world in a manner so attractive
by the gifted author of The Principles, and his
explanations of some of the most profound cosmical
phenomena appeared to his readers so easily in-
telligible, that they have taken root almost
without being questioned. Many persons, however,
including the writer of the following chapters, while
rejoicing in the real gains and expansion of human
knowledge made by Geology, have from the first
felt the want of that scientific proof of this theory
which philosophy assures us is alone capable of
producing rational belief. There seems no reason
why Geology should be exempt from the tests
demanded from other sciences and beliefs. It is
easy to attribute to the action of the elements
and of earthquakes phenomena not easily ac-
counted for. Is it not possible that, in the reliance .
placed by the promoters of this theory on such feeble
agencies,, they have been misled by plausible but
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VIU PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION.
mistaken analogies; which can never counterbalance
the entire absence of any positive proof of what they
assert ? At all events, there can be no presumption
in asking that their facts and instances should be
passed in careful review and scrutinised. The as-
sumptions of modem geology have filled some minds
with alarm. Let us, in the cause of truth, try to
ascertain whether her own foundations are secure.
A theory is but a scaffolding by which we approach
the colossus Nature, in the attempt to develope some
new feature ; and that end being served, the scaffold
drops away. The theory of Modem Causes has done
some service in advancing and popularising geologi-
cal study ; and, unlike '' new facts " in some other
" ologies," whose average vitality, is said not to ex-
ceed three years, it has had a long and prosperous
career.
Already, however, have some heavy blows been
dealt to it, perhaps unintentionally, by its own
friends and supporters. Thus, Professor Huxley ac-
knowledges " a very remote period when the earth
was passing through physical and chemical condi-
tions which it can no more see again than a man
can recall his infancy."^ Darwin, Lyell, and others,
who proclaim a term of 300 mOlions of years in-
^ Critiques and Addresses, p. 239.
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PBEFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION. ix
suflficient for some of the operations of geology, are
warned — "So much the worse for geology, since
physical considerations render it impossible to allow
her more than 10 or 15 millions of years." ^ Ee-
searches into the Dissipation of Energy have already
dissipated the'nniformitarian doctrine that — thanks
to a supply of heat furnished constantly to our earth
by the sun — the state of things which has existed
on it for millions of years will continue unchanged
for as many more millions. We have also recently
obtained positive assurance that our globe was, '' in
the remotest times," so hot as to be at least plastic —
a condition, fortunately, not now prevailing, either
" in kind or in degree."
This little book does not deal with the broad and
incontrovertible truths of geology, but only with
certain excrescences, which aim at proving the earth
to have been fashioned by mechanical processes still
going on. To sift the truth of this is the author's
object. If the book should attract any attention, it
is sure to be met in certain quarters with rough
usage. Faults may very likely be found with his
arguments, and his suggestions (they scarce deserve
to be called theories) may share the fate of many
others ; but he would earnestly submit to the candid
^ Tai^i Lectures, p. 166.
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PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION.
reader whether the long array of his facts, taken
together with his answers and objections to alleged
facts hitherto generally accepted, can be refuted or
evaded ? A conviction of the radical flaws apparent
in the theory of Modem Causes, long brooded over,
and confirmed by careful investigation of the pro-
cesses now employed by nature, impels him to make
public his views.
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CONTENTS.
-4-
•CHAPTER L
PAGE
Geology — ^Its Verities and Vagaries — Unlimited
Time — Causes now in Action — ^Metamorphism 1
CHAPTER 11.
Earthquakes — Their Effect in modifying Earth's
Surface — Earthquake-Waves . . .11
CHAPTER m.
Supposed Elevation of Mountains by Gradual and
Gentle Impulses 33
CHAPTER IV.
The Formation of Mountains — Upheaval from
BELOW Doubtful — Shrinkage and Lateral
Pressure — ^The Bursting of the Earth-Rind 38
CHAPTER V.
Present Rise of Land in Sweden and Norway — Is
IT A Fact that it does Rise ? ... 46
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XU CONTENTS.
CHAPTEE VI.
PAOK
River Erosion — ^The Creation of Valleys by Ru^-
NiNG Water, and of Lake-Beds by Glaciers —
E3LA.MPLES : the Simeto, Rhinb at Bingen, Iron
Gate, Cataract op Niagara, Falls op Zambesi,
River LitIny, Dead Sea, etc. . . .57
CHAPTER VII.
Atmospheric Denudation — Mountains and Valleys
asserted to be made by it ; also destroyed
BY IT — Amount op Faith required — Great
Results from Inadequate Causes — Another
Cause Suggested 86
CHAPTER VIII.
Op Denudation by Glaciation — Effects op Sudden
Emancipation op the Earth's Crust from an
Icy Coating 102
CHAPTER IX.
Summing up — Inviting the Reader's Verdict —
Convulsions — Can the Doctrine of Modern
Causes and Natural Development apply to
the Earth, and if so, to what Final Conclu-
sion DOES IT LEAD ? Ill
Postscript. — Gaping Faults 126
Index 129
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LIST OF ILLUSTBATIONS.
Plan op Falls op Zambesi, Central Africa Frontispiece,
Torrent prom the Findelen Glacier, Zermatt
Gorge op the Danube below Belgrade
Gorge op the Rhine — the Via Mala .
Bird's-eye View op the Falls op Zambesi
Glacier — Movable and Immovable Ice
Section op Basin op the Dead Sea
Nero Fjord, Norway ....
60
64
65
68
81
83
98
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SCEPTICISM IN GEOLOGY.
CHAPTEE I.
GEOLOGY ITS VERITIES AND VAGARIES. UNLIMITED
TIME— CAUSES NOW IN ACTION METAMORPHISM.
Of all the sciences, the most rapid in its rise and
general popularity has been Geology. Since the
beginning of the present century a band of illus-
trious men, contemporaries in this and other coun-
tries, all striving with one aim, and reminding us of
the group of authors in the time of Queen Anne,
and of artists in that of Leo the Tenth, have de-
veloped this branch of learning and rendered it
perhaps the most attractive of the Natural Sciences.
In rapid succession they poured upon the world the
results of their discoveries; the fixed orders and super-
position of strata aU the world over, the determina-
tion of relative age, not only by superposition, but
by the distinctive fossil contents of these strata,
the existence and structure of multitudes of animals
6
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2 SCEPTICISM IN GEOLOGY. CHAP. I.
created and anniMlated long before man's appear-
ance on earth, and more recently the prevalence of
glaciation in former ages, and its effects on the earth's
surface. To have recovered so many lost records of
the past existence of our globe, and of its inhabitants,
was a precious addition to the book of knowledge.
But while appreciating the verities of geology, few
who have studied the subject attentively can have
failed to feel some qualms at accepting all its
theories. There is no denying that the systems
proposed by the Cosmogenists of the present day,
while very dogmatically enforced by their propagan-
dists, contain many things hard to believe, and
which appear to have been accepted too readily and
without full investigation. An observer, long oc-
cupied in the study of nature, may be allowed to
dwell upon the difficulties which environ the doctrine
of Uniformity or the operation of Modern Causes, the
elevating power of Earthquakes, Erosion of rocks by
rivers, unlimited Denudation by atmospheric influ-
ences, and the Antiquity of Man on the earth. •
If it can be shown that there is ground for
this hesitation to believe, and need for fresh in-
vestigation of dubious facts, if it should turn out
that enormous exaggerations have paved the way
for erroneous conclusions, and that supposed analogy
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CHAP. I. LIBERTY OF DOUBTING. 3
has been mistaken for evidence, the great cause of
truth will have been served. The younger disciples
of this school of geology will in that case not refuse
to retrace their steps and start afresh. A living
philosopher has proclaimed that to doubt is the first
principle of modem science. Science, moreover,
claims for herself an unlimited right of search into all
matters of belief, and will not refuse to concede the
same liberty which she enjoys. I propose, therefore,
to relieve myself of an accumulation of scientific
doubts which have obstructed my acceptance of cer-
tain tenets of the modem school of geology, examin-
ing various statements assumed to be facts, and
testing their competency to fulfil the results attri-
buted to them, from careful study of the writings of
that school, partly from personal observations of
the earth's structure in this and in other countries
during many years past. The candid reader who
may not be convinced by my arguments may perhaps
be so far shaken in his imph'cit trust in these the-
ories as to desire a verification of the bases of some
parts of modern geology, by a careful re-investigation
of the phenomena on the spot. ^
And here, at the outset, it is necessary to protest
against the insatiable demands of geologists for time,
or rather against the substitution of time for proof
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4 SCEPTICISM IN GEOLOGY. CHAP. I.
of what they assert. They see in their visions re-
sults which do not follow their premises, but which
they assure us will happen, or ought to happen, pro-
vided we put off the fulfilment for " an incalculable
period of time." They seem unconscious of the
fallacy of supposing that an event which to all
appearance is not happening, and which certainly
has not happened within the period of the world's
known history, can ever come to pass, conditions
and circumstances remaining the same, and no new
motors coming into the field. There cannot be
a more groundless assumption than that " time is
power." ^ A late geological president has corrected
the mistake in these terse words : " It is a question
of dynamics and not of time, and we cannot accept
the introduction of time in explanation of problems
the real difficulties of which are thereby more often
passed over than solved." — Professor Prestwich's
Inaugural Lecture; Oxford, 1875.
Granted millions of years table-lands they say
will be cut down into mountains and glens ; given
four and a half millions of years and the whole
N". American continent will be denuded away. It
cost, according to Darwin,^ only 300 millions of
^ Geikie, Scenery of Scotland, p. 8.
' Origin of Species, p. 287, 1st edition.
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CHAP. I. LIBERTY OF DOUBTING. 5
yeaxs to denude the Weald, and positively if we
concede only a few millions more of " untold ages,"
the present ^ continents will all be washed into the
sea ! In truth, the geologist draws bills at very
long dates, which are never paid because they never
arrive at maturity.
Would it not become the geologists of our time to
abandon a position which enforces on their followers
a belief almost amounting to a superstition ? Does
it not look like a resource for escaping from the
fulfilment of their own prophecies ?
Another preliminary objection must be recorded
against a prevalent practice endorsed by some
eminent names, but very dangerous to real science,
of arguing from supposition and alleged similarity
to conclusions wholly unproved. Thus, because a
puddle in a rainstorm will cut runlets in the soft
sand in an hour or two, it must follow that rain or
running water will cut glens and vaUeys, or even
sever high mountains, granted millions of years.^ Or
that because the earthquake of 1822 in Chili raised
the sea-beach 3 or 4 or 10 feet, whether perman-
ently or not has not been proved, a part of the South
American continent, surpassing in weight and volume
the whole chain of the Andes, was lifted at the same
"^^ Geikie, Scenery of Scotland, p. 115. ^ Ibid, p. 13.
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6 SCEPTICISM IN GEOLOGY. chap. i.
time.^ Yet these assumed facts have been drawn into
the texture of their arguments by the eminent geo-
logists referred to, apparently carried away by en-
thusiasm for their subject.
As a reason for the following discussion, indeed
as a justification of it, we ought to bear in mind
that the dogmas to which objection is taken are not
confined to scientific papers or learned Transactions,
but are promulgated in popular treatises and taught
in school-books, now being widely circulated among
the young. Is it not, therefore, incumbent upon us
to ascertain whether these assertions be true ?
The principles of this school of science have been
thus formally enunciated by their eminent leader :
" The forces now operating upon earth are the same in
Jcind and in degree as those which, in the remotest
times, produced geological changes" — Lyell.
If this be reaUy the fact, if nature were still
carrying on the operations by which the globe was
made and fashioned, only on a diminished scale, are
we not, in the first place, entitled to expect to catch
her in the act of producing some of those elementary
substances which enter into the composition of the
earth's crust; not of depositing but creating the
^ Lyell^s Principles, i p. 133.
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CHAP. I. NO NEW ELEMENTARY SUBSTANCES. 7
metals and simple minerals, gold, silver, tin, quick-
silver, iron, the diamond, emerald, etc.? In no in-
stance has any such discovery been made. The
geologist is lavish in explaining how sandstope is
to be produced out of beds of sand, the washings of
great rivers deposited in the sea. Yet we are not
aware of any example of these sandbanks being
raised from the bottom of the sea, and converted
into solid sandstone or crystalline quartz. The sand
and mud washed down into the Mediterranean by the
Ehone in the days of Hannibal remain to this day
incoherent mud and sand. We cannot even satisfy
ourselves with the sight of a fragment of new-made
granite or a morsel of modem mica-schist. The
obvious conclusion to be drawn from the absence of
these substances is that the conditions under which
they were created no longer exist. What goes on
at present is but a fresh deposit, or concretion, or
sublimation, or crystallisation of substances already
existing in vapours or solution, as of silex from
the Geysers of Iceland and Tiot springs of New
Zealand, of calcareous stones from water impreg-
nated with carbonic acid, of sulphur from the vol-
canic vapours of Etna or Hecla, etc.
A distinguished philosopher proclaims, as one of
the facts gained to science from the cruise of the
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8 SCEPTICISM IN GEOLOGY. CHAP. I.
" Challenger," the discovery that true chalk, in the
condition of mud, is now being made at the bottom
of the Atlantic, and even that it has never ceased
to be made since the deposit of the chalk formation
of our continents. Two reasons, however, have
been brought forward by Mr. Gwynn Jeffreys, which
would seem to make it impossible for us to imbibe
implicitly this assertion. Atlantic mud cannot be
liquid chalk, because it contains no more than fifty
per cent of carbonate of lime, chalk being a nearly
pure carbonite — and the living moUusca found in
this mud are in every case totally different from
the species contained in the old genuine chalk.
Hutton ^ satisfied himself, and many others, his
followers, by the assertion that " the materials of the
harder rocks transported into the sea are spread out
and form strata analogous to those of more ancient
date. Though loosely deposited along the bottom of
the ocean, they become afterwards altered and con-
solidated by volcanic heat, and are then heaved up
fractured and contorted" — Flay fair's Works, iv. p.
75. Sir James HaU, to corroborate this, instituted
instructive chemical experiments, such as heating
lime in a closed gun barrel, to produce the crystalline
texture assumed by melted matter cooled under high
^ LyeU's Principles, i. p. 73.
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CHAP. I. METAMORPHISM A THING OF THE PAST. 9
pressure. But no sea, no water, could have existed
on the surface of a globe of molten rocks. The
water in contact with sand or rock heated red hot
would have turned into vapour. What then be-
comes of high pressure exercised by the old ocean ?
Metamorphism.1
, Of comparatively recent origin is the theory of
Metamorphism, or the alteration and conversion of
one kind of rock into another, on a large scale and
over great areas. By it sandstone has been (or may
have been) converted into quartz rock (or even into
granite), shales into mica-schists, and fossiliferous
limestones into crystalline marble. That such effects
have been produced in a former condition of the
earth we have full evidence. The question is how
it was effected. About this geologists are much
perplexed and greatly at variance ; some attributing
it to great heat under pressure, others to chemical
action. To some, hot water charged with chemical
carbonates seems to have been the agent, to others
cold water percolating the rocks. Another expounder^
writes : " heat aided by water is necessary to allow
^ Lyell's Elements, p. 730, 6tli ed. ; Geikie's Geolo^^
(Chambers), pp. 72, 73.
* Kamsay, Physical Geology of Great Britain, p. 47.
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10 SCEPTICISM IN GEOLOGY. chap. i.
of interned moveinents in the rocks by the softening
of their materials, without which I do not see how
complete re-arrangement of matters, accompanied by
crystallisation could take place ; " but he adds, " how
to obtain the required heat is a diflSculty."
One thing at least is clear, that the rrwdus operandi
is neither satisfactorily explained nor approximately
understood, and that it has been found impossible to
realise metamorphism, or even to imitate it, in the
laboratory.
From all that has been stated, however, we
arrive at one unmistakeable conclusion, viz. — that
metamorphism is a thing of the past, its processes not
now discoverable, and it must therefore be dismissed
from the category of " Causes now in action."
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CHAP. II. EARTHQUAKES. 11
CHAPTEE 11.
EAKTHQUAKES ^THEIR EFFECT IN MODIFYING EARTH'S
SURFACE ^EARTHQUAKE-WAVES.
** Thou sure and finn-set eartlu" — Macbeth,
The theory which attributes to earthquakes a large
share in the conformation of the actual surface of
the globe we inhabit is as old as Herodotus, who
referred the opening of the gorge, through which the
Peneus escapes to the sea, and Thessaly ceased to
be a lake, to an earthquake caused by Neptune.
This view was shared by Strabo. It was adopted
by Hooke and Hutton; and their follower. Sir
Charles Lyell, proclaimed the continued action of
earthquakes as the undisputed agent of his cosmogony,
operating now, as in former ages of the world's ex-
istence, only with diminished force. Not less than
100 pages of that fascinating work The Principles
are devoted to a history of the best recorded con-
vulsions, and to the description of the oflSce they fiU.
He sums up with the conclusion that the actual
configuration of the earth's surface is due to a long-
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12 SCEPTICISM IN GEOLOGY. chap. ii.
continued series of moderate shocks. The poets of
old, he tells us, were wrong to select the rock as the
emblem of firmness/ and it has faUen to the geolo-
gist of modem times to correct their error.
There can be no doubt that the earthquake, when
it comes in contact with buildings, or other work of
man, is truly terrible, indeed irresistible. " Temple
and tower fall to the ground," whole cities are pro-
strated like packs of cards, and myriads of human
beings are annihilated in the ruin. N"o wonder then
that the description by eye-witnesses of these catas-
trophes should be tinged with the exaggerations of
terror. It is surprising, however, that men of science
should have transferred such exaggerations to their
writings, and should have applied to the works of
Nature what is strictly true only in reference to
those of man, more especially since the few scientific
eye-witnesses who have written from the spot, and
near the time of such convulsions, give information
which enables us to correct these fables and reduce
them to sober reality. If it should turn out that this
part of the fabric of modem geology has been hastily
laid on foundations not perfectly secure, it is to be
hoped that all lovers of science wiU encourage an
investigation which has tmth for its object.
1 Ly ell's Principles, ii, p. 179.
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CHAP. II. EARTHQUAKES. 13
Earthquake phenomena, little understood when
the Principles of Geology first appeared, have been
since subjected to minute mathematical and practical
investigation by Mr. Hopkins and Mr. Eobert Mallet.
The last-named gentleman has studied them not only
theoretically but on the scene of operations, having
visited South Italy after the earthquake of 1857.
His authority is acknowledged by Lyell, who quotes
his writings, though he does not avail himself of all
the results we are bound to bring forward.
First of all let us invite attention to Mr. MaUet's
definition of an earthquake as " a movement like
the shaking of a sieve," ^ as " simply the transit of
a wave or waves of elastic compression, from
vertically upwards to horizontally, through the crust
and surface of the earth." An eye-witness compares
its motion with that of a carpet lifted on one side and
shaken along the groimd. Another wrote from Callao,
August 13th, 1868, "As far as the eye could see
along the narrow street, the very street itself rose
and fell in long billowy undulations." ^ After the
^ A translation of the Greek asttffiog. Admiralty Manual,
p. 325.
• During an earthquake at Samoa, February 1876, an
observer writes, " The thatched roof presented the appear-
ance of waves running rapidly across it from south to north."
—Nature, July 27, 1876.
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14 SCEPTICISM IN GEOLOGY. CHAP. il.
first concussions the earth continues for hours, even
for days, in a constant tremor or vibration. . Mallet
adds, p. 329, "Earthquakes must not be confounded
with the forces producing permanent elevation of the
land." These fundamental determinations of learned
observers ought carefully to be borne in mind in the
following investigation ; they are somewhat at vari-
ance with the assumption of the Huttonian school of
geology regarding both the nature and the permanent
changes effected by these convulsions.
Let us examine, then, the various instances recorded
in the pages of the Principles, so as to ascertain what
enduring consequences earthquakes are really capable
of producing, and what evidences they leave behind,
on the face of Nature, of the permanent elevation and
fracturing of rocks, and especially of great mountain
chains.
The earthquake of Calabria in 1783 was one of
the most tremendous on record, and its effects were
carefully investigated on the spot immediately after,
by the Neapolitan Academy, by Sir William Hamil-
ton, Mons. Dolomieu, and others, who published
elaborate reports ; and Sir Charles Lyell has given
a very full account of it from these sources. First
and foremost occurred the opening of fissures in the
ground, as the earth-wave rolled along, and the
swallowing up of men and cattle and buildings by
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CHAP. IL RESULTS OF EARTHQUAKE. 15
the immediate closing of these gashes. Some re-
mained open, however. Next we are struck by the
constant occurrence of landslips,^ caused by enor-
mous masses of earth being shaken down from the
hillsides by the sieve-like motion, so that, in the
language of the terror-stricken inhabitants, one hill
marched down to meet another. The result was —
innumerable stoppages of the river -courses, the
obstruction of the drainage of the district, and the
formation 2 of 215 stagnant ponds and lakes.
But the reader of Lyell who has admired the
curious woodcuts of straight and starred fissures,
holes, ravines, and chasms, must not for a moment
suppose that these were formed in solid rock, that
they lasted any time, or that any one visiting the
spot would be likely to find any trace of them at
the present day. All the fissures gradually closed
up, for they were confined to superficial deposits,
alluvium, clay, gravel, and an incoherent tertiary-
sandstone, according to Dolomieu (Brit. Assoc. Eep.,
^ The filling up of a deep cove near Dusky Bay, New
Zealand — surrounded by steep chflfs — after the earthquakes
of 1826-27, was evidently the result of Imidslips. "Trees
were seen under water near the coast, having probably been
carried down by landslips." — Lyell's FrincipleSy iL p. 82.
' LyelPs Principles, ii. pp. 129, 130, 133.
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16 SCEPTICISM IN GEOLOGY. CHAP. ii.
p. 39). This is also acknowledged by Lyell, who
adds that " in more soUd rocks we may expect that
fissures will remain open for ages." Yet he is able to
adduce no example of such permanent fissures in Cal-
abria, nor of any enduring change of level. Mr. Mallet
visited this part of South Italy immediately after
another very severe earthquake,^ which spread de-
struction through the southern part of the Peninsula,
December 1857 ; but after the most patient investi-
gation, after traversing 150 miles of sea-coast and
river-courses, he " could find no trace of permanent
elevation ; " ^ or, as the author of the Principles ex-
presses it, " the changes wrought in the river-courses
were not on so grand a scale as in 1783." — LyeU's
Principles, ii. p. 138.
The well-known Temple of Serapis, on the Bay of
Naples at Pozzuoli, a carefully observed geological
example, is stated to have been twice raised and
twice lowered by earthquake influence since the
Christian era. Granting this, it at least affords no
proof of permanent elevation, for we learn that in
1852 the floor of the temple was nearly on a level
with the sea, and all downward movement had
ceased, so that the temple stands now nearly where
it did at first. The zone of holes midway in the three
^ Report to Royal Society, Transactions, vol. x.
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CHAP. II. TEMPLE OF SEEAPIS. l7
standiDg columns, at a height of 12 feet above the
pedestals, formed by marine-boring animals, which
can live only under the sea, renders this building a
puzzle to geologists and archaeologists alike.^ We
owe to the erudition, however, of the late Sir Edmund
Head the discovery of a passage in Pausanias, from
which ..it seems quite possible that the site of the
temple was originally gained from the sea hy artificial
means, by throwing down earth and rubbish on which
to found the temple, around a hot spring which rose
in the midst of the sea itself. No doubt this is the
spring, now flowing behind the temple, and once used
to fill its baths. The pavement which was discovered
five feet below the level of the base of the columns
may have been the floor of a sunken bath, and conse-
quently no indication of any subsidence in the ground
on which the stones of the pavement are laid.
In the same manner the Fort of Sindree, in the
delta of the Indus (L. ii. p. 104), submerged by
the earthquake of Cutch, 1819, and seen by Alex.
Bumes, 1828, surrounded by water, ten years later
had risen up again on dry land, the lagoon having
diminished; while still more recent intelligence, in
1845, assures us that " a large area seems to have sub-
sided, and the Sindree Lake had become a salt marsh."
^ See ArchcBologiay vol. xxxvii.
C
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18 SCEPTICISM IN GEOLOGY. CHAP. ii.
From all these circumstances, recited by Lyell
himself, and from others which it would be tedious
to quote, the permanent effects of earthquakes are
discredited, and it would appear that although parts
of the earth's surface may be raised by the jar of an
earthquake, like the lifting of tlie lid of a box, the
truth, as it emerges, proves that this rise is not
lasting, and the ground subsides again gradually
into place, when the shocks are over. Were it not
so, there are some spots on the earth's surface, such
as Conception and Copiapo in Chili, which ought to
have been hoisted into the air or permanently sunk
long ago, since scarce a year passes without at least
one shock, whereas they remain, like the Temple of
Serapis, just where history and geology first found
them. No more extensive or remarkable range of
volcanoes exists on the globe than that great circle
which belts the Malay Archipelago. In this whole
region earthquakes are constant, slight shocks occur-
ring monthly, or even weekly, intermixed with stu-
pendous convulsions. at intervals, yet we do not find
that Java, Sumatra, or the adjoining Philippines, are
either gradually rising at all or sinking below the
ocean.
In many instances severe earthquakes pass with-
out causing the slightest change of level. After that
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CHAP. II. RISE OF LAND TEMPORARY. 19
which desolated the West Indies in 1868, a survey
made on the part of the coast where the shocks had
been most severe, by Captain Hamilton of H.M.S.
Sphynx, proved that no alteration had occurred in
the soundings.
The most destructive earthquake which ever
visited the coast of Chili was that of November 1822,
when shocks were felt throughout a space of 1200
miles from north to south. Next morning the coast
was found to have been raised at Valparaiso 3 feet,
and about 4 feet at Quintero, a seaport close to
Valparaiso, where " some rocks, a few hundred feet
from the shore, previously always under water, were
uncovered at half-tide ; " also, " a mill-stream, about
1 mile from the sea, gained a fall of 14 inches in
little more than 100 yards, 2i.nA.from this fact it was
inferred that the rise in some parts of the inland
country was far more considerable than on the
borders of the ocean." — Lyell's Principles, ii 95. Dr.
Meyer, a Prussian, who visited the coast nine years
after, and saw beds of shell-fish and sea-weed adher-
ing to rocks which before the earthquake were under
the sea, was " led to think the whole coast of central
ChiU was raised aiout 4 feet." This supposition of
the rise of the coast is repeated in written state-
ments of Mrs. Graham, Mr. Cruikshank, and Mr.
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20 SCEPTICISM IN GEOLOGY. CHAP. ii.
Darwin, but in no instance do surveys or measure-
ments appear to have been taken either before or
after the shocks. Upon the strength of this evi-
dence alone, though confined to the neighbourhood of
Valparaiso and the coast of central Chili, we are told
that " some observers supposed the whole country,
from the foot of the Andes to a great distance under
the sea, was upraised in 1822." — Ly ell's Principles,
ii. 9 6. "It has also been conjectured by the same eye-
witnesses that the area over which the permanent
alteration of level extended may have been equal
to 100,000 square miles."
It is true the author of the Principles acknow-
ledges that " this conjecture must be considered as
very hypothetical, and the estimate may have greatly
exceeded or fallen short of the truth." — ^Vol. ii. p.
96. Still he builds upon it in different parts of his
book, so far as to assert that "in Chili, in 1822, the
volcanic force has overcome the resistance, and has
permanently uplifted a country of such vast extent .
that the weight and volume of the Andes must be
insignificant in comparison," adding, a few lines
further on, " We can scarcely doubt that a rrmss of
rock several miles thick was uplifted in Chili, 1822." -^
We have shown upon how very slight evidence,
^ Lyeirs PrincipleSy vol. i. p. 133.
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CHAP. II. EARTHQUAKE IN CHILI. 21
in Sir Charles Lyell's own estimation, this assertion
is made. Let us seek for any other example at any
.time or in any other country, from the author's
earthquake chapters, to confirm it.
The statement that " Chili has thrice been per-
manently elevated " is modified by Captain Fitzroy,
who was there during another earthquake in 1835,
and who warns us that " the difference of 4 or 5
feet vertical, perceptible at first in the relative level
of the land and water, gradually diminished, untU
the water rose again to within 2 feet of the former
high- water level" He concluded also that in the
neighbouring island of Santa Maria the land had
been raised 4 or 5 feet in February, and had re-
turned in April to within 2 or 3 feet of its former
level." i—LyeU, ii. 92.
Mr. Darwin, indeed, who was in Chili at the same
time as Captain Fitzroy, appears to have been so
blinded by his bias towards " the permanent eleva-
tion theory," as not to be able to trust the evidence
of his own eyes. " There can be no doubt," he tells
us, " that the land roimd the Bay of Conception was
^ Sir Charles himself, in another place (vol. ii. p. 156),
alludes to " an opinion often promulgated of late years, that
there is a tendency in the Chilian coast, after upheaval,
to sink gradually and return towards its former position."
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22 SCEPTICISM IN GEOLOGY. chap. ii.
upraised 2 or 3 feet; but it deserves notice that,
owing to the waves having obliterated the old lines
of tidal action on the sloping sand, / could discover
no evidence of this fact, except in the united testi-
mony of the inhabitants, that one little rocky shoal,
now exposed, was formerly covered with water." —
Journal, p. 310.
Of the earthquake in New Zealand of 1855, a
description appears for the first time in the tenth
edition of the Principles, The author lays the
greatest stress on it, because " the geologist has
rarely enjoyed so good an opportunity as that afforded
him by this convulsion." — Lyell, ii. 88. The ac-
counts of it, also, were furnished to him by " three well
qualified scientific observers, who were eye-witnes-
ses," and their statement of the elevation of a high
cliff of hard slaty rock over a distance of ninety
miles inland from the sea, is a unique instance of
the kind, and requires to be carefully examined and
tested on the spot at the present time by competent
observers. This earthquake occurred on January
23d, 1855, in Cook's Straits, in the vicinity of
Wellington, and was supposed by Mr. Eoberts, an
engineer, " to have permanently elevated, in the
vicinity of Wellington, a tract of land comprising
4600 square miles, not much inferior to Yorkshire."
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CHAP. II. NEW ZEALAND EAETHQUAKE. 23
But it is added, " the points of minimum and maxi-
mum elevation were 23 miles apart, which therefore
expresses the breadth of the upraised area." — P. 85.
The length of the fault running inland from Muka
Muka, which marks the termination and the highest
point of the upheaval, viz., 9 feet, amounted, accord-
ing to Mr. Borlase, " to the extraordinary distance of
about 90 miles." — P. 86. Now if we multiply 90,
the length, by 23, the breadth, we find the result to
be an area not of 4600 but only 2070 square miles.
Farther on^ it is stated by the author — " At the same
time this vertical movement took place, Jan. 23, the
harbour of Port Nicholson, about 12 miles west of
Muka Muka Cliff (where the rise of 9 feet occurred),
together with the valley of the Hutt, was raised from
4 to 5 feet." The reader would naturally suppose
that this was a separate catastrophe in a different
district ; but on consulting Sir Charles Lyell's map
we find that Muka Muka Cliff and the valley of the
Hutt are included in the strip of 23 miles wide by
90 long, which he has already told us was elevated
from 1 to 9 feet (p. 85), while Muka Muka Cliff is
only an escarpment of the Eemutaka Mountains
which bound the Hutt vaUey on the east, and are
* Principles f voL i. p. 86.
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24 SCEPTICISM IN GEOLOGY. CHAP. li.
also included in the same strip or tongue of land,
washed on either side by the sea.
How can we account for such confusion and con-
tradictions in the statement of " an engineer who
observed minutely the changes in the level of the
land," and who " was able to measure accurately the
amount of pennanent upheaval in the older for-
mations " ?
Until we can obtain further information on the
results of this earthquake, we are compelled to refuse
belief in the " fissures 6 to 9 feet broad " in the
older for TTiations, especially as there exists, as far as
we know, no well-authenticated instance on record
of the raising of an entire mountain chain in any
part of the globe,^ nor of permanent fissures in hard
or crystalline rocks by any earthquake. We are
informed by one well acquainted with New Zealand
^ Observe, however, we are told of a fissure 15 inches
wide, " traced by Mr. Mills, and partly by observers on
whom he could rely, for 60 miles." — Lyell, vol. ii. p. 89.
Also "deep rents caused in solid rocks in Syria, 1837," no
place or authority named. — Lyell, vol. ii. p. 89. " Near Val-
paraiso, in 1822, parallel fissures in the granite ; some were
traced 1^ m. inland" (no spot named). — Ly ell's Principles,
vol. ii. p. 95. But Mallet rejects the idea of the formation
of fissures of any magnitude by the direct influence of earth-
(l\iake.-^Reportj p. 52.
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CHAP. II. PEOOF WANTING. 25
and the locality of this earthquake, that the asser-
tion of permanent upheavals over so large an area
is allowed to be a mistake, and is not now to be
made out on the spot.
Moreover, after the repeated and persistent asser-
tion of permanent upheaval (Lyell, p. 82), the nar-
rative of the New Zealand earthquake winds up
with the usual confession that " a question aros6
whether the land about Port Nicholson," where the
shocks were most violent, upheaved several feet in
January, had not " sunk again to some slight extent
before September 1855" — Lyell, voL ii. p. 88.
It is but just to add that Mr. Eoberts " felt per-
suaded that he could not have failed to notice even
a slight change of level, had any occurred ; " and
the author adds, " It is surprising how soon the
signs of a recent change of level on a coast are effaced
to aU eyes but those of the scientific observer."
To sum up the results of the New Zealand earth-
quake, it may be safely asserted that the idea of a
change of level over a space nearly as large as York-
shire originated in a total mistake; while the 90 miles
fault, if it really extends that distance, wiU probably
turn out on examination to be not a fracture of solid
rock, but a mere shift or landslip at the junction of
two discordant unconformable formations.
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26 SCEPTICISM IN GEOLOGY. CHAP. Ii.
If there be well-founded doubts of any perma-
nence in the elevations and depressions caused hj
earthquakes, a perusal of their annals wiU prove how
limited are their operations on tTie solid frame of
the globe.
Although by no means confined to plains and low
grounds, earthquakes are most common among them,
as in Cutch, the Mississippi valley, Lisbon, Jamaica,
and even when they occur amidst the mountains, are
felt chiefly upon the clay, gravel, and other recent or
alluvial deposits at their base. Indeed, as a general
rule, the earthquake force seems to glance oflf and to
be turned aside on reaching the solid rocks of older
formations. Dolomieu assures us that the Calabrian
earthquake of 1783 did little mischief on the granite
and slate rocks around the plain. Humboldt was
astonished to find the spires and pinnacles of lofty
buildings in the mountain capital of Quito, 9500 feet
above the sea, stand the shock with scarcely a rent in
their walls, while in the plain even huts are shattered
by it. Sir Charles LyeU expresses wonder that two
isolated earth columns, called the Dwarf Towers, near
Viesch, in the Valais, " consisting of hardened mud
and gravel, should have resisted the destructive
power of earthquakes which have occurred again and
again in the neighbourhood," but he explains the
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c;bap. II. EARTHQUAKES CHECKED BY MOUNTAINS. 27
cause when he tells us " the fundamental rock is
mica schist," vol. i p. 343. "The destroying
effects of the Lisbon earthquake were confined to the
tertiary strata, and were most violent on the blue
clay in the lowest part of the city. Not a building
on the secondary limestone or basalt was injured,"
writes Mr. Sharpe in 1839, quoted by Lyell. " In
New Zealand, 1855, the motion on the plain was
greater than that on the hills." — ^Thompson's New
Zealand, voL ii. p. 232. " The vertical movement
ceased abruptly along the base of the hills of Eemu-
taka." — Lyell, ii. 8 5.^ " Those houses in Chili of which
^ It is true Humboldt asserts that during the earthquake
at Caracas (1812) the gneiss and slate mountains of the
Cordilleras were more shaken than the plains. There may
be other exceptions to the rule, but the opposite instances are
far more numerous, and Mallet's opinion that the shocks
felt at Lahore in 1832 passed through the Hindoo Coosh
chain appears to be a conjecture only. The earthquakes felt
at the same time on the Oxus, and even at Bokhara, may have
originated from different centres. — See Mallet, British Asso-
ciation Report, 1850, pp. 39-40.
In the Earthquake of Cashar, 1869, Dr. Oldham declares not
a single fissure occurred in the solid and permanent part of the
plain. They were confined to the borders of the liver, and
caused landslips, often filling up its channel, and driving back
the water. The EarthquaJce of Mendoza (on the authority of
the late Dayid Forbes) ** was felt for 1200 miles across the
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28 SCEPTICISM IN GEOLOGY. chap. ii.
the foundations were on rock were less damaged than
those built on alluvial soil." — Lyell, vol. ii. p. 95.
But it is precisely among the mountains, amid
the great elevations and the fissures of the earth,
that the operations which have modified its surface
in ancient times are most perceptible, and here it is
that the modem earthquake, if it were capable of
performing the part assigned to it by geologists,
ought to be most telling and active in lifting and
fracturing, yet here precisely it begins to be impotent.
The Swiss earthquake of 1855 shattered some
houses of Visp on the low alluvium of the Ehorfe, dis-
lodged and shook down a few loose rocks upon the
path to Zermatt ; but the lofty Balfrin Peak which
looks down on Visp was not moved. During the
catastrophe which levelled part of the city of Antioch
in 1872, a German traveller, Seif, journeying thither
through the mountains, had no perception whatever
of the shock. So also to persons at the bottom of
mines, the earthquake, so terrible at the surface,
often passes unheeded by ; witness that which spread
terror at Falun in Sweden, November 1823. The
late excellent geologist, David Forbes, had been at
plain at the foot of the Andes. Wherever the firm rock came
to the surface, there was no trace of fissure — only in the alluvial
soil." — Quarterly Journal of Geological Society, August 1872.
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CHAP. II. EARTHQUAKES AMONG MOUNTAINS. 29
the bottom of deep mines during earthquakes, but
perceived nothing except the noise. He could tes-
tify to their effects being confined to the surface.^
But not only does the earthquake appear to
avoid the mountains, it has also nothing to say to
those great gorges which intersect them and furnish
channels to allow rivers to pass ; such as the Via Mala
traversed by the Ehine in the Grisons, the gorge of the
Danube below Belgrade, that of the Avon at Bristol,
that of Sottoguda in the Tyrol, and a thousand others.
Sir C. LyeU leads us to expect, p. 163, "Where
rocks have been once fractured and freedom of
action communicated to detached portions of them,
these will naturally continue to yield in the same
direction, if the process of upheaval be continued."
But we look in vain in these gorges for any *' up-
heaval " of their sides or enlargement of their open-
ings at the present day.
Two examples remain among the interesting
catalogue of earthquake results brought together by
Sir C. LyeU, which must not be passed over, because
beyond doubt their effects are 'permanent — the sub-
sidence of 1000 acres of sandy beach at Port Eoyal,
Jamaica, 1692, and of an area 80 miles by 30 at New
Madrid, in the valley of the Mississippi, 1811-12.
* Journal of Geological Society, August 1872.
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30 SCEPTICISM IN GEOLOGY. CHAP. Ii.
In the latter case the ground afifected consisted of
alluvial matter — mud, trees decayed and living,
mixed with reeds and lacustrine herbage. Such a
soil could scarcely be termed dry land ; the neigh-
bouring rivers inundating it, and constantly chang-
ing their beds even at ordinary seasons ; and after
being incessantly cracked and fissured by shocks for
three months together, it is no wonder that it was
under washed. It had been squeezed dry like a sponge
by the successive shocks, and collapsed soon after.
In that very neighbourhood Sir Charles Lyell^ found
the river alone, unaided by earthquakes, wasting its
banks and undermining houses. The Jamaica case
was a settlement of an incoherent sandbank, over-
weighted with buildings, which simply slipped into
the sea from the concussion.
Due stress and consideration has hardly been
given to the effects of the great waves which always
follow an earthquake occurring near the sea-shore.
The ocean would appear to be turned up from its
lowest depths on these occasions, and its equilibrium
to be destroyed for days or weeks during which its
oscillations last. These waves (as at Lima and
CaUao 1750, Conception 1751, Lisbon and Tan-
^ Lyell, Second Visit to the United States j vol. ii. p. 228 ;
LyelPs Principles, ii. p. 161.
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CHAP. II. EARTHQUAKE WAVES. 31
giers 1755, Hawaii 1867) rush inland for miles,
sweeping everything before them, and carrying along
with them not only vessels (in 1868 an American
corvette was swept inland a mile at Arica, and left
high and dry) but also masses of gravel and shingle.
In this way beds of shells of living species are
thrown up far beyond the shore, at heights of 60 or
80 feet above the reach of the tides, along with
sea-weeds and shell-fish. This will account for the
deposit of cotton thread, plaited rush, and an ear
of Indian com, found by Darwin on a hill near'Lima.^
The tremendous force and volume of water thus set
in motion* also greatly alters the sea-bed near the
shore, creating bars and sandbanks, and thrusting
forward huge detached rocks ^ to places where before
there was deep water. Hence the stories of rocks
appearing above the water, and shell-fish exhaling
odours on the shore. May not such waves have
been the cause of the gently sloping beach which
1 Lyell, Antiq, of Man, p. 49 ; Mallet, Report, p. 61. In
1689, at Callao, one of these waves carried three ships inland
over an intervening hill, so that they were left to rot there
for want of means to take them back to the sea.
2 Lyell, after describing the rise of recent reefs in the
harbours of Penco and Conception (Lyell, ii. p. 155), states
that facts discountenance the idea of any permanent upheaval
in that ancient port in modem times (p. 156).
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32 SCEPTICISM IN GEOLOGY. CHAP. il.
was laid dry between the cliflf and the sea imme-
diately after the New Zealand earthquake ? " aflfording
ample space at all states of the tide for the passage
of man and beast." — Lyell, p. 86.
We have now passed in review all the most pro-
minent and important instances of earthquake action
enumerated by Lyell, and have endeavoured to show,
partly out of his own ever candid avowals and con-
fessions, that they do not bear out the conclusions
at which he arrived. We have also the support of
the following decisive sentences from Mallet : —
" An earthquake, however great, is incapable of pro-
ducing any permanent elevation or depression of
land whatever. . . . Hence it is inexact, or rather
untrue, to class earthquakes as among the causes of
permanent elevation or depression of land." — Mallet,
Report on Earthquake Phenomena , p. 48. The
reader, it is hoped, will not consider that we have
devoted too much space to this discussion when he
remembers the importance which Lyell attributes to
earthquakes : " The integrity of the habitable world
is preserved, and the very existence and perpetuation
of dry land is secured, in a great degree, by subter-
ranean movements." — LyeU's Frinciples, ii. p. 144.
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CHAP. III. RESORT TO ^* CONVULSIONS." 33
CHAPTEE III.
SUPPOSED ELEVATION OF MOUNTAINS BY GRADUAL
AND GENTLE IMPULSES.
The difficulties of modem Geology are greatly
increased owing to its undertaking to produce vast
effects with means which, on investigation, appear
utterly inadequate to perform them. However, these
results are so stupendous that even its adherents
show signs of incredulity as to their own theory,
and a want of confidence in it. While professing
uniformity and quietude, and charging with ignor-
ance and obliquity of vision those who still have faith
in former operations of a more decisive character and
on a grander scale than at present, they are compelled
themselves to resort to these to account, in the first
instance, for the creation of mountains, valleys, and
river-beds, although laying the chief stress on denu-
dation. Thus a stubborn repudiator of any but modem
causes writes, ''Valleys, lacustrine hollows, table-
lands, and mountains, have all been, more or less,
D
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34 SCEPTICISM IN GEOLOGY. CHAP. ill.
slowly fonned by the forces we see even now at work
in the world around us,"^ but he adds,^ " It is evi-
dent that the great mountain-chains of the world
are due, in the first place, to upheaval^ Further on
he invokes " the subterranean forces which upheaved
the solid crust into great table-lands or mountain
undulations." Lyell also, in his Elements^ describes
and figures a remarkable ravine in the suburbs of
Lewes, called " The Combe," which he says " is un-
doubtedly due to dislocation. ... No outward signs
of disturbance are visible, and the connection of the
hollow with subterranean movements would not have
been suspected by the geologist, had not the evidence
of great convulsions been clearly exposed in the
escarpment of the valley of the Ouse."
The Quietudinarian geologist wUl answer that
these upheavals are due to tranquil and gentle dis-
turbances, to "multiplied convulsions of moderate
intensity"!^ — a succession of uniform minor move-
ments, repeated at distant intervals and after long
pauses. A slight attention, however, to the laws of
dynamics teaches us that enormous weights are raised
1 Chambers's Geology^ by J. Geikie, p. 74. * J6., p. 76.
3 Lyell, sixth edition, p. 361. It is unaccountably omitted
in later editions.
* Ly ell's Principles, vol. i. p. 120.
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CHAP. III. EVIDENCB OF FOBCES NOW EXTINCT. 35
and inertia is. overcome only by a concentration and
accumulation of force, and that pauses or intervals
between the impulses inevitably produce loss of
power. Moreover, as a wise modem geologist
appropriately lays it down, " It is not possible for
any number of minor forces, where the ultimate
resistance exceeds each one taken separately, to
accomplish in any time, however long, that which
requires for its execution a force of infinitely greater
power." — Prestwich, Past and Future of Geology,
1875. To overcome the resistance of a mountain
mass, to lift the Alps or Andes, and at the same time
to break them up into gorges and valleys, was as-
suredly due to no modified violence, no gentle taps
renewed from time to time. In order fully to under-
stand the magnitude of the work to be done by
these gentle jogs, let us transport ourselves for 9
time into the midst of some of the grandest scenes
of nature's operations. Listen to the evidence of an
unbiassed geological observer possessing a minute
knowledge of the highest mountain chain, the Hima-
layas.
'' The whole mass," says Mr. Blanford, in a Eeport
attached to the Geological Survey of India (p. 68),
" has been broken and disturbed, the rocks on one
side of the fracture having been lifted up many thou-
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36 SCEPTICISM IN GEOLOGY. CHAP. iii.
sands of feet, and crushed and crumpled together as
the leaves of a book might be if placed edgeways
between the boards of a powerful press. If we con-
tinue the section through the whole chain of the
Himalaya, for some hundred miles, and still farther
into Thibet and the plain of the great Gobi, we should
stiU find the same evidence of crushing and contor-
tion. Here, then, is the work of a power compared
to which the greatest of earthquakes sinks into insig-
nificance. Since man began to record his experience
of natural catastrophes no one has ever witnessed
such gigantic movements of the crust of the earth as
here stand in existence."
Sir Eoderick Murchison — " non sordidus auctor
naturae verique," writes, " See the deep chasm occu-
pied by' the Lake of the Four 'Cantons (between
Brunnen and Altorf), a profound transverse fissure
with vertical cliffs on either side, and observe the
broken and discordant ends of the strata on one side,
showing abrupt clean vertical abscission from those
of the other. Then follow up on each opposite cliff
the twisted and often inverted lines of torsion, by
which the Tertiary strata are crumpled up with the
Secondary rocks, particularly on the east side of that
great hollow, even to the summit of the mountain."
— Siluria, p. 490.
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CHAP. III. EVIDENCE OF FORCES NOW EXTINCT. 37
These two passages alone form a standing pro-
test against the theory of modem causes, knd we
are not aware that they have ever been answered.
Geologists acquainted with the Alps need not to be
reminded of such examples as the Glarnisch, where
an entire mountain is rent from top to bottom in a
precipice 6000 feet high; nor of the Galanda, torn
from the opposite range of the Kuhfirsten, both in
Eastern Switzerland. Such instances of the effects
of energies now extinct may be multiplied a hundred-
fold in almost every part of the world.
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38 SCEPTICISM IN GEOLOGY. chap. it.
CHAPTER IV.
f
THE FORMATION OF MOUNTAINS UPHEAVAL FROM
BELOW DOUBTFUL SHRINKAGE AND LATERAL PRES-
' SURE — THE BURSTING OF THE EARTH-RIND.
The great geological problem of the day is, "How
were mountains made ? "
The advocates of " modem causes " endeavour to
answer the question by suggesting some upheaving
force acting from below. This idea underlies all
their speculations.^ Lyell refers the elevation of
mountain-chains to the effects of subterranean power,
similar to that which causes volcanic eruptions; yet he
himself demolished the theory of "craters of elevation,"
and no one has satisfactorily ascertained the seat or
origin of a power which, like that of the fabled giant
of old, is to rise up under its mountain burthen. If
the evidence produced in my second chapter is of
any value, it does not exist in the earthquake, whose
movement is a mere superficial and transient shake.
^ "It is evident that the great mountain-chains of the
world are due, in the first place, to upheaval." — Geikie's
Geology, p. 76.
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CHAP. ly. FORMATION OF MOUNTAINS. 39
Volcanoes are a purely collateral phenomenon, which
have existed in all ages of our planet. They are to
it what boils and pustules are to the human body, a
sort of safety-valve. Through holes in the earth's
crust they throw up cinder and lava-heaps, veins and
dykes, after the manner of huge furnace chimneys,
ejecting molten matter at their mouths or sides,
which sometimes rises into permanent mountains and
islands, but seldom effects movement of the strata
adjoining. In nine cases out of ten the outburst of
trap and basalt has not raised the adjacent strata.
These intruders usually ascend in veins through cracks,
or are injected in sheets between sedimentary strata,
and are constantly tilted up along with them. Even
granite, though an intrusive rock, often occurs super-
imposed upon mezozoic strata, as in the mountain mass
of the Finster-Aarhorn ; while in the section of Cader
Idris^ igneous rocks arie uplifted along with the schists
and interstratified. The same with porphyry, as may
be seen in the hills of the Vicentine and Tyrol.
Is it not possible that the idea of general up-
heaval by a vertical force acting from below may have
carried too far ? Would not such an upward blow
produce a radiating fracture in the earth's crust at
the point of impact, like the starring of a pane of
^ Siluria, p. 41.
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40 SCEPTICISM IN GEOLOGY. CHAP. iv.
glass, in which the widest aperture would be in the
centre and the fissures would diminish from that
centre — the very reverse of what has happened in
the case of mountains and valleys ?
With no reliable evidence on this subject within
our reach, may it be permitted to offer for considera-
tion an opposite theory, substituting lateral for verti-
cal movement in the great natural operations which
have given our earth its existing surface of hill and
valley ? It is to be hoped that the suggestion
may not fail of obtaining a hearing and considera-
tion from the geologists of this time and coimtry
merely because it is imconnected with " causes now
in action," and in fact is independent of them. It
originates in events, issues, and developments which
have passed away, and depends on a different condi-
tion of our planet from the present. We all know
that the highest mountains on our globe are, in com-
parison with its diameter, far less than the wrinkles
on the skin of an orange. Any one who has taken
a survey of mountain-ranges from a high coign of
vantage must have been struck by the uniformity
with which they rise around him, wave beyond
wave, maintaining, with the exception of a few pro-
minent peaks, nearly the same uniform level. Is it
not possible that the spectator is here beholding
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CHAP. IV. MOUNTAINS NOT UPHEAVALS. 41
the shattered ridges of a great table-land of stratified
deposits which once formed the even surface of the
primeval earth's crust ?
If we adopt this conception, the mountain masses
of the globe, the basins of lakes, the channels of
rivers, the deep bed of the ocean, its narrow straits
and wide gulfs, are the result of overthrow rather
than upheaval, of fissures and cracks in earth's surface
caused by the contraction and shrinkage of the rocks
while in the act of cooling down from the state of a
molten mass, like a lava stream, solid above, yet resting
on masses stiU pliable from heat, and moveable below.
Out of the openings thus formed arose our present
mountains and valleys. The lines of fracture may
have followed a direction nearly but not entirely
parallel to one another, interrupted in places by cross
faults and fissures extending at right angles. At the
moment of disruption some of the divided masses
would be liable to fall over upon their yielding and
still plastic base, like clods turned by the plough. The
broken edges of the upper strata thus inclined would
become peaks and ridges. Some, like the waves
in a moving lava stream, would topple over and be
absorbed in the glowing abyss below, to be remelted
into granite or trap. In the general break-up the
yawning gaps would become valleys and gorges, while
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42 SCEPTICISM IN GEOLOGY. CHAP. iv.
the widest gulfs and deepest cracks, some descending
not less than five miles, would become the ocean
beds for the waters of the great deep to repose in.
But the tremendous force developed in the
sudden bursting asunder of the loftiest mountain-
chains would be accompanied by a recoil of the larger
masses, producing unlimited lateral pressure, suffi-
cient to drive up the flat sedimentary strata behind
either in slopes against their sides, or pushing them
onward, to squeeze and crumple them up together.
Hence those gigantic bends and contortions which
in many a mountain section have roused the geolo-
gist's wonder. Thus the rupture and recoil of the
Alps bursting out of their cerements may have pro-
duced those wave-like undulations and folds, rising
in nearly parallel ridges one behind the other, which
characterise the chains of the Jura. We know from
high authority that no strata are so rigid as to resist
a sufficient force applied laterally.^ The same con-
tracting movement would also promote the injec-
tion from the molten sea below of trap or granite in
beds between the half-closed folds of the strata, or in
veins and dykes penetrating their cracks and vertical
fissures. The work would be completed by the
flooring-over of the valley bottoms, as the lower layer
^ Lyell's Principles, chap. vii.
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CHAP. IV. ORIGIN OF CONTORTED STRATA. 43
of heated rock hardened and cooled between the
mountain-walls caused by the original fractures, and
thus water-tight lake and river beds would be formed.
Geologists assure us that lateral pressure has
crumpled up the Palaeozoic rocks extending from
the Mendip Hills, imder the sea, to the Ardennes,
a distance of 800 miles. If we consider the space
these strata would occupy if laid flat in their
original position, we may form some notion of the
amount of folding and crumpling, of firactures and
fissures, of gaps and slips, arising from the combined
influence of contraction and recoil As the pressure
increased nearly every fold would become a fracture,
and the uplifted strata would resemble a long line of
bound volumes, part of which would be liable to slip
out of the strong grasp of one who attempted to lift
them aU together. That some of these isolated strata
should drop through into the seething abyss, there
to be melted into trap or porphyry, would be inevit-
able. What more natural also than that, in a range
of mountains of such length, in the midst of such
vast lateral dislocations and vertical displacements
and shifts thus set in movement, large isolated
masses, parts of beds once continuous, should have
been left behind as outliers ? In this way may we
not account for those wonderful colimmar hills of
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44 SCEPTICISM IN GEOLOGY, CHAP. TV.
Assynt in Ross-shire, Suilven, Canisp, and Coulmore,
and the Isle of Handa, the puzzle of geologists
hitherto ; standing up as they do alone, and lifting
their banded sides marked like tallies with lines, to
prove the thickness and number of the strata now
lost and vanished, of which they are fragments ? By
such violent recoils may we not comprehend how
the isolated deposit of secondary rocks, including
chalk, discovered by Mr. Judd,^ above a mass of
gneiss, found its way to the top of the mountains of
Morven ?
The explanation furnished by this hypothesis
would relieve us also from those preposterous and
incredible curves of strata prolonged into the air
by geologists of our day only to be swept away by
atmospheric denudation. From the evidence afforded
to us by numberless sections of disturbed strata,
it appears that the outer folds of bent rocks have
snapped asunder under the strain of severe pressure
long before assuming the shape of complete arches.
Thus the amount of chalk destroyed by denudation
in the Weald may have been comparatively small,
when we allow for shrinkage and a fracture ensuing
soon after the pressure was applied. To use a homely
comparison, the chalk escarpments may have parted
^ Proceedings of Geological Society, 1876.
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CHAP. IV. CONTRACTION OF ROCKS. 45
asunder like the sinews in a shoulder of mutton on
the application of the knife.
The tendency of earth's crust to split and divide
is not confined to the main severances forming great
vaUeys, but extends to the joints, faults, and cleavage
lines which traverse every stratum more or less. To
this propensity is owing the fitness of the globe for
man's occupation. Through it the lowest strata and
all their mineral treasure have been brought to
light on the surface; through it the water springs
have been let loose, and broad avenues made for
their dispersion and circulation over earth's surface.
The leading outline of the theory of a primeval
split-up of the crust of the globe thus propounded
does not originate with ^the present writer. Many
geologists, chiefly of foreign schools, have approxi-
mated to it. The sagacious Prestwich almost clutches
it, but is entangled with the notion of upheaval
from below ; Sir WiUiam Thomson's views on the
rigidity of earth's surface have nearly anticipated it
and tend to confirm it; but the merit of fully
developing it is due to Professor Suess ^ of Vienna,
who has carried it out and exemplified it upon the
principal mountain-ranges not only of Europe, but
also of Asia and America.
^ Die Entstehung der AJ/pen, von Edward Suess. Wien,
1876.
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46 SCEPTICISM IN GEOLOGY.
CHAPTEE V.
PRESENT RISE OF LAND IN SWEDEN AND NORWAY IS
IT A FACT THAT IT DOES RISE ?
That a considerable part of the continent of K
Europe is at the present time undergoing an up-
ward movement is positively asserted in all recent
English works of geology, and is generally believed
by geologists.
Thus, in an elementary school-book ^ it is stated
that " the Scandinavian Peninsula offers a fine
example of tranquil movements of elevation and
depression." The phenomenon, if real, is remark-
able in a geological point of view, because it is
effected entirely without the interposition of earth-
quakes, which are almost unknown in Scandinavia.
Thus, while the fact itself is doubtful, geology can
furnish no reason why it should occur, which
is a strong jprimd facie argument against it.
Linnaeus, it is true, shared in the belief of a rise,
but in his time no attempt had been made at accu-
rate observation. Von Buch, in 1807, was the first
^ Geikie's Geology, p. 66.
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CHAP. V. RISE OF LAND IN SWEDEN. 47
geologist who, from infonnation derived from in-
habitants and pilots on the spot, declared his con-
viction that the whole of Scandinavia was slowly
and insensibly rising.
In recent times marks have been made on rocks
on the shores of the Baltic, and observations with
levels taken both on the Swedish and Prussian
coasts. The results hitherto have not been satis-
factory ; no two sets of observations, made even by
those who assert a rise, agree as to the rate and
amount of it; and some of them throw doubt on
the existence of any rise whatever. Sir Charles
Lyell having visited the Baltic, 1834> on purpose,
concluded that he had ascertained by a comparison
of measurements, made at different periods, that the
land had risen by an insensible motion, — Principles,
vol. i. p. 314; but in vol. ii. p. 190, of the same
work, he evinces doubts whether the land had risen
2^ feet, or 10 inches, or it might be less, in a cen-
tury, " in certain places north of Stockholm."
Much stress is laid by Von Buch, Lyell, and
others, on the existence of beds of sea-shells of ex-
isting species, at various heights considerably above
the Baltic, but no light is thrown on the time or
mode of their deposition, and we cannot suppose
that Wales is at present emerging from the sea
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48
SCEPTICISM m GEOLOGY.
CHAP. V.
merely from the discovery of sea-shells on Moel
Trivaen, which may have been placed there before
the creation of man. The question we have to deal
with is confined to causes now in action, and we seek
to ascertain what is going on at the present time.
So much uncertainty prevails on the subject of
the shores of the Baltic, that it is worth while to
compare the conflicting evidence brought together
by Sir Charles Lyell, which prevailed in convincing
him that a rise is now really going on in Scandi-
navia over an area of 1000 miles N. and S., and of
unknown distance E. and W., increasing as we
approach North Cape.^
Assertion. Moditication.
'* In parts of Sweden, and The investigations of MM.
the shores and islands of Loven, Erdmann, Norden-
the Gulf of Bothnia, proofs skiold, and others, made since
have hem obtained that the my visit to Sweden in 1834,
land is experiencing, and has have on the whole tended to
experienced for centuries, a confirm the idea previously
slow upheaving movement." entertained, that some changes
— Lyell's Elements^ p. 49. are now going on in the re-
lative level of land and sea
in certain parts of the Swedish
coast, though they consider
them to be probably local.
With a view of accurately de-
^ Antiquity of Man, p. 61.
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CHAP. V.
RISE OF LAND IN SWEDEN.
49
Assertion.
Sir Charles Lyell examined
in 1834 some marks made
by Swedish surveyors four
years before. " In that interval
the land appeared to me to
have risen at certain places
north of Stockholm, as near
Gefle, for example, about 4
inches, or at the rate of less
than 2j feet per century.
But at Stockholm, I inferred
from the position of certain
aged oak-trees only 8 feet
above the level of the Baltic,
that the rise could not have
been at a greater rate than
10 inches in a century, and
might be less." — LyelFs Prin-
ciples^ ii. p. 186.
" In seaport towns all along
MODIMCATION.
termining the reality of the
movement, and its amount
and direction, they have in^
stituted a regular series of
annual observations, which,
however, have not yet been
continued lon^ enough to lead
to positive results, — Principles,
1867, p. 314.
Lord Selkirk, after exa-
mining the marks on the
rocks, declares, " There is so
much fluctuation in the sea-
level from day to day, owing
to the action of the wind and
other causes, that the observa-
tions of a casual visitor are
of no real value in determin-
ing the average water-level."
— Lord Selkirk, Geological
Journal^ 1867, p. 187.
^'Several towns, also, on
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50
SCEPTICISM IN GEOLOGY.
CHAP. V.
Assertion.
the coast of Scania there are
streets below the high-water
level of the Baltic, and in
some cases below the level of
the lowest tide. Thus, when
the wind is high at Malmo,
the water overflows one of
the present streets, and some
years ago some excavations
showed an ancient street in
the same place 8 feet lower,
and it was then seen that
there had been an artificial
raising of the ground, doubt-
less in consequence of that
subsidence. There is also a
street at Trelleborg, and an-
other at Skanor, a few inches
below high-water mark, and
a street at Ystad is exactly on
a level with the sea, at which
it could not have been origi-
nally built." — Lyeirs Prin-
ciples, ii. p. 191.
" The upward movement
now in progress in parts of
Norway and Sweden, extends,
as I have elsewhere ^ shovni,
Modification.
the shores of the Baltic, as
Lubeck, Wismar, Rostock,
Stralsimd, and others, after
600 and even 800 years, are
as little elevated above the
sea as at the era of their found-
ation, being now close to the
water's edge. The lowest
part of Dantzic was no higher
than the mean level of the
sea in the year 1000 ; and
after 8 centuries its relative
position remains exactly the
same.". — Lyell's Principles,
9th Edition, p. 526.
" The rate of upheaval was
said to be greatest at the
North Cape, but no accurate
scientific proof of this fact has
^ Principles, 11th edit. chap. xxxi.
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CHAP. V. SCANDINAVIA UNMOVED. 51
Assertion. Modiiication.
throughout an area about yet been obtained." — Lyell's
1000 miles N. and SJJ. for an Principles, ii. p. 196.
unknown distance K and W., " Whether any of the land
the amount of elevation al- in Norway is now rising must
ways increasing as we approach be determined by future in-
North Cape, where it is said vestigations." — LyelVs Prin-
to equal 5 feet in a century." ciples, ii. p. 194.
— Lyeirs Principles.
Such a conflict of testimony cannot fail to have
perplexed my readers, and no wonder, since it appears
to have had the same effect upon Sir Charles Lyell
himself, for he adds, " We have not only to learn
whether the motion proceeds always at the same rate,
but also whether it has been uniformly m one direc-
tion. Some phenomena in the neighbourhood of
Stockholm appear to me only explicable on the sup-
position of the alternate rising. and sinking of the
ground since the country was inhabited by man." ^
It is pleasant to pass from such uncertainties to
positive facts which lead us to hope that we have
once more arrived on " terra firma." Thus, " at Soder-
telge, 16 miles S.W. of Stockholm, the land seems
to have been quite stationary during the last cen-
tury." — LyeU's Principles, ii. 1 8 2. We have at least
two other fixed points about which proof is positive
^ Principles, vol. ii. p. 184,
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52 SCEPTICISM IN GEOLOGY. chap. v.
that they, have not budged. The low Isle of Salt-
holm,^ near Copenhagen, is covered by the sea, except
in summer, and it is proved by old deeds to have
been precisely in that state in 1280, while the islet
Munkholm,^ in the Bay of Drontheim, offers proof
that the land has there remained stationary for the
last 800 years at least. Thus we have been
fortunate enough to pin down the Scandinavian
Peninsula, so to speak, unmistakably in its centre
on the Baltic, and at its N.W. and S. extremities,
upon evidence furnished by the author of the Prin-
cijples himself
The above extracts will show how serious are the
misconceptions regarding any present rise or fall in
the Baltic shores, and how greatly exaggerated are
the positive statements in books regarding it.
But are there any local peculiarities which will
account for the delusion of geologists ? Although
there are no regular tides in the Baltic, it is subject
to constant variations in level. Even strong N.E.
winds in the North Sea affect it by damming up
the narrow outlets which allow its waters to escape.
Being fed by many large rivers, it is liable to sud-
den rises when they melt in summer, and it is lowest
^ Lyeirs PrincipleSy ii. p. 181.
^ 'Everest^ a Norway ; LjelVB Principles, ii, -p, 194.
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CHAP. V. SHOKES OF THE BALTIC. 53
in winter. Oscillations of magnitude also occur in
this inland sea merely from the pressure of the
atmosphere. Professor Schulten observed that a
fall of the barometer is followed by a rise in the
surface of the sea, lasting sometimes for three weeks
together. Moreover, no sea is more subject to the
influence of ice than the Baltic. The groimd ice
which forms at the bottom of its shallow bays and
channels whenever the frost is severe and prolonged,
speedily converts them into solid cakes of ice. These,
when lifted by the freshets of spring, take up not
only large quantities of gravel and shells, but also
great stones, blocks, and boulders, and float them
away, depositing them in shoals and reefs. Nay,
sometimes these floes are driven a considerable dis-
tance inland along with their burthen, and are
packed up to a height of 20 or even 50 feet. Von
Baer observed a granite block of more than 400
tons weight thus stranded high and dry.
By these means in many cases the channels between
the fringe of islets and the mainland are growing
shallower, or are even deserted by the sea, and reefs
appear above the water from the deposits left by
floating ice, driven by the wind, and not at aU
from any rise of the land. The elaborate re-
searches of Dr. Meyer of Kiel, on the west part of
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54 SCEPTICISM IN GEOLOGY. chap. v.
the Baltic, show that under Such circumstances no
reliance can be placed on marks made on rocks two
or three inches above the water in a sea-basin liable
to so great variability. To sum up the evidence, it
would appear beyond doubt that in a former state
of the globe, in the quaternary period, the shores of
the Baltic may have been deeper in the water than
now, but no proof is shown of any such rise during
the historic period, and certainly there is no ground
for the positive assertion, that " The land is experi-
encing and has experienced for centuries a slow
upheaving movement."^ Indeed, if the author of
the Elements had seen the following testimony of M.
Pettersen, it is fair to suppose he would have modified
his statement. That accurate Norwegian surveyor
and geologist asserts : " As to whether the land is
still rising there is no positive evidence. In any case
it is certain that the elevation during the last 1000
years has been quite insignificant. When it is stated
in so many quarters, as a geological fact, that the
north part of Norway rises about ^ of a metre in a
century, this rate is evidently much too great." ^
This is virtually a confirmation of the previous tes-
1 Lyell's Elements, p. 49.
'^ *' Karl Pettersen on the Geology of Norway, 1867-75,"^
(j[UOted in the Geological Mag., No. 1351.
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CHAP. V. PINE TREES STARVED TO DEATH. 55
timony of Professor Keilhau of Christiania to a
general change of level " at some unknown period "
— ie. before the historic era. He confesses that " the
deviation from horizontality in the marks denoting
the ancient coast lines^ although the measurements
have been made at a great number of points, is too
small to be appreciated."^- Lyell's Principles, ii. p.
195.
Even supposing a partial rise of the Baltic coasts
in the quaternary period, imder geological conditions
which have long since ceased to exist, let us ask the
reader whether this furnishes sufl&cient ground on
which to base a theory of uninterrupted change
present as well as past on the earth's surface ? It
is true that ardent disciple of the school, Mr. Geikie,^
is so fully convinced of a slow upward movement
now going on in Scandinavia, as to assure us that,
in consequence of the great rise of the land, *' the
pine-woods which clothe the mountains are being
slowly elevated to ungenial heights, and are there-
fore gradually dying out along their upper limits."
Now as the upper limits of pine-trees even as far
north as Norway is 3500 feet, and as not ^ of the
whole surface of Sweden surmounts the level of
2000 feet above the sea, it is quite clear the eleva-
^ Chambers's Geology^ p. 66.
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56 SCEPTICISM IN GEOLOGY. chap. v.
tion of the land cannot have produced these disas-
trous effects, for which, let us hope, there is no other
foundation than in the geologist's own imagination.
In concluding this chapter we may safely rely on
the decision quoted above of native geologists. There
is no positive evidence that the land is now rising ;
and, in any case, it is certain the elevation during
the last thousand years, if perceptible at all, has been
insignificant.
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CHAP. VI. HAS RUNNING WATER A SAWING POWER ? 57
CHAPTEE VI.
RIVER EROSION ^THE CREATION OF VALLEYS BY RUN-
NING WATER, AND OF LAKE BEDS BY GLACIERS
EXAMPLES : THE SIMETO, RHINE AT BINGEN, IRON
GATE, CATARACT OF NLAlGARA, FALLS OF ZAMBESI,
RIVER LITANY, DEAD SEA, ETC.
Among assertions which have been accepted as facts,
and assumed to be verities by geologists, is the
theory of the erosive power of running water, and
the conclusion that the valleys, gorges, and beds of
rivers, many of them composed of the hardest and
most indestructible of rocks, in all parts of the world,
have been cut by the streams now running through
them, however inconsiderable. The writers of the
modem school of geology adopt this as the basis of
cosmical operations. Their system cannot work
without it; it is laid down in their elementary
manuals, and reasoned on in the profoundest of their
philosophical papers, and those who dare to doubt
are treated with ridicule. The present writer craves
permission to inquire whether this view has not
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58 SCEFnCISM IN GEOLOGY. CHAP. VI.
been accepted blindfold, and without due reflection.
He cannot avoid laying stress on the fact that no
one has observed the sawing process in operation,
not even in places where water exercises its greatest
force, as at the cataract of Schaflfhausen or the Falls
of the Clyde, he hopes to be able to prove, in addi-
tion, however surprising it may seem to many, that
even Niagara is wrongly quoted as an instance of
erosion by running water. Those who dwell near
the rushing waters of cataracts are unconscious of
the abrasion of a single foot or inch within the term
of man's memory. The Linn of Dee, in Braemar,
is a smaU FaU, caused by the whole river forcing
itself through a natural cleft in its bed not three
feet wide. It has been described by one who not
only knew it well, being a native of the county,
but was also a man of science, and therefore a
reliable witness. What says MacGillivray of it ?
" Great as the force of the stream must be, it has
failed to wear off projecting angles or to straighten
the passage. Considering the power of running
water, and especially the wonderful efifects it is
represented as producing, we naturally think it
strange that this fissure, in no very hard rock,
should remain so little changed. The Dee, with
all its floods, and many they have been, has rushed
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CHAP. VI. THE LINN OF DEE, BRAEMAR. 59
along this narrow rent — I suppose some thousand
years — without so much as fairly smoothing its
sides." ^ The frequent growth of water plants,
mosses, sea- weeds, etc., on the very surface washed
by rapid currents, ought also to create doubts as to
the truth of this prevalent notion. Its general
acceptance seems to be due to the confounding
together of certain undoubted fluviatile operations.
Currents of water in rapid motion partially abrade
their beds by forcing stones and gravel over them.
Whirlpools also driU holes in solid rock, by making
loose stones revolve constantly in their vortex, thus
hollowing out pits or cauldrons many feet deep.
Sometimes, by constant wear, two such " pot-holes "
are thrown into one. In both cases this is purely
mechanical erosion, since the stones, and not the
water, hoUow out the rocks. But these forms of
erosion occur ^ only near falls and rapids, and are not
1 MacGillivray, Natural Histoid of Deeside.
2 Streams flowing beneath glaciers act in the same manner.
The water* gathering on their surface drops through the first
crack in the ice, and cuts a shaft sometimes more than 100
feet deep right through to the rock below, descending with
tremendous force and a roar like thunder. If at the bottom
it meets with any loose stones this Molm or glacier-mill sets
them revolving, and driUs round pits in the rock just as in a
river bed. A remarkable example of this may be seen at
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60 SCEPTICISM IN GEOLOGY. CHAP. vi.
generally marked by the curved or conchoidal surfaces
which they leave behind on the rocks. There is no
instance to be found, in any part of the world, of
water, even with these auxiliaries, cutting down a
clean smooth vertical surface in hard rock.
It is not pretended that slightly coherent rocks,
such as tufa, travertine, shale, and lava, can resist
heavy floods any more than clay, drift, gravel, or sand,
which of course are liable to be dissolved into mud,
and washed away by any torrent, or even by any
contact of water. This will explain the action of
the flood of the Anio in destroying some of the
houses at Tivoli (Ly ell's Principles, i. 354), because
they stood upon beds of ^ porous and incoherent
tufa. The passage cut in a columnar lava current
by the river Sioule in Central France (Scrope, C.
F., p. 60), between granite and columnar trap, is
accounted for by the current penetrating between
the joints and separations of the lava columns.
Lucerne, on the hill-side close above the Swiss Lion, where a
surface of rock, laid bare accidentally in 1875, exhibits in an
area of 50 or 60 square yards sixteen such holes, some of them
20 feet in diameter and 20 to 30 feet deep, retaining the
identical round stones whose revolutions excavated them thou-
sands of years ago ; an interesting proof of the extension of
primgeval glaciation. The "Giants' Kettles" near Christi-
ania and other parts of Scandinavia are due to the same cause.
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TORRENT DESCENDING FROM THE FINDELEN GLACIER, ZERMATT. SHOWING
A, WHAT RUNNING WATER CAN DO, AND B, WHAT IT CANNOT DO.
A Hollow at the base of the cleft foi'iued by friction of stones driven by the
stream. In front ai'e two small pot-holes also formed by stones.
B Smooth surface of cliff, not fashioned by running water.
To /(toe 1)0(76 60.
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CHAP. VI. THE SIOULE AND SniETO. 61
by which, in process of time, it has sapped them
and swept them away like a row of skittles;
but it has stopped short at the original granite
bed of the Sioule. Ly ell's ravine at Milledgeville,
Georgia, was excavated 55 feet deep in twenty
years, because " the sides of the ravine consist of
beds of clay and sand, red, white, and green." In
fact the stream has only done on a large scale there
what any shower of rain does on a ploughed field,
by dissolving the clods into mud. For the same
reason, no one (except Mr. Jukes) ^ denies the power
of running water to cut through alluvial deposits
in plains and deltas and other easily disintegrated
modem formations, where rivers are constantly
meandering and changing their beds.
Another of Lyell's examples, that of the Simeto,
at the foot of Mount Etna, cutting its way through
lava of modem origin, but described by him to be
compact and heavy, is yet capable of explanation.
^ " When, however, a great river reaches the broad plain,
its current must necessarily slacken, and its erosive power
departs." — Jukes' School Geology, 2d edition. True, where
the river is most rapid it has greatest power to move stones ,
but in its course over alluvial plains the current wears and dis-
solves its banks. The effects of friction of rivers against their
banks and beds in retarding the flow of the stream ought to
show that water is mastered, and is not the mastering agent.
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62 SCEPTICISM IN GEOLOGY. chap, vi
The investigations of a trustworthy scientific
observer on the spot fortunately enable us to clear
up this mystery. Sir Charles I^ell is, as usual,
accurate on. the whole in his observations, the lava
cuiTcnt which issued from Etna in 1603 has been
removed to a depth of 200 feet, and the stratum'
over which the river now flows is unusually compact.
He has fallen into error, however, in this respect
that, though the layer of lava now forming the river
bed is comparatively hard, the upper beds, as in all
lava streams, are scoriaceous, being the mere froth of
the fiery mud, and offer slight resistance to running
water. Notwithstanding, however, even the more
compact bed has little tenacity, and from the nature
of its aggregation is very brittle, and more easily
battered to pieces by fragments washed down by the
stream than a similarly compact rock of sandstone
or limestone, the Simeto makes little or no progress
at present in the lowering of its bed.
However, by far the greatest number of valleys,
gorges, and water-courses, and the most important
in all parts of the world, lie in hard rock, slate,
granite, crystaline lime or sandstone, trap, etc., and
it is with these that we have now to deal. The case
of limestone countries demands special attention,
since it tells much in favour of our argument. Upon
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CHAP. VI. CHEMICAL CORROSION OF LIMESTONE. 63
hard limestone, water charged with carbonic acid
exercises a chemical power of corrosion, but it is
carried on chiefly in the dark; instead of cutting
open gorges and ravines on its surface the running
water hollows out caves and gulfs and tortuous
passages in the very heart of the rock, while the
rivers not unfrequently quit their beds and sink
below ground. Yet, notwithstanding this, limestone
countries abound in open valleys, specially distin-
guished for the cliffs that almost invariably flank
them, and are traversed by rivers like any other
formations. Here, then, where water exercises an
acknowledged power of excavation, it does not
fulfil the duties which geology assigns to it. The
limestone cliffs of Yorkshire and Derbyshire, there-
fore, were certainly not cut by watery erosion, but
are probably due to a dislocation like that which
produced the great Craven Fault.
Many of the great river- vaUeys display miles of
lateral precipice, rising often to heights of 1000
and 2000 feet above the water, almost invariably as
smooth and even as the waUs of a house. No proof
exists of any of the processes of watery action above
enumerated being able to produce straight cliffs, i.e.,
walls of rock. If running water specially possessed
this useful property of opening in hard rock such
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64 SCEPTICISM IN GEOLOGY. chap. vi.
"cuttings" as these, it is inexplicable why our
scientific engineers should have failed to avail them-
selves of it. How easily and economically might the
many cuttings on our railways have been constructed
by turning over a hill a rapid current of water.
The Prussian engineers, at any rate, had no faith in
such aid in 1833, when they had some trouble in
removing, by means of gunpowder, the well-known
reef stretching across the Ehine at Bingen, upon
which so many laden barges had suffered wreck
during hundreds of years, to the injury and oppro-
brium of Hanseatic commerce. Yet notwithstanding
the full stream of the Ehine during so many ages
had been unable to wear away this comparatively
slight barrier, we are taught by geologists to believe
that the long avenue of lofty precipices, including
the Lurley a little lower down, and consequently
the whole of the gorge from Bingen to Neuwied, 60
miles long, have been cut through by this same
river Ehine. The Iron Gate on the Danube, just
below the even more stupendous gorge through which
that river passes out of Hungary, presents a similar
obstacle to navigation and to geologists, who have
failed to explain to us how water erosion having (as
they assert) cut through cliffs 2000 feet high, should
have stopped short at this petty barrier reef. No
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■^^
GORGE OF THE DA>fUBE BELOW BELGRADE.
Cliffs 2000 feet high— an example of geological erosion by running water ! ! !
To face page 6-4.
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GORGK OK THE RHINE— THE VIA MALA.
Accordiiij; to Geologists seoored out hy " rain, frost, and mnning water '
(aerial (loiiudation) !
Tu face page 05.
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CHAP. VI. GORGES OF VIA MALA, ETC. 65
impaxtial spectator looking at these two defiles can
deny that they have the appearance of clean fracture,
effected A un seul coup. Their sides are flat, smooth,
and, where the beds of strata project, they present .
sharp angles or splintery edges, in distinction from
curved surfaces.
Such facts as these occurring all over the globe
are a standing protest against water erosion. The
weU-known gorge of the Via Mala is so absolutely
a crack through a mountain, that the two sides,
1500 feet high, in places are barely separated by
2 or 3 feet of interval ; from the freshness of the
fracture they seem to have been torn apart only
yesterday, and ready to close again at any moment.
The Rhine, though a broad river above the pass,
sinks invisible or reduced to a mere thread at the
bottom of this most remarkable fissure. But cliffs
and precipices occur all over the world, and there
is no distinction in form and structure between
those which bound seas or river-courses and those
which occur inland and far away from running water.
Why should the one class of cliff have a different
origin from the other ? The gorge of Goschenen, on
the St. Gothard Pass, is traversed by the furious
torrent Eeuss ; but its valley runs uninterruptedly
into the lake of Lucerne, whose precipices are loftier
P
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66 SCEPTICISM IN GEOLOGY. chap. vi.
than those about the Devil's Bridge, and as straight,
though no running water washes their base, but only
a deep lake. A ready explanation is at hand in the
faults, shifts, joints, etc., which prevail all through the
earth's crust : but these the ruling school of geology
repudiate, nay, try as far as possible to shut their eyes
to the frequent occurrence of such dislocations.
Let us now, however, test the erosion theory by
an examination of the phenomena attending the two
greatest cataracts in the world. In them, beyond
doubt, we see the power of running water exercised
to its fullest extent. The first, Niagara, is ap-
pealed to triumphantly as an undoubted proof of
the effects of running water. " We have here," Sir
Charles Lyell assures us, " a river which has been
eating its way backwards through the rocks for a
distance of 7 miles." Fortunately he himself fur-
nishes the explanation of this : " The St. Lawrence
flows over a hed of hard limestone nearly 90 feet
thick, beneath which lie soft shales of equal thick-
ness, continually undermined h/ the action of the
spray, which rises from the pool into which so large
a body of water is projected, and is driven violently
by gusts of ivind against the base of the precijpice.
In consequence of this action, and that of the frost,
the shale disintegrates and crumbles away, and
portions of the incumbent rock overhang 40 feet.
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CHAP. VI. NIAGARA FALLS. 67
and often, when unsupported, tumble down." ^ Is
it not singular that the author should not have per-
ceived that this explanation refutes his own theory ?
The hard limestone bed, 90 feet thick, of the St
Lawrence, is not eaten back by the current flowing
over it. It suffers no detriment from the passing
river, but breaks away by its own weight,^ because
its natural support is removed, not by the running
stream above but by the splash of the spray wafted
up from below the Falls, which dissolves the soft
shale. To use the words of Professor Tyndall, " the
most violent whirling of the shattered liquid (!)" and
"the most powerful eddies recoiling against the
shale." But for the accident of the occurrence of
this shale the Falls would not have altered their
position. So far from the limestone bed being
eroded, it is by its resistance to the river alone that
the shale has not all been removed long ago, and
the cataract demolished.
The retrocession of Niagara Falls, therefore, is
not the result of river erosion ; it is not even caused
by contact with running water, but by the fortuitous
1 Lyell's Principles f vol. i p. 360.
2 The famous Table Rock at Niagara, a part of the 90 feet
limestone, projected, it is stated, 70 feet beyond the face of the
cHff before it broke by its own weight ; but for many years
before that event occurred the river had ceased to flow over it.
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68 SCEPTICISM IN GEOLOGY. CHAP. VI.
concurrence of a soft stratum soluble in water,
whether still or in motion, at a considerable depth
below the bed of the river.
The great cataract of the Zambesi, in Central
Africa, called by its discoverer, Livingstone, the Vic-
toria Falls, redresses the balance of glory for the Old
World in possessing a larger and grander waterfall
than any in the New. But besides that, it furnishes
an undoubted example, on the largest scale, of a
river-bed made f(yr the river and not hy it. This
commanding stream having attained a width of more
than a mile, flowing from N". to S. along an undu-
lating plain bounded by distant hills, on a sudden
drops down into a crack stretching directly across its
course, forming a trough 350 feet deep, but not more
than 80 feet wide, into which the whole body of water
is discharged. The FaU is twice as high and twice as
wide as Niagara, but differs from it in that, immedi-
ately opposite to the Fall, rise three successive natural
walls of rock of the same height as that over which the
river leaps, separated from one another by narrow rifts.
These triple barriers consist of wedge-shaped pro-
montories of rock with vertical sides, projecting
alternately from the right bank and from the left^—
like side-scenes in a theatre, but entirely overlapping
one another. Out of the first deep trough the river.
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Gap in the rock forming
first ban-ier.
'^^i-:^^
A^-
BfRD's-EYE VIEW OF THE FALLS OF THE ZAMBESI, SOUTH AFRICA.
To fajce }X(ge 68.
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CHAP. VI. ZAMBESI FALLS. 69
after its descent, is compelled to find its way through
a gap only 80 yards wide in the first opposing rock
wall. A second wall here confronts it, by which the
stream is turned at an acute angle to the right
It is next forced round the second promontory, then
reversing its course round a third, and before it is
allowed to escape to the sea it is compelled to double
round a fourth wider headland.
If the irresistible erosive power attributed to
running water really existed in it, the intrusive wall
thus thrusting itself in front of the cataract should
have been swept away by it long ago, instead of which
the hard basalt over which the river tumbles has not
yet lost its sharp edge, and the floods of thousands
of years have surged against the opposing precipice
without the slightest apparent enlargement of the
wonderful, deep, zigzag channeL The profound abyss
into which the Zambesi falls is so narrow, it is diffi-
cult to discern athwart the blinding spray the vast
flood at its bottom ; but the surging river, however
much it may chafe within its bounding walls, is
turned backwards and forwards by them, to right
and to left, according as they direct its course.
What action or application of running water could
cause a river of first magnitude, flowing over a flat
surface of rock, thus suddenly to drop into the
bowels of the earth? By what operation did it
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70 SCEPTICISM IN GEOLOGY. chap. vi.
make this zigzag ravine channel? Was it by
cutting back ? ^- Then how came it not to sweep
away these rock-partitions, so narrow in places that
two men can scarcely walk abreast along them?
Still more preposterous is it to suppose that such a
river could reverse its current on a sudden, so as to
cut sideways, first right to left, next left to right.
The discovery of the Zambesi Falls would seem
to have been reserved until the present time, in order
to refute a leading tenet of modem geology, and to
prove the utter impotence of water to cut through
hard rock. The conclusion seems irresistible that
the fissure was made for the river to pass through,
possibly by some shrinkage of the basaltic rock,
when cooling down from an incandescent state, per-
haps on the sudden contact of water or ice.
1 Mr. G}eikie, after studying an excellent model of these
Falls, gives the following explanation upon erosive prin-
ciples : — " The river seems to have .cut its way backward
through this winding ravine, until, owing to some subter-
ranean movements effecting a change of level, or to some
other cause which would probably be detected by a geologist
on the spot, the body of water in place of entering at the
top of the ravine has been emptied over its sides." — Geikie's
Scenery of Scotland. This winding ravine is in reahty a series
of cracks, ending in narrow points. The river is not emptied
over its sides. There can have been no change of level, the top
of the rocks at the Fall being even with the river bed above.
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OHAP. VI. THE LITInY river. 71
But we find mountains split through to allow
rivers to pass in all parts of the world. If, then,,
water made such gorges, how was it carried up to
the top of these mountains ? how could it com-
mence operations on a curved slope ? how could
water have rested on such inclines ? We will pro-
duce another river as an example deserving the best
efforts of modem geology to explain the phenomena
attending it on erosive principles.
The Litkny (ancient Leontes), a river of Palestine,,
rising on the east slope of Lebanon, descends the
valley between it and Anti-Libanus for more than 30
miles.^ At that point it approaches within 10 miles of
the head-waters of the Jordan. A watershed of not
more than 50 feet elevation, rising directly in the line
of its previous course Kand S., alone separates the two
valleys. Precisely at this spot the litJtny alters its
course, turns abruptly at a right^ angle due W.,in order
to enter the defile of Kuweh,in places no more than 1
or 15 feet wide, which cleaves the chain of Lebanon
^ Robinson, Researches, Porter's Hand-book of Palestine^
p. 530.
s This rectangular bend is not confined to the Lit&ny,
but is shared by the neighbouring rivers, to the N., as they
approach the coast, thus proving that it is due to the pri-
mitive modelling of the district ; it is a feature impressed on
the physical contour of the region.
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72 SCEPTICISM IN GEOLOGY. CHAP. Vi.
to a depth of 600 feet at least, and through this it
enters the sea a little to the N. of Tyre. The
lit^y, if left to itself, according to the laws of
hydrostatics, must have followed the lower opening
presented to it, and have flowed over the inconsider-
able watershed into the Jordan, and thence to the
Dead Sea. It is equally clear and certain that it
could not have turned round, risen up 600 feet, and
cut its present bed through so lofty and rocky a
chasm, when the low road was open to it, without
changing the line of its previous course.
But it is not necessary to go so far as to Palestine.
We have precisely similar examples to that of the
Leontes close at home, one of them in the course of the
Avon. Why should the Avon on quitting Bristol have
altered its course, and instead of running straight
forward over the low ridge at Bedminster into the
Bristol Channel, have turned north to encounter
hills five times higher (400-500 feet), those of Leigh
Downs, unless it had found the gorge of Clifton
opened ready for it ? That that gorge was produced
by a great convulsion is imdeniable from the remark-
able fault a little below the Suspension Bridge, by
which the strata on one side have suffered a vertical
displacement of 800 feet above those on the other.
In both these instances we may fairly ask the
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CHAP. VI. KIVER-BEDS VERSUS WATERSHEDS. 73
erosionists what could possibly have induced rivers
to run up hill to surmount ridges many hundred
feet high, and then to saw through mountains many
miles thick when a clear low gap was offered to
them with the least possible amount of erosion ?
Modem geology assures us that the original ele-
vations of earth's surface determined the flow of the
waters, and that their currents carved out the river
valleys.^ How does this agree with the physical
geography of our own country? In the Isle of
Wight a high ridge of chalk running from E. to W.
forms the back-bone of the island and the natural
watershed, but the three chief rivers, the Brading
brook, the Medina, and Yare, rise to the S. of the
ridge and run N", into the sea, through this op-
posing ridge, by depressions evidently not made by
water running from the watershed, which, as it is,
yields only small rivulets. The same thing occurs
in the drainage of S. E. England. The natural
watershed of the oolite and chalk ranges is utterly
disregarded by the Nene, Ouse, and WeUand, all of
which rise to the west of these hills, and by means of
^ " The direction of the river valleys has, in the first place,
been determined by the original slope of the land, but the
deep dells, the broad valleys and straths, have all been
scooped out by running waters." — Geikie's Oeohgy, p. 76.
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74 SCEPTICISM IN GEOLOGY. CHAP. vi.
fractures across them enter the Wash, and through
it the North Sea.
The Weald of Kent and Sussex may be described
as a succession of strata trending nearly from KW.
to S.E., surrounded on the W., N., and S. by a horse-
shoe shaped escarpment of chalk, with an opening
towards the E., descending towards Ronmey Marsh.
Do the rivers rising from the central Forest Eidge
run parallel to the ranges which seem to offer ready-
made troughs, and through the wide level gap be-
tween Folkestown and Beachy Head empty into the
Channel ? Nothing of the kind — the chalk barrier to
the N. and S. is fractured, and through these openings
the Arun, Adour, and Ouse run into the sea, the Med-
way, Mole, and Wey to the Thames. It is then vain
to teU us that river- vaUeys have been scooped out by
running water, and that their direction has been
determined by the original slope of the surface, when
there are innumerable instances to the contrary.
Again, let not the geological student run away
with the idea that the mud carried down by rivers
is any proof of their erosive power, nor refer to the
rapid increase of deltas at river mouths as a measure
of its extent. In this case rivers are but trans-
porters. Allowing for the moderate disintegration
of rocks at the present day from weather action, far
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OHAP. VL MAIN OFFICE OF RIVERS. 75
the larger portion of the sediment in suspension
is only the washings out by rain and torrents of
clays and other mineral and vegetable soils, the
creation of ancient denudation and glaciation, the
debris of rocks disintegrated thousands of years ago
by processes differing widely from any now in oper-
ation, as will be shown further on. (See Chap, vm.)
No doubt the milky streams rising in glaciers are
tainted with the mud formed by the present grind-
ing of the ice, but even here the water is only
the carrier and not the creator of the mud suspended
in it.
One of the ablest and most popular geological
writers of the day describes an imaginary Bavine}
cut by the stream running through it, as though it
were typical of all ravines. He ought to have made
it plain to his readers how many ravines have the
strata on one side either lifted higher or sunk lower
than those on the other, thus proving them to be
undeniable faults or fractures in the strata. He
does not even come forward as an eye-witness of the
erosion which he describes, but confesses he " has
much to learn as to the process of excavation," ^ and
that no appreciable difference might be detected pro-
^ See Story of a Boulder,
2 Geikie, Scenery of Scotland, p, 148.
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76 SCEPTICISM IN GEOLOGY. chap. VI.
bably " even after the lapse of a generation." —
Geikie, Scenery of Scotland, p. 25.
The same author informs us that among the rivers
of his acquaintance, " their main office seems to be
to deepen their beds and carry off the waste of the
rocks." — ^p. 34. But be it remembered nature works
for a purpose, and what would be the good of deepen-
ing channels which already effect the object for which
they were intended, that of affording free passage for
the waters of the country that they intersect ?
The great impediment to the formation of a con-
sistent theory of the fashioning of the existing sur-
face of the earth lies in the obstinacy of those who
deny the influence of pristine cracks and shrinkage
fissures in the creation of vaUeys, culminating in
the dogmatic assertion that " there is no necessary
connection between fractures and the formation of
valleys." It may be safely asserted that fissurage
is the common lot of earth's crust. Every formation,
from the oldest to the newest, is pervaded with cracks,
the natural result of the primitive haking to which
all have been subjected. Every cliff and precipice,
every quarry, convincingly proves this, and especially
every mine groaning under the number of its faults,
shifts, etc. ; yet the utmost concession to be wrung
from the erosionists is that " the direction of valleys
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CHAP. VI. VALLEYS OF DISLOCATION. 77
may sometimes have been determined by rents and
fissures, although not due to them." — Lyell's JWn-
ciples, ii. p. 359. Another authority assures us that
" for one valley which happens to run along a line of
dislocation there are, / daresay, 50 or 100 which
do not."^ He is mistaken, however, when he adds
" that our vaUeys and ravines are not mere cracks,
would seem to be put beyond dispute;" also, "that
there is no point which the detailed investigations
of the Geological Survey has made clearer than this."
Unfortunately for this bold assertion the point is
disputed, and by a member of the Geological Survey,
Mr. Kinahan,^ who maintains, without any hesitation,
" But for the existence of faults, joints, and other
shrinkage-fissures, few, if any, valleys could have
acquired their present form." He enforces and
proves his assertion by examples without number
from various parts of Ireland, and follows up the
war into his antagonist's country, the Highlands of
Scotland, where he did not meet with a valley,
ravine, or lake-basin unconnected with a break " in
the parts which he visited."^
In the case of Loch Lomond, whose general bear-
1 Geikie, Scenery of Scotland, p. 9.
2 Kinahan, Valleys in their relation to Fissures, p. 83.
8 Ibid. p. 209.
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78 SCEPTICISM IN GEOLOGY. chap. vi.
ings N". and S. correspond with the line of other im-
portant breaks in that part of Scotland, he accounts for
the bends or change of direction in the lake-basin by
the intervention of transverse valleys and depressions
in the hills crossing it, while he finds the deepest spots
in the lake basin coincide with these breaks or faults
in the strata. This applies also to other valleys
and lakes, and accounts for the peculiar zigzag
ground plan of the Lakes of Lucerne, Lugano, and
Maggiore, which appear to be a combination of cross
strikes and transverse openings. " The historic valley
of Glencoe lies along a line of break in its schistose
rocks, which is very prominently marked from about
the centre to the top of the glen, where the main
fault appears to be split into a nimiber, and these
are in many cases cut across by other faults."^
Sir Charles Lyell himself has acknowledged the
gorges of the Avon at Bath and Bristol to be " the
site of a great convulsion and fracture, which took
place in the crust of the earth at some former period."
— Lyell, Address to British Assoc, 1864, p. Ixiv.
The great fault extending from Denbighshire to
Bala and Towyn on the sea, passing S. of Cader
Idris, has given rise to the lakes of Bala and Tal-
y-Llyn. This fault affects the carboniferous and
1 Kinahan, Valleys in their relation to Fissures, p. 217,
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CHAP. VI. WEAKNESS IN THE EABTH'S CRUST. 79
Silurian rocks in its passage. The valley of the Severn
at Coalbrook Dale offers a crux for erosionists ;^ a
river, tranquil and powerless, flowing through a gorge
of the Wenlock limestone, the strata on one side of
the river being quite unconformable to those on the
other. There is no part of the world from which
certain proofs of similar shifts and breaks might not
be collected. But proof in this instance is likely
not to lead to conviction in a mind which, while
acknowledging that the Great Glen of Scotland, tra^
versed by the Caledonian Canal, with its chain of lakes,
runs along a line of fracture throughout its entire
length even to the Moray Firth, yet maintains this to
be " a coincidence." Thus, the most pronounced
feature in the physical geography of Scotland is dis-
missed as " a weakness in the crust of the earth." ^
That the atmosphere is to take the credit of
making the valley when all the hard work has been
performed by the power which first forced the open-
ing, would appear in the highest degree imreasonable
and inconsequential, and it would be perfectly justi-
fiable to retort that, without the original fracture,
there would have been no valley at aU.
^ Murchison's Siluria^ p. 497.
^ Geikie, Scenery of Scotland, p. 177 ; but see Note at
the end of this volume.
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80 SCEPTICISM IN GEOLOGY. chap. vi.
Next to the Great Glen as a feature in the geo-
graphy of Scotland, comes the valley of the Tay,
which sends to the sea more water than any other in
Britain. From the head of Glen Dochart to the
junction of the Tummel, this valley corresponds with
the general strike of the rocks. "It is excavated
along an anticlinal axis or fold of the quartz rocks
and schists."^ Nevertheless this, according to Geikie,
is another " coincidence," although the atmospheric
erosion is determined by geological structure, and
may be traceable to an actual fracture in the strata.
These instances have been quoted, among hundreds,
in order to show that "coincidences" (as they are
called) of a valley with a line of fault are by no
means " exceptional." It is mere assertion on Mr.
Geikie's part to deny that the sides of the valley
are the actual sides of the fracture. These and
other similar assertions regarding various parts of
the Highlands are confidently expressed, but they
are accompanied by no evidence by which their
accuracy may be tested.^ Mr. Geikie needs not to
be reminded that " a belief of any kind must be
founded on evidence of some sort, and that evidence
must be produced if the owner of the belief desires
^ Elinalian, Vallei/s in their relation to Fissures, p. 147.
^ See Postscript, end of Volume, added since this was written.
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CHAP. VI.
ICE EROSION OF LAKE-BEDS.
81
that it should be accepted by others besides him-
self."
Professor Eamsay's theory of the erosion of Lake-
Basins by ice was called forth by the acknowledged
incompetence of running water to form basins or
hollows, by dotting back or any other mode, since as
soon as running water falls into a hole or lasin it
ceases to run. He has failed to perceive that the
same dilemma affects the action of glaciers. Ice
Ay course of a Glacier down B, a mountain's side. C, portion of Glacier
arrested, and consequently immovable, in its course by the rock-barrier, B.
can grind only when in motion, and is liable to be
stopped by a barrier in front. Sunk into a hole, ice
becomes dormant and ceases to grind, therefore never
could have caused those deep hollows which form
the beds of most lakes.^ Even supposing the whole
lake basin covered with a glacier, the upper stratum
^ This argument has already been brought forward by
the Duke of Argyle m his Presidential Address, but it was
worked out separately by the present author before he read
that Address.
G
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82 SCEPTICISM IN GEOLOGY. chap. vi.
of ice would flow over that in the hollows, which
would stick fast for an indefinite time. In such a
hollow lies Loch Tay, an expansion in the course of
the river Tay, descending to a depth of 600 feet, its
bottom being nearly 250 feet below the level of the
sea. In a basin far deeper lies the Lake of Como ;
how could any ice-grinding account for its depth of
1924 feet, 1200 of which descend below the sea
level ? How is it possible for running water or ice
on any principle of hydrostatics to have created such
basins ? The Sogne Fiord of Norway attains in its
upper recesses a depth of 4000 feet, while near its
entrance into the sea it is diminished to 200 or 300
feet. Loch Etive, in Scotland, is nearly walled in at
its mouth by a reef, over which the entering and
receding tide falls like a cataract. There is scarce
a lake bed in any part of the world which does not
present similar obstacles to the theory, and they,
are immensely increased in the case of such a de-
pression as the Dead Sea, whose surface is sunken
1300 feet below the Mediterranean, with the
further obstacle of a watershed intervening in the
valley of the Ghor, between it and the Eed Sea, to in-
tercept an outflow in that direction. A line of frac-
ture in the strata forming the Valley of the Jordan
extends N". and S. for 160 miles. In this crack lies
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CHAP. VI.
FAULT IN THE DEAD SEA BASIN.
83
the river bed of the Jordan, and when it reaches the
Dead Sea the rocks on either side not only do not
correspond, as they would have done had the hoUow
Hoab — Hills of chalk marl.
I
W.
Sandstone (Gr6s de Nubie).
Section across the Bed of the Dead Sea, showing a dislocation and shift of strata.
" A Gaping Fissure." Copied from Lartet's work.
been caused by atmospheric erosion, but the chalk
cliffs on the W. side of the Dead Sea are totally
different from the red sandstones (grfes de Nubie)
which occupy the E. (Moab) shores, owing to the
sandstone having been lifted up many hundred feet,
while the cretaceous rock on the W. is depressed.
Professor Huxley, who has especially studied the
geology of Palestine (see his Presidential Address),
having before him the survey of the Dead Sea by
M. L. Lartet, the most complete yet made, along
with his section of the Dead Sea which we here
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84 SCEPTICISM IK GEOLOGY. chap. vi.
reproduce, yet deliberately endorses the assertion
that "rain and running water, working along this
old line of fracture, ultimately hollowed out the
Valley of the Jordan ; in fact, determined the present
configuration of the country." ^ Just as plausibly,
and with as much probability, might he attribute
the image on a rusty bronze medal to the rust which
corrodes it, and not to the die which stamped it.
Existing glacier beds, as a rule, would not hold
lakes. Their rocky sides and bottom are always on
a slope open at their lower extremity, generally
assuming a spoon-shaped curve. Glaciers certainly
never form vertical precipices, such as those 'which
wall in the Lakes of Lucerne, Garda, Wallenstadt,
and many others. But here the question arises, can
it be shown that there is any essential difference
between river and lake valleys? They are both
channels for running water, which, in the case of
lakes, is arrested for a time by hollows deeper than
the average level of the bed of the passing stream.
The course of all great rivers among mountains is
virtually a succession of gorges and basins ; if the
gorges were closed the basins above them would
become lakes. What, for instance, is the Uri Bay
^ The Nineteenth Century, No. 1. "Geologie de la Terre
Sainte," par Louis Lartet, 1876.
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CHAP. VI. PROCESS OF EROSION UNCERTAIN. 85
of the Lake of Lucerne but a continuation of the
valley of the Eeuss ? and if the defile at the Devil's
Bridge were closed, as it once was, it would dam
up the river and restore the basin of Urseren to
its original condition of a lake.
Before closing this chapter, after this accumula-
tion of evidence to prove that valleys are not and
have not been made by river erosion, but are for the
most part the results of original dislocation in earth's
surface, we cannot do better than quote two admis-
sions which we find modestly lurking in the quiet
comer of a footnote to Geikie's Scenery of Scotland,
p. 148 :—
" Loch Tay has had its basin scooped out, I be-
lieve, by land ice, but the valley was there probably
before the ice filled it."
" Though I am fully persuaded that these High-
land valleys are the results not of subterranean
movements but of subaerial denudation, I have still
very much to learn as to the way in which the pro-
cess of excavation was carried on."
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86 SCEPTICISM IN GEOLOGY.
CHAPTEE VII.
ATMOSPHEKIC DENUDATION MOUNTAINS AND VALLEYS
ASSERTED TO BE MADE BY IT ; ALSO DESTROYED BY
IT AMOUNT OF FAITH REQUIRED GREAT RESULTS
FROM INADEQUATE CAUSES ANOTHER CAUSE SUG-
GESTED.
One of the most potent agencies counted on by
geologists for modifying the surface of our planet is
Denudation. It is defined by them to mean the
removal of solid matter by water in motion, includ-
ing rain, frost, rivers, and sea-waves. It surpasses
all Other modem causes in the power that it is said
to be stiU exerting, and in the effects it produces. The
wonders which it has performed and is performing
are best set forth in the very words of its advocates.
" Mountains and valleys are due to it; it has carved
them out of the solid rock. The great river systems
are excavated by it."^
Again, wherever upturned strata crop out at
the surface of the ground, these represent the effects
' Lyell's Elements^ chap. vi.
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CHAP. VII. GEOLOGICAL DENUDATION. 87
of denudation ; " they are but the truncated portions
of beds that were once continuous, and formed com-
plete arches or curves."^ Professor Geikie also
asserts, " it can be proved that strata miles in thick'
ness have been removed bodily by the seemingly
feeble action of denudation."
But what has become of the missing strata removed
by this clean sweep ?
" They have been carried away," we are assured,
" grain by grain,^ by the denuding forces, weathering,
rain, frost, and the fluviatile and marine action." ^
But in case this astounding announcement should
not meet with submissive acceptance, we are warned,
by one of its most zealous propagators,* that a long
process of geological education is required to realise
the conception ; and the scholar may be excused for
some hesitation, since another professor, who firmly
believes it, confesses his ignorance as to the way in
which it is brought about, as we have already seen.
The difficulty, however, seems to lie not in the
great amount of Denudation, which without doubt
has made its mighty influence felt in all parts of the
^ Chambers's Geology, by Geikie, pp. 74 and 77.
^ Geikie, Scenery of Scotland, pp. 8 and 12.
^ Chambers's Geology, p, 75.
* Ramsay's Physical Oeology of Great Britain, p. 35.
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88 SCEPTICISM IN GEOLOGY. chap. vii.
earth, but in attributing denuding powers on such
a scale to such trivial causes as those to which our
geologists restrict them. A disciple of this school
must indeed be gifted with faith without measure
before he could admit the possibility of removing
even such a mountain as Ben Nevis, not quite one
mile high, by rain and frost above, aided by all
the seabreakers that could be brought to bear on its
base.
It is needful, therefore, to inquire how this pro-
cess of rasping down the face of nature is carried on,
whether these small agents are reaUy effecting such
changes, and in what way their power, such as it is,
is applied.
Weather, that is to say frost far more than rain,
is a potent cause of disintegrating surfaces of rocks,
especially those of slaty texture or jointed, so as to
admit water into their interstices, which are burst
open through its expansion by intense cold. But
even at the greatest heights, where frost has its
utmost sway, the mountain peaks and crags are
covered with perennial lichens which preserve the
surface from further corrosion. Such a coating
envelopes the hoary blocks of Stonehenge, and has
defied the storms of at least a thousand years. Where
the softer nature of a rock allows the crumbling
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CHAP. VII. ATMOSPHERIC DENUDATION. 89
process to penetrate, the very debris which results,
turning into soil, supports grass and herbs sufficient
to stop the destructive tendency. There is scarce a
railway cutting which does not furnish proof of this
, by the rapid clothing of its bare sides. There are
two objections to the denudation of the Weald by
atmospheric causes ; the chalk of the Downs, which
form its N". and S. margin, though one of the softest
rocks, yields to the weather less than granite, because
it is so quickly covered with turf, which is virtually
indestructible and impregnable to atmospheric de-
nudation. The turf-clad barrows on Salisbury Plain
have preserved their prehistoric surfaces and out-
line unchanged for thousands of years, while walls
of stoutest masonry have crumbled. Secondly,
there is no trace of beach or shingle ^ at the base of
the chalk escarpments, such as must inevitably have
been left there had they ever been washed by sea
waves.
Nature has thus set a decided limit to the denud-
ing influences of frost and rain, for before they can
penetrate to any great depth in rock surfaces vegetation
interposes and disintegration is stopped. The dilapida-
tion and ruin which follow where forests are recklessly
cut down is the best proof of the importance and
^ Murchison's Siluria, p. 493.
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90 SCEPTICISM IN GEOLOGY. chap. vii.
strength of the protection which vegetation afifords.
These consoling facts, and the knowledge of the very-
large proportion of earth's surface which is covered
by vegetation, may appease any alarm occasioned by
geological exaggeration as to the present progress
of denudation under mere atmospheric waste now in
operation.
The impotence of sub-aeriel agencies could not be
better proved than by the engraving still indelibly
fixed by glacial erosion on rocks so hard as to resist
the growth of lichens, on which the finest lines are
preserved in defiance of weather, as perfect as the
day in which they were scratched, which the geolo-
gists will tell us is not less than 30,000, perhaps
than 100,000 years ago.
Let us next consider the part which the sea and
its breakers are taking in this work of denudation,
which, if we believe some of the modem school, is
so formidable as to threaten " a power of waste
having perhaps no limit short of the total demolition
of the dry land." — Geikie, Scenery of Scotland,
p. 44.
Lyell commences his chapter on tides and cur-
rents by " viewing them first as employed in de-
stroying portions of the solid crust of the earth,"
and illustrates his conclusions by reference to the
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<JHAP. vn. INROADS OF SEA ON LAND. 91
coasts of the Shetland Islands exposed to the full
violence of the Atlantic. " Steep cliffs," he teUs
us, " are hollowed out into deep caves, and almost
every promontory ends in a cluster of rocks imitat-
ing the forms of columns, pinnacles, and obelisks." —
Lyell's Principles, i. p. 503.
The Needles of the Isle of Wight are a familiar
example of the same sort of thing, only they consist
of soft chalk, while many of the Shetland outKer
obelisks are composed of granite. But all these rocks
have stood, little if at all altered in size and form,
since the beginning of the historic era. Those who
live close to them detect very slight change, so that
so far from proving the power of modem agencies,
they demonstrate that the uncontrolled pressure of
the Atlantic, aided by the most rapid currents known
on the shores of Britain, are unable to complete the
work of oceanic devastation effected in a former age of
the world, by destroying these apparently feeble obe-
lisks. The experienced engineers who built the storm-
braving lighthouses of Skerryvore and Dhu Hertagh
on isolated breaker-battered rocks in the midst of the
Atlantic, rarely rising above the tides, were not
deterred by geologists' tales of the power of waves
to consume solid rock. The evidence of the barnacles
and sea-weeds adhering to the surface of those rocks
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92 SCEPTICISM IN GEOLOGY. chap. vn.
proved how baseless is the fable of wave erosion.
Even the terrible surf- wave of the Tropics ^ has for
ages lashed the foot of the cliffs of Angola without
encroaching on them, though it pulverises to atoms
the fragments of the hardest rock and shells which
fall within its swirls. The fiat has gone forth to
the sea, "Thus far shall thy waves come, and no
farther."
No doubt there are many spots on the coast of
Britain, notably between Bridlington and Spurn
Point in Yorkshire, at Dunwich in Suffolk, at
Bognor in Sussex, etc., where clay and sand cliffs
of easy disintegration ^ are yielding to the gnawing
attacks of the sea. The mechanical force of waves
also, during storms, in hurling heavy detached rocks
against cliffs, like battering-rams, must not be
ignored, but it is equally true that there are as
many places where the land is gaining upon the sea.
In reality the sea is not a destroying element, as
geologists would lead us to suppose. No fact is
more certain then that its boundaries and those of
^ Monteiro's Angola, i. p. 24.
2 On no subject are vulgar errors more rank and deceiving
than on this : many of the instances of sea-cliffs falling and
afterwards washed away, depend not upon the waves but on
the undermining effects of land springs.
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CHAP. vn. RESISTANCE TO THE WAVES. 93
the dry land are fixed. On the whole, taking account
of those few places where " give " is compensated by
" take," continents are not diminishing, nor are sea
areas increasing. Admitting the silting up of some
estuaries, no other material change has taken place
in the outline of Britain since Eoman times. In
fact nature herself sets a barrier to marine inva-
sion by the foreshores and beaches of shingle and
alluvium thrown up by the waves themselves.
Even the isthmus of the Sjgurn Point, at the
mouth of the Humber, which is especially relied
upon by erosionists to prove the inroads of the sea,
though composed only of a heap of loose pebbles and
sand, and " exposed to two strong currents, may
perhaps be little changed for ages to come ; such is
the efi&cacy of long equal slopes and a pebbly sand
in repelling the rage of the sea!* — Phillip's Yorkshire,
p. 69.
Every cape and headland which has midway
breasted the sea and the storm for thousands of
years offers a protest against a belief in the power
of breakers to mow down mountains or " strata miles
in thickness." Finally, we have from Lyell himself
{Elements, p. 82), the acknowledgment that "waste
of sea-cliffs forms an insignificant portion of marine
denudation."
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94 SCEPTICISM IN GEOLOGY. chap. vii.
The foregoing examination of the powers of the
various agents of atmospheric corrosion (excepting
that of running water, discussed already. Chap, vi.),
by which geologists account for the vast phenomena
of denudation, will enable the reader to appreciate
the amount of credulity they are called upon to exer-
cise in order to accept the astounding announcement
that strata 3800 feet thick from the S. Wales
district, and 4000 feet from the Mendip district,
and 10,000 to 11,000 feet from the Vale of Towey,.
Caermarthen,^ have been removed by rain, running
water, frost, and waves. This rests on the authority
of one eminent geologist. Prof. Eamsay, who availed
liimself of his opportunities while engaged on the
geological survey of Great Britain to calculate the
thickness of the beds removed. Did he, when
proclaiming such extraordinary results, consider how
far he was straining the theory of Causes now in
Action by fathering upon it such a geological miracle^
1 Memoirs of the Geological Survey of Great BritaiUy vol. i.
p. 334. Ramsay, p. 306, moreover, states " It is n6t unlikely
that, including all the rocks from 'the old red sandstone up-
wards, 9000 feet is not the greatest amount of vertical denuda-
tion which these rocks have suffered in the district between
Brodrick Hill and Garth Hill." Is it usual to find in this or
any country hills, say rather mountains, of the formations
specified, attaining an elevation of 9000 feet 1
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CHAP. VII. KEMOVAL OF MOUNTAINS. 95
amounting to a removal of whole chains of moun-
tains by rain, and frost, and running water ?
Imagine what would have been the reception of a
similar statement made in defence of the Noachian
Deluge, with what a howl of derision would it have
been received ? It is true those who adopt atmo-
spheric denudation are obliged to take refuge under
the " great lapse of time required in explanation of
the facts so observed."
Geologists, it would appear, '^ never are but always
to he blest" by consummation.
It is evident that in proportion as the uniformi-
tarian geologist raises these imaginary mountains,
the difficulty of removing them by causes now in
operation is increased. Nevertheless, the story of
this clean sweep of mountains of strata was at once
accepted by De la Beche, Lyell, Geikie, and others/
and is now part of the geological creed, and incor-
porated in elementary works on geology.
If we inquire what is the evidence that such
masses of strata were so removed, or even that they
ever existed, it rests solely upon geological diagrams,
drawn by a process which is described as " protract-
ing in imagination." ^ The gifted Government
^ De la Beche, GeoL Ohs, 817-819. Murchison alone refused
belief. See his protest, Siluria. ^ Chambers*s Geology p. 74.
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96 SCEPTICISM IN GEOLOGY. chap. vii.
Director of the Geological Survey, not satisfied with
producing sections of the actual strata as they exist,
was tempted to "join up the disrupted edges of the
beds in conformity with the known normal curves de-
duced from accurately observed normal dips." ^ But
it is evident that in drawing these curves a varia-
tion in the angle, almost microscopical in amount,
or a slight twist of the compasses in protracting
the curves, would convert hundreds of feet into
thousands. No wonder that mountains so readily
and fancifully created should be washed out by
equally fanciful agencies. But besides this, it is
highly probable that these contorted and uplifted
strata, for all we know, may have been run up into
many small plies or folds instead of one or two
exorbitant or impossible curves. The flexibility
also of stratified rock has its limits ; and the pheno-
menon may be accounted for by the outer bands of
strata breaking in the act of flexure long before the up-
lifted curve was compressed into an arch. The author
of this theory of lofty curves seems to have been
by no means sure of its adoption, and he propounded
it with a diffidence and modesty which commands
our commendation. He, as every other geologist,
must perceive the risk of distortion and exaggera-
^ Geological Survey of Great Britain^ vol. i.
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CHAP. VII. PROTKACTING IN IMAGINATION. 97
tion in adopting a false scale. When he finds certain
strata diving down below the surface he has often
to seek for their upthrow at very great distances, the
intervening space being covered with vast superficial
deposits, not to be penetrated. How can he be sure
that he has not passed over the missing ends of the
strata which may possibly be buried beneath ? If he
fancies he recognises the same rock many miles off,
can he positively identify it, knowing how constantly
rocks are modified; how, even when identical in
mineral composition and occurring in contact, they
differ widely in age ? These and other difl&culties
constantly make it a hopeless task for the geological
surveyor to define the boundaries of strata, and to
delineate the structure of a country, and ought to
make us very cautious in believing that which may
turn out after all to be not a fact but only an un-
safe inference.
But may not the gaps, and voids in the con-
tinuity of dislocated strata, be accounted for in
another way ? If we take into account the shrink-
age of rocks at the time of cooling, and the recoil
of the strata at the moment of fracture, it is toler-
ably certain the edges of the strata stretched to
the utmost degree of tension previous to breaking
H
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98 SCEPTICISM IN GEOLOGY. chap. vii.
would fly asunder and leave vacant spaces between,
independent of any denudation. This relieves us
from the necessity of supposing that the whole area
between the escarpments of the N. and S. Downs
was ever covered by a continuous bed of chalk.
Moreover, the ingenious Professor Eamsay has pro-
longed his curves into the air until he could drop them
down, so as to cap some other outcrop of the same
strata, regardless of the probable destruction and
entire disappearance of intervening beds, which may
have slipped through in the general concussion at
the moment of the uplifting of whole ranges of hills.
But over and above the sweeping away of masses
of strata piled miles up into the sky, weather, frost,
and running water, are credited by the younger geo-
logists with the power of carving aU mountains and
valleys out of the solid block of the primitive table-
lands.^ Let us apply this to Mont Blanc, with
its twelve miles array of peaks and precipices, and
inquire what has become of the chips and fragments
which this subaerial hammer and chisel work could
not have failed to leave behind ? The answer is,
that not only is the valley of Chamounix, measuring
from the top of Mont Blanc to that of the back of
1 Chambers's Geology (Geikie's), pp. 75, 76.
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NERO FJORD, NORWAY.
Specimen of a Gorge, 3000 to 4000 feet high, scooped out by "rain, frost, and
running water," according to the geological creed of " Modem Causes."
To face page 98.
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CHAP. vn. SCULPTURING OF MOUNTAINS. 99
Fl^g^re, a width of five or six miles, entirely open, but
its bottom bears no trace of any such encumbrances.
The river Arve rolls over a bed of rock, covered with a
thin layer of boulders and gravel, the product of
ancient and modern glacier moraines. Yet we know
that in places where weathering (whose influence
no geologist will underrate) is going on to a great
extent, as on the sides and summit of the Matterhom,
an exceptionally fissile mountain, a vast pile of debris
at its foot proclaims the action of frost and thaw,
which ceases not during the whole summer. Not that
we find in this instancef " the missing strata have been
carried away grain by grain," ^ for the geologist who
uses this expression need scarcely be reminded that
frost and weather do not act in this fashion, but by
working into the crannies of rocks, by detaching
flakes and fragments, and even after the expiration
of ages smaU traces of granulation are perceptible,
so as to enable the debris in any quantity to be
washed away by rivers.
But mountain peaks and ridges by their very
shape proclaim their hardness and power of resisting
the weather. Yet how is it credible that these
colossal obelisks were originally imbedded in an uni-
^ Geikie, Scenery of Scotland, p. 9.
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100 SCEPTICISM IN GEOLOGY. chap. vn.
form matrix of solid rock, the bulk of which was
liable to be washed out while they were left standing ?
How came the sides of valleys to stand, while the
centres were swept away, and have vanished ? We
know that weather acts equably upon all rock-sur-
faces exposed to it, consisting of similar strata, and
placed under the same conditions of exposure. Sir
Charles Lyell^ has too readily taken for granted that
the largest and deepest valleys are in rocks which
yield most readily to the atmosphere. The reverse
is so often the case as to be a strong argument
against erosion. The very deep valley of the Dee, in
Aberdeenshire, is riven through granite, and that of
Chamounix, the deepest in Europe, in rocks of the
hardest crystaUine texture.
Where then are we to seek for an explanation
which wiU relieve geology from these discordant
improbabilities ? The only one we can offer is that
real denudation, which effected such astonishing revo-
lutions on the earth, was no imperceptible " feeble
process," was a power quite different from the puny
everyday causes now in action, and one infinitely sur-
passing them in energy and intensity. We see in it
the results of the phenomena accompanying the
^ Antiquity of Man, p. 36.
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CHAP. VII. TRANSITIONAL PHENOMENA. 101
transition of our earth from a globe in great part
crusted over with thick ice to its present habitable
condition : that state of glaciation having probably
been the climax of the cooling down of our planet,
the first consequence of which was the cracking and
breaking up of its crust, which we have already
attempted to describe.^
1 See Chapter iv.
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102 SCEPnCISM IN GEOLOGY. chap. viii.
CHAPTER VIIL
OF DENUDATION BY GLACIATION EFFECTS OF SUDDEN
EMANCIPATION OF EARTH'S CRUST FROM AN ICY
COATING.
The existence of glaciers in primaeval times, not
merely in the heads of the highest valleys, as at
present, but filling them entirely, radiating from the
mountain chains, and overspreading large parts of
the existing continents, was first discovered amidst
the Alps, but it has since^been traced to distant comers
of the globe. Mount Sinai, Lebanon, Norway, the
Himalayas, and New Zealand, alike proclaim in their
old moraines, grooved and mamillated rock-surfaces
and boulders, the widespread presence, at one time, of
an icy crust. Greenland, a country equal to Germany
in area, exists at the present day in that state of
glaciation. There the valleys are scarcely to be
distinguished from mountains, so completely is the
surface equalised by the burthen of snow and ice.
Investigations among the Alps have detected, at
heights of 6000 and 7000 feet above the sea.
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CHAP. vni. DENUDATION BY GLACIATION. 103
removed blocks and ancient moraines distributed
over both K and S. slopes of the great chain from
one extremity to the other, also pot-holes made by
whirling torrents under the ice.^
The process of removal of this ice crust from
altitudes so great, in quantities so enormous, will
furnish, I would venture to suggest, a power more
capable of accomplishing the stupendous effects of
denudation than any amount of atmospheric influ-
ences, however long their duration. To appreciate
this power we must dismiss from our minds the
trivial workings of modem glaciers confined to deep
sunken beds, down which they descend with a slow
motion and with a moderate erosive action.
The phenomena before us are inconsistent with
the supposition of a gradual retirement and diminu-
tion of the ice covering, which geologists hitherto
have taken for granted. We have to consider the
effect of a sudden transition from total glaciation,
due to a change of temperature, and the consequent
melting of a body of ice covering every mountain
and hilly region, combined with the additional weight
and force which such huge bodies would acquire from
^ See de Salis' TJeher Erratischen Erschdnungm im Rheivr
Gebiety 1875. On the very Bummit of the Bemina Pass,
7400 feet above the sea, pot-holes occur, made by sub-gladal
whirlpools or " glacier-mills."
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104 SCEPTICISM IN GEOLOGY. chap. vni.
their yast elevation, starting into motion from moun-
tain peaks and overhanging precipices, and sweeping
downward in all directions.
It appears probable that the state of glaciation
followed close upon, if it was not the residt of, the
cooling down of the earth from' a molten state,
the first consequence of which was the universal
fracturing of its crust, described in Chapter iv.
Thus, from the extreme of heat the globe may
have passed to the extreme of cold, a prelude to
oscillations of climate, constantly diminishing, un-
til the happy mean of temperature which we now
enjoy was attained. Glaciation, therefore, must
have taken possession of a fractured but unpolished
world, of those deep fissures encumbered with moun-
tain fragments, and strata bent into curves or
broken short off with splintered edges, great part
of which it was destined to smooth down or clear
away.
No one, so far as we can caU to mind, has taken
the trouble to consider by what steps and stages the
earth was reKeved from this general incrustation of
thick ribbed ice. It must have been due of course, in
the first instance, to a change of climate. A slight
increase of temperature acting upon so wide an
expanse of ice and snow would set torrents running
equal to the largest European rivers, capable of
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CHAP. VIII. PRIMITIVE GLA.CIATION. 105
detaching and carrying off huge icebergs. Most of
these would follow the openings in the fissured rocks
which we have described as the rude troughs of
future valleys, but great part of the icy coating of the
upper tableland would slough off in enormous cakes,
acres in extent, over the shoulders and down the
mountain sides. We have proof that the ice masses
we have to deal with were not limited to glaciers,
deep sunk in channels prepared for them, moving
downwards a few inches per diem. We must face
the problem of a continent of ice, superimposed upon
a vast mountain area, suddenly released from peaks
and precipices, and hurled downwards in every direc-
tion in which the force of gravity could conduct it, in
the form of colossal avalanches, and ice sKps loaded
with debris of rock exceeding that of the fall of the
Eossberg, and starting from infinitely greater eleva-
tions. From this, and from the greatness of the
masses, some faint ideas may be formed of the
force they would exercise in concussing, pounding,
fracturing, and sweeping away the obstacles in their
course. Not that the rush of the debacle would
long continue uninterrupted. The fragments, of
fallen mountains, the reefs of fractured and up-
turned strata lying in the way, the discharges of
constantly recurring avalanches of overwhelming
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106 SCEPTICISM IN GEOLOGY. chap. viii.
mass, would furnish, especially at the bends of
valleys or in gorges, obstructions sufficient to
arrest masses in which ice formed so considerable
a part. It will assist us to understand the occur-
rences inseparable from such a state . of things if
we refer to accidents of a similar kind, though on
an infinitely smaller scale, which produce the ice-
barriers on the St. Lawrence, St. John's, and other
rivers in N. America, and in Europe at times on the
Ehine and Danube. In the spring of some years the
ice breaks up in the upper course of the river before
the thaw has set in below ; and floats down until ar-
rested by ice still unmelted. The constantly accumu-
lating blocks and floes, driven by the strong current
against this obstacle, are not only piled one over the
other, but are sunken, and packed into one solid
watertight dam, stretching across from side to side, and
taking the shape of the river-bed, which it entirely
fills. This impervious barrier lasts until a further
thaw, or the accumulated weight of water behind,
aided by the cutting power of the overflow upon ice,
bursts the dam. " The river goes," sweeping aU before
it, and wild work ensues. Such debacles, made familiar
to us by the well-known bursting of the ice-formed
lake in the Val de Bagnes, may give some slight
notion of the tendency of ice, when driven along
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CHAP. vin. BURSTING OF THE GLACIERS. 107
by water, to pack and arrest the entire stream of
a great river in a comparatively short time, and
may thus account for some of the gigantic pheno-
mena which we are attempting to describe. Those
acquainted with the properties of glacier ice, the
instantaneous cohesion of its surfaces, however sudden
the contact, its flexibility and elasticity in masses,
will easily comprehend the rapid formation of these
ice baniezB, — ^indeed the impossibility of such large
masses of ice disengaging themselves from their
cradle on the high plateaux without forming them.
Their disruption, again, releasing the accumulated
icebergs behind them would occasion a succession
of concussions exercising the most powerful influence.
At the openings of secondary valleys minor
glaciers protruding across, and even pushed up the
opposite heights, would also effectually bar the passage
of the descending deluge of ice, water, rocks, and mud.
Thus the accumulation, though enormous, would be
let down step by step. Lakes would be formed one
after another at different heights and in aU directions,
filling the main valleys, and ramifying back into
their tributaries, at times overflowing lateral ridges.
At every burst the process of rasping and smooth-
ing the rocks in the way would be renewed, and
when starting from the higher elevations the dis-
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108 SCEPTICISM IN GEOLOGY. chap. viii.
charge would sweep over hills, valleys, and plains,
carrying away with it boulders, gravel, drift, and sand,
the varied components of moraines, and scattering
them far and wide to great distances and on various
levels, far above the reach of any existing rivers.
With such a variety of impediments, so large a mass
of ice could not be speedily removed. The Arctic
climate, which such an enormous body of ice pre-
supposes, granting the alternations of seasons, and
the return of winters of far greater severity than at
present, would continually reconvert into ice the
rushing torrents let loose by summer heat, so that
this state of things must have lasted for an indefinite
time before the pristine glaciation could have been
reduced to its present limits.
At such a time, and under such circumstances,
the Lake of Geneva was joined to those of Morat,
Bienne, and Neuchatel, forming a great inland sea,
stretching K to the base of the Jura, and S. up the
Ehone to Martigny. Beyond the Jura another lake
may have occupied the whole space between the
Vosges and Black Forest hills, as far as the gorge
of the Bingen Loch, then perhaps recently opened, but
still choked with debris. So long as these temporary
lake-beds lasted, they would receive the products of
all the pounding and grinding of rocks, mixed with
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CHAP. VIII. DEPOSITS IN GLACIER LAKES. 109
washed-out moraines and glacier detritus, which the
inflowing .waters would sift and deposit in the form of
beds of boulder, clay, gravel, sand, and drift, — in-
gredients for fertile soils in the future. On the sur-
face of these lakes would float icebergs capable of
clasping, prizing up, and transporting boulders of the
largest size. The open fissures in the earth's crust,
destined to be permanent lake and river beds, woidd
be puddled and made water-tight by the influx of
clay into cracks and leakages.
Conjectural as many of the foregoing suggestions
may be, they have yet a larger basis of facts than
the atmospheric denudation theory. They are con-
firmed, as far as regards the stepwise formation of
lakes, by the phenomena exhibited in the well-
known Parallel Eoads of Glen Eoy, which are to be
accounted for only on the supposition of a series of
temporary lakes at various levels, ponded back by
ice-barriers, one formed after the other. They re-
lieve the geologist from the ludicrous incongruity
and startling assertion of " a complicated series of
events, including more than one interglacial period,
requiring for their explanations several oscillations
of level and successive submergencies and re-eleva-
tions of land" to accoimt for the production of
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110 SCEPTICISM IN GEOLOGY. chap, viil
boulder clay.^ They would at least enable us to
dispense with " three successive periods in N. Wales,
when the land was alternately (1) much higher
than at present — ice excessive; (2) 2300 feet
lower than now — reduced to a cluster of low
islands ; (3) and raised again when the valleys were
ploughed out by a second set of glaciers."
^ Lyell, Antiquity of Man, pp. 296, 313.
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SUMMING UP. Ill
CHAPTER IX.
SUMMING UP ^INVITING THE READER'S VERDICT — CON-
VULSIONS CAN THE DOCTRINE OF MODERN CAUSES
AND NATURAL DEVELOPMENT APPLY TO THE EARTH,
AND IF SO, TO WHAT FINAL CONCLUSION DOES IT
LEAD?
Pausing from the scrutiny to which certain import-
ant geological assertions — involving fundamental
principles of the science — have been subjected in
the foregoing pages, let us ask whether the inquiry-
has been justified, and whether prevailing hypotheses
have passed muster as worthy to be accepted for the
bases of the geological theory which depends upon
their substantial truth. Are the forces now in action
the same in kind and in degree as those which stamped
upon the earth its actual features ?
The reader who has followed me may be enabled
to judge, from the comments I have made on the
various statements and instances brought forward by
modem geologists to corroborate their theory, what
influence Earthguakes are now exercising on our
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112 SCEPTICISM IN GEOLOGY. chap. ix.
planet. It has not only been proved that mountain-
chains are not raised by them, but made probable
that their shock is arrested by mountains ; while,
so far from opening gorges and valleys, they are
powerless to effect even a fracture ^ in solid rock ;
that whatever slight displacement of low alluvial
land or rocks of recent formation may arise from
one shock is undone by the next, and that they
have left no permanent marks behind, except the
devastation of human constructions. It is impossible
to overrate the importance of the testimony of Mr.
Mallet, who, so to speak, has studied earthquakes both
in theory and practice, that " An earthquake, how-
ever great, is incapable of producing any permanent
elevation or depression of land whatever." Limited
as earthquakes are in action and area, they cannot
disturb the general evidence we discover everywhere
on the face of Nature of former disturbance and
present tranquillity. We may rest content then
with the conclusion that, after all, the round world
stands so fast that it cannot be moved, and that
its surface on the whole is neither rising nor fall-
ing, not even in Scandinavia.
It is submitted also that the case of Atmospheric
Denudation has broken down imder cross-exami-
^ Mallet, Beport on Earthquakes, p. 62.
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CHAP. IX. CONCLUSIONS. 113
nation : that geologists have lost sight of the fact of
the almost universal spread of vegetation over the
globe, and that a limit is set by it to the erosive
effects of the atmosphere, except always that small
amount, chiefly the result of frost and ice, which,
in conjunction with decay of leaves and other
vegetable products, serves to repair the waste of
fertilising soils. — That, at the utmost, present denu-
dation could not produce the astounding effects at-
tributed to it ; since the combined action of rain,
frost, running water, and sea waves, whatever their
force and velocity, have but a very limited power to
file away or erode hard rocks, much less to carve out
great valleys or mountains. We cannot even admit
the possibility of a " brooklet gouging out deep
trenches in solid rock," to use the poetical words
of an erosionist. That the supposed triumphant
example of erosion in Niagara Falls has been mis-
leading, inasmuch as it is proved that the undeniably
successful resistance of hard rock to rushing water,
in that case has alone preserved the river bed, and
prevented the removal long ago of the barrier which
pens back the great lakes of K America.
There is cause for believing that the entire dis-
appearance of strata over large areas, known to us
by a few outlying fragments, may be due to earlier
I
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114 SCEPTICISM IN GEOLOGY. chap. ix.
and mightier operations than those of Modem De-
nudation, The deliberate assertion of a rise of land
in Scandinavia, now going on to such an extent
as to stop the growth of trees, on scrutiny eludes
our search, and is shown to be destitute if not in-
capable of proof; and we have in vain endeavoured ,
to discover any instance, at any time, or in any part
of the world, of alluvial materials washed down into
the sea having been hardened into rock, and " pushed
up, ever and anon, as new beds to the light of day."^
It is surely time that common sense should be
exercised to resist the fallacy that weather, frost, ice,
and running water (such as we now experience), could
have carved out mountains, dug valleys, swept away
piles of strata miles high, or strewed hills, valleys,
and plains, all over the world, with streams of loose
stones, including boulders as big as a house, gravel,
clay, and earth. The reliance of modem geology
upon such feeble and inadequate agencies to produce
such enormous results may perhaps be accounted for
by the fact that a teacher of this new philosophy
assures us both that time is power, and that to attri-
bute great effects to great causes is a prejudice.^
^ Chambers's Geology, p. 77.
2 '* We make the fatal error of forgetting that in the geo-
logical history of our globe time is power, — It may not be
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CHAP. n. ' CONCEIT OF KNOWLEDGE. 115
An attempt has been made in the foregoing pages
to explain what was the real cause of Denudation,
and to refer it to phenomena which, fortunately for
the existence of man, cannot be numbered among
causes now in operation. We have also endeavoured
to show that other causes besides modem denuda-
tions, or upheaval, or earthquakes and volcanoes may
have been instrumental in forming mountains and
valleys ; that they are possibly, the result not so much
of a lifting up as of a throwing down of the earth's
crust, of a rending and crumpling together caused
by contraction and recoil, of a horizontal rather
than a vertical movement, and are at all events
not due to any lifting power of volcanic action.
The contraction of heated rocks by cold would send
earth's crust into valleys and mountains. The
^strain and pressure from weather outwards, on such
an enormous scale, would produce the results
hitherto attributed to upheave!
Instead of dogmatising then, let us rather con-
fess it is difficult if not impossible for the limited
faculties of man thoroughly to explain the nature
of those all-powerful causes which have given the
easy to get rid of the natural tendency to associate great
effects with great causes ; but if one can free himself from
this prejudice,'* etc. etc. — Geikie, Scenery of Scotland, p. 9.
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116 SCEPTICISM IN GEOLOGY. chap. ix.
earth its present surface. Whatever they were,
they were means to an end, and that end has been
effectually and successfully carried out. A certain
object was to be effected, that of rendering the
earth habitable and useful to man; the resistless
force which effected this, though stupendous in our
eyes, was no more a convulsion than is the burst-
ing of a seed-vessel of a plant when ripe, in order
to disperse the seed. What wonder then that these
forces should exceed in might and power of perfecting
anything we now behold on earth? It was perhaps
descending a little below the dignity of science when
geologists of the younger school began to upbraid
their opponents as " Convulsionists," promoters of
catastrophes, and obstructives, bearing in mind their
own favourite resort to earthquake?, the most tre-
mendous "convulsions," taken together with vol-
canoes, of which we have experience at present. It
becomes a question indeed, whether the impulse
given to geology by the great founder of the modem
theory in his inimitable works has not been some-
what counterbalanced by the exaggerations and in-
consistencies of his followers, and whether they are
not the real obstructives, who, while acknowledging
the prevalence of faults, fractures, and shifts in all
strata, refuse to them their real and direct coimec-
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CHAP. IX. FALLACY IN MODERN CAUSES. 117
tion with the formation of valleys and gorges, for-
getting that these are but larger fractures, only-
opened with design and for a purpose.
After considering such cases as those of the
Litany in Syria, the Zambesi in Africa, the Avon at
Clifton below Bristol, the rivers of Eastern England,
and of the Weald, examples which may be multi-
plied a hundredfold from aU parts of the globe, we
surely have authority to deny that rivers have made
their own channels, and that the mere original slopes
or contour of high lands have sufficed to conduct
them in their course over the surface. " Subter-
ranean movements,"^ — say rather primeval fractures
of the strata, cannot have been the mere^ aids of rain
and running water in excavating the great valleys,
but must have been their direct cause. The original
force, hitherto styled " subterranean movement,"
which lifted continents above the sea, was not
only capable of splitting open vaUeys and creating
mountains, but could not have done the one with-
out the other. Why does the geologist stop short
at the lifting, and deny the natural and inevitable
result — the dislocation of strata ?
^ Geikie's Geology, pp. 75, 76.
2 " Subterranean movements have lent their aid in acce-
lerating the process of erosion." — Ly ell's Pnwop^e^, xv, p. 332.
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118 SCEPTICISM IN GEOLOGY. chap. ix.
More important objects, however, are, it is hoped;
to be gained from such a discussion as the present
than the refutation of some spurious offshoots of a
popular theory. One vast fallacy would appear to
underlie the doctrine of Modem Causes, the suppo-
sition that the world we inhabit, so beautiful, so
pregnant with every gift which can contribute to
man's progress, prosperity, and happiness, has been
turned out by its Maker unfinished and imperfect ;
that it is capable of improvement, at least of de-
velopment, and is undergoing material change day
by day. According to this hypothesis all its ar-
rangements are faulty, its waterways require lowering
and scraping, and are being reduced to other levels by
the influence of the elements, occasionally corrected
by earthquake shocks ! Yet it would be hard to find
a more striking and beautiful example of design and
combination than that by which the earth is drained
and watered. And the evidence of design deserves
all the more to be dwelt upon, because granite and
iate and greywacke are not sentient bodies capable
of self-evolution. No innate desire on their part to
let the waters pass through them could have pro-
duced that " mighty maze, but not without a plan,"
— the wonderful ramification of the river-systems of
the world, resembling the outspread filaments of a
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CHAP. IX. EVIDENCE OF DESIGN. 119
sea-weed. In travelling over a mountainous country,
or ascending the course of a river, we comprehend
the nature and extent of this multitude of water-
courses, joining the main stream from the right hand
and from the left, through gaps and fractures, by
perfectly-adjusted levels, so that however elevated
the source, however distant from the sea, no matter
by how many mountain barriers the stream was
shut in, it meanders through them all, and emerges
into the plain, where rivulets and rivers, united into
one channel, finally pour themselves into the ocean.
Especially to be observed in the course of every river
is the number of basin-shaped openings, which it
traverses in succession, connected with one another
by rocky gorges and narrow defiles cloven through
the chine of the mountains. Ko one can doubt that
at one time these gorges were closed, and formed
huge dams, holding up behind them the lakes and
pools which filled the basins, and which must have
remained nearly stagnant until, the barriers being
broken down, circulation was given to the accumula-
tions, and thenceforth "the waters were gathered
together in one place." But this is only one-half
of the wonder. Philosophers have not perhaps sufii-
ciently considered the intimate connection between
the firmament above and this fissuring of the earth
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120 SCEPTICISM IN GEOLOGY. chap. IX.
below. This intricate, but not clueless labyrinth
of water-ways is inseparably connected with the
system of the atmosphere, with the clouds and
storms, and evaporation going on above and around
us, by which the snowflake or the raindrop, falling
on the mountain crests, finds its way from the highest
level down these rock- cleft channels, until, on reach-
ing the sea, it ascends again in the form of vapour,
and is transferred back to the snowy peaks to feed
the same or other rivers, and once more to fertilise
the earth in its passage.
Such is one of the complicated arrangements,
analogous to the circulation of the blood in the
human body, by which the earth was made habitable
for man. What undeniable proof of well-concerted
design ! how worthy of the most sublime intelligence !
Yet we are taught by the geologist to believe that all
this was effected by the atmospheric processes of
nature now daily at work, and by earthquakes ; " a
long-continued series of moderate shocks," whose
puny efforts, in fact, produce merely superficial and
temporary disorder on the earth, and, judging from
their own historian, act by haphazard, and thus mar
the fair face of Nature.
A zealous erosionist exclaims : " It is incon-
ceivable that a country could have been rent originally
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CHAP. IX. RESULTS OF CAUSES NOW IN ACTION. 121
into the pattern of its drainage system." Yet in
the end we cannot doubt that geologists will be
constrained to accept this as a fact. Is it indeed a
bit more difl&cult to believe than that mountains are
created and likewise washed away by rain, water, etc.
etc.? At all events the forces, whatever their nature,
which made the existing mountains and opened the
valleys, were directed to a consistent purpose, tending
to a common result. They did not, as we havQ seen
the earthquakes do,^ throw down merely to raise up
again after a few years ; they opened up water-courses
instead of obstructing them, promoted the circulation
of water instead of damming it up into stagnant pools
producing order in the world, and not confusion,
such as the destruction of Lisbon, the wasting of
Calabria and Java. In short, that original wonder-
ful break-up of surface, whenever and in what
manner soever it was brought about, opened out to
man a world otherwise impenetrable, and but for this
unprofitable, to him.
Few, it is likely, of the many readers of the
fascinating chapters of the Principles and Elements
have been prepared for the ultimate conclusion to
which the Author was leading them. Fewer, we sus-
pect, will be disposed to acquiesce in it. Those who
^ Lyell's Principles, ii. pp. 128, 131, 140, 159.
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122 SCEPTICISM IN GEOLOGY. CHAP. IX.
believe in modem causes must accept as the certain
result of their action that we owe to earthquakes in
a great degree the perpetuation, nay the very exist-
ence of the habitable earth.^ They must acquiesce
in a redistribution of land and water, as it is called,
as now going forward — that is to say, the sea is to
replace the land, the land the sea ; they must admit
that the land is gradually but certainly being
washed into the ocean ; that denudation, undoing
at one moment what it has done at another,^ may be
destined to work away, " in the long ages of the
future, imtil it has worn down the solid land, and
mountains and glens have alike disappeared."^
A philosopher, no less eminent than Playfair, even
calculated the time it will take to transfer the whole
of the dry land into the bosom of the ocean ; and,
though he did not arrive at "safe conclusions,"
bolder men have been found of late, who, with
" more exactness," assert that the whole globe is
' " Subterranean movements ... are essential to the well-
being of the habitable surface, and even the very existence of
terrestrial species." — Lyell*s Principles, u, p. 243.
^ " Thus the final result of atmospheric denudation is to de-
stroy the features which itself gave rise to ; so the end of its
action is to plane everything down to a uniform leveU' —
Green, Geology for Students, 1876.
3 Geikie, Scenery of Scotland, p. 115.
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CHAP. IX. EARTH REDUCED TO A DEAD LEVEL. 123
worn down 1 foot in 6000 years ; and, consequently,
it will not take more than 4^ million of years to
sweep away 'the whole American continent, and in
6 millions the entire rock-surface of the earth may
be planed off in the same fashion. — See Lyell's Ele-
ments, pp. 91-92.
The result, then, of the most approved geological
philosophy is to reduce the great globe, and all that
it inherit, to a dead level ! ! ^ unless by the antagon-
istic aid of igneous causes the unevenness of earth's
surface can be restored — ^truly a difl&cult task, con-
sidering that while atmospheric effects operate over
the whole globe, volcanoes are limited to about
l-500thpart of it!!
The modem Huttonians lay it down as profoundly
unphilosophical that the energies of nature should be
supposed to hav'e been greater at the creation of the
globe than at present. Is there then any inconsistency
in supposing that when a potter moulds a vase out of
a lump of clay he should put forth his greatest energy
^ Lyell's Principles, L p. 327 : " Tlie aqueous agents are
incessantly labouring to reduce the inequalities of the earth's
surface to a level." See also Principles, ii. pp. 237-239.
" So great is the denudation of the land, that in process
of time the whole would be planed down to the level of the
sea, were it not for the subterranean forces." — Qeikie's Geology
p. 77.
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124 SCEPTICISM IN GEOLOGY. CHAP. IX.
and exert his utmost skill to finish it and turn it out
perfect ? That achieved, would there be any reason
for his continuing to revolve his wheel'slowly for an
indefinite time ? That the work of the creation of
the earth was one of perfection defies all disproof.
What need then to imagine that it was done by little
and little ; least of all can we admit a solution of the
problem of cosmogony involving the absurdity that
the work was left unfinished, and needs constant
alteration by means of certain mechanical self-
acting operations. The theory of natural develop-
ment in other branches of natural history, whether
true or false, at least infers improvement of structure
and conformation. Applied to geology, it ends in
deterioration, monotony, and stagnation. According
to it the earth is to be planed smooth and bare,
deprived of all that makes it beautiful, useful, and
habitable ; converted into one monotonous plain,
barely capable of keeping its head above water, save
by the aid of occasional earthquakes ! !
" The hunger of the mind to see every natural
occurrence resting upon a cause," and the vanity of
believing (spite of man's finite capacity) that modem
science can account for and explain everything, ap-
pear to lie at the bottom of the confidence reposed
in the Theory of Modeen Causes. Yet there is
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CHAP. IX. CONCLUSION. 125
to hope that the more geology is studied in an earnest
spirit, free from the mirage of attractive but shadowy
hypotheses, the more it will be acknowledged that
not blind force, however gentle, nor mechanical
impulses, however gradual, rendered our planet what
we find it. It will eventually be acknowledged
that at the time and in the- process of fashioning
the globe, a power was exerted totally different from
the present course of nature ; that, in fact, it is not
inconsistent with logical conclusions to hold that an
obd of creation may differ essentially from one of
maintenance and conservation.
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126 POSTSCRIPT. — GAPING FISSUBES.
POSTSCEIPT.— GAPING FISSUEES.
Since the foregoing pages were in print, we have met
with the following passage in a new edition of Mr.
Geikie's Great Ice Age, lately published : — " Do lakes lie
in gaping fissures or in chasms produced by dislocations
of the solid rocks, or, as they are technically termed,
faults ? As a matter of fact, no single instance has yet
been adduced, either at home or abroad, where a fault
could be said to be the proximate cause of a lake-hollow." '
We were about to raise a protest against this dog-
matic assertion when we were re-assured by discovering
the following explanation or modification of it on the
page following, though this rider to the new edition of
the work had nearly escaped our notice again in the
modest retirement and small type of a footnote : —
" It may be well to remind the reader that I am speak-
ing of the carboniferous areas of the west of Scotland.
I am very far from affirming that faults have never in
any case given the initial direction to a line of drainage.
I could mention a number of instances where they have
certainly done so. A good case in point is Glenapp, in
the south of Ayrshire, which coincides with a large frac-
ture. Again, the north-east and south-west fault that
traverses Scotland from the shores of the Firth of Forth
1 Geikie's Gnat Ice Age, New Edition, 1876, p. 272.
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POSTSCRIPT. — GAPING FISSURES. 127
to the Irish Sea, gives rise in many places to a distinct
feature, and streams occasionally follow it for some dis-
tance. The Great Glen would also appear to be in a
line of dislocation. I have never seen, and would travel
a long way to see, a gaping fault."*
An author who shows so, laudable a desire to be set
right, even at the expense of a considerable journey,
may be glad to be informed of the existence of gaping
faultSy — 1st, in the Dead Sea; 2d, in the Lake of
Lucerne ; or, if he declines to go so far from home, 3d,
in the gorges of the Avon at Bath and Clifton, also
in Colebrook Dale.
^ Geikie, The Great Ice Age, p. 273.
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INDEX.
Andes, alleged lifting by earthquake, 19.
Aasynt Mountains accounted for, 44.
Atmospheric denudation, 86, 92, 108.
Avon Gk)rge made for the river, and not by it, 72 ; at Bath, 78.
Baltic, rise in its shores — contradictory statements, 47, 65.
Bingen Gorge, not a proof of erosion,' 64.
Cashar earthquake, 27 note.
Causes now in action — Do they account for the state of earth's
surface? Ill ; results to which they lead, 121 ; fallacies involved
in the theory, 122-124 ; will reduce earth*s surface to a dead
level, 123.
Chalk forming at the present time not so certain, 8.
Chili, earthquakes in, 18, 20.
Cliffs never formed by river or atmospheric action, 60.
Contraction and shrinkage of the earth's surface on cooling down, 40.
Cracking of earth's crust, 39.
Cracks and fissures, 76, 77.
Colebrook Dale, 76.
Convulsions, geological, 33, 116-117 ; employed by Lyell, 34, 70, 78.
Cutch earthquake, 17.
Dead level, the ultimate destiny of earth, 122, 123.
Dead Sea and Valley of Jordan, 83.
Denudation, atmospheric, 86 ; removal of strata miles high, 87 ;
limited by natural processes, 89 ; applied to Mont Blanc, 98.
Denudation, by sea waves, 90 ; exaggerations as to amount, 93.
real, by primseval glaciation, 102, 109.
Difficulties of modem geology, 33.
Development theory as applied to geology, 124.
£a£thquake waves, 30.
K
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130 INDEX.
Earthquakes, geological consequences attributed to, 11 ; their
limited effects, 13 ; nature of the shock, 13 ; permanent re-
sults, 14, 32 ; in Calabria, 14 ; Chili, 19, 21 ; New Zealand, 22 ;
more destructive on plains than among mountains, 26-28; at
Cashar, 27 ; said to preserve the integrity of the habitable
world, 32.
Elementary substances not now created, 6.
Elevation of continents by earthquakes questioned, 16, 16, 18, 20,
24.
of mountains, want of proof, 33.
Erosive power of mnning water, 57, 70.
Fissures in hard rock formed by earthquakes, 23, 27 noU, 112.
Fissures and cracks in earth's surface, 24 note, 40, 76.
Forbes, David, on earthquakes, 27 ; in mines, 28.
Gaping fissures, 83-126.
Geikie, Professor, formation of a ravine, 71 ; on creation of valleys
by erosion, 73 ; at a loss as to process of denudation, 82 ; pre-
judice regarding cause and effect, 114 ; on the starving out of
trees in Sweden, 55 ; in quest of a gaping fault, 126 ; palinode
respecting valleys of dislocation, 126.
** Giants' Kettles," 60.
Glaciation, terrestrial, primeval, 102.
Glaciers, primeval, marks of at Lucerne, 58 ; extent of former, 99 ;
their dissolution, 104 ; and dispersion, 107.
Glacier Mills, 59 iwte.
Great Glen of Scotland, 79.
Himalayas, 35.
Huxley on the Valley of the Jordan and Dead Sea, 83.
Ice Age on earth, the, 102, 103 ; process of removal, 104-107.
Ice dams formed on rivers, 106.
Iron gate of Danube, 64.
Jura cnimpled strata, 42.
KiNAHAN, valleys formed by fissures, 77.
Lake-beds formed by glaciers, 81-84.
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INDEX. 131
Limestone, corrosion of, by water charged with carbonic acid, 63.
Lewes, " The Combe," attributed by Lyell to a "convulsion," 34.
Lisbon earthquake, 27.
Litkny river, 71.
Loch Lomond, 77.
Lucerne glacier pot-holes, 69 note.
Lucerne lake, 35.
Lyell, Sir C, describes valleys formed by convulsion, 34, 78 ;
evidence of rise of Andes in Chili, 20.
MacGillivray on Linn of Dee, 68.
Mallet on earthquakes, 13, 31, 32, .112.
Metamorphism, 8 ; a thing of the past, 9.
Mines, earthquakes not perceived in, 28.
Modem causes underlying error, 118, 122, 124.
Mont Blanc, 98.
Mountains removed by denudation, 94 ; created by denudation, 96.
how they are made, 38 ; upheaval of, 39, 36.
Nero Fjord, Norway, 98.
New Madrid earthquake, 29.
New Zealand earthquake, 22, 26.
Niagara Falls, 66 ; not an instance of river erosion, 67.
Operations of nature, magnitude of, 34, 36.
Outlier mountains accounted for, 42, 97.
Prestwich, Professor, quoted, 4, 36.
Pot-holes in river beds at Lucerne, 69 ; in glacier beds, 69.
Protracting in imagination, 96.
Ramsay, Professor, on extent of denudation, 95 ; on lake beds, 81.
Ravine, imaginary, 75.
Rise of land caused by earthquakes, 17 ; not permanent, 20, 24, 31.
in Scandinavia at present, 46, 54.
River beds not made by TiverSt but for them, 71, 74.
River erosion, 67.
Rivers, only transporters of mud, not producers, 74.
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132 INDEX.
Scandinavia, rise of land, 47-65 ; doubts respecting, 48, 49 ; three
fixed points ascertained, 61 ; probable explanation of the de-
lusion, 62.
Scientific doubts, 2.
Sea inroads on land restricted, 93.
Serapis* temple, Pozzuoli, 16.
Simeto river, erosion explained, 61.
Sioule river, erosion explained, 60.
Spurn Point, resistance to sea, 93.
Strata folds and contortions accounted for, 41 ; broken and lost, 43,
96.
Suess, Professor, of Vienna, his theory of the earth, 46.
Sweden and Norway, supposed rise of land in, 44, 66 ; confusion of
testimony on, 47-51 ; positive facts, 61 ; probable causes of
the error, 52, 54.
Tay valley, 80 ; loch and river, 82.
Time, demand for, unlimited by geologists, 3.
Time is not power, 4.
Trees, growth stopped by elevation of land, 65, 114.
Turf resists weather, 89.
Upheaval of earth's crust, limits of, 38, 116.
Valleys, how formed, 40, 41.
Vegetation, effects in checking denudation, 89, 113.
Via Mala, 65.
Volcanoes, limited elevating power of, 39.
Water in motion, limits of erosion by, 58, 69.
charged with carbonic acid, corrosion by, 63.
Weald of Kent denudation, 74.
Weathering, its effects on rocks, 88, 97.
Zambesi Falls, not made by river erosion, 68, 70.
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A FIRST GERMAN READING BOOK, WITH GRAMJVLA.TICAL QUESTIONS
AND NOTES, AND A DICTIONARY.
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A DICTIONARY OF CHRISTIAN BIOGRAPHY,
LITERATURE, SECTS, AND DOCTRINES.
FKOM THE TIME OF THE APOSTLES TO THE
AGE OF CHABLEMAGNE.
By Various Writers.
Edited by WM. SMITH, D.C.L., and REV. PROFESSOR WAOE, M.A.
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This Work, together with the "Dictionaries of the Bible'* and of "Cluistian
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Creation to the Age of Charlemagne.
LIFE OF THE SCOTCH NATURALIST,
THOMAS EDWARD.
By SAMUEL SMILES,
Author of ** Lives of tho Engineers,'* "Self-Help," "Thrift," &c.
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THE APOSTOLIC DOCTRINE OF THE
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THE CHAPEL IN THE TOWER;
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ST. PETER IN THE TOWER OF LONDON.
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Anne Boleyn.
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ANNALS OF WINCHCOMBE AND SUDELEY.
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SCEPTICISM IN GEOLOGY,
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MEMOIR OF LORD ABINGER,
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FIVE YEARS BETWEEN THE DANUBE AND
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THE LIFE AND TIMES OF TITIAN.
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THE WITNESS OF THE PSALMS TO CHRIST
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ROMANISM AMOWaST THE CLERGY.
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LIFE OF MICHAEL ANGELO.
SCULPTOR, PAINTER, AND ARCHITECT;
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HANDBOOK TO THE ENVIRONS OF LONDON.
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SHORT HISTORY OF NATURAL SCIENCE;
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DICTIONARY OF CHRISTIAN ANTIQUITIES.
COMPRISING THE HISTORY, INSTITUTIONS, AND ANTIQUITIES
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THE FRENCH RETREAT FROM MOSCOW.
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PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY.
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FIIiST DIVISIOX.—Y\]ELy including
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AN ATLAS OF ANCIENT GEOGRAPHY.
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Axi) the "Speaker's Commentary on the Bible."
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THEIR CONSTITUTION AND TEACHING: AN HISTORICAL SKETCH.
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SECRET HISTORY OF THE VATICAN COUNCIL.
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HANDBOOK TO THE CATHEDRAL OF
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LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD OF RUGBY.
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A PRACTICAL GERMAN GRAMMAR.
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VARIOUS CONTRIVANCES BY WHICH ORCHIDS
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THE STUDENT'S FRENCH GRAMMAR.
A TRACTICAL AND HISTORICAL GRAMMAR OF THE
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PRINCIPLES OF GREEK ETYMOLOGY.
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THE TRAVELS OF MARCO POLO,
DESCRIBING THE KINGDOMS AND MARVELS OF THE EAST.
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LECTURES ON THE HISTORY OF THE
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HISTORY OF HERODOTUS;
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and Hieroglyphical Discovery.
By GEORGE RAWLINSON, M.A.,
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THE ROYAL SUPREMACY,
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CONSTITUTION.
Being the Substance of a Letter to Bishop Blomfield in 1850.
By the Bight Hon. W. E. GLADSTONE, 1C.P.
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TROY AND ITS REMAINS.
A NARRATIVE OF DISCOVERIES AND RESEARCHES MADE OK
THE SITE OF ILIUM, AND IN THE TROJAN PLAIN.
By DR. HENRY SCHLIEMANN, Citizen of the U.S.
With 500 Illustrations. Medium 8vo. 425.
BOSWELL'S LIFE OF JOHNSON.
Edited by the late Right Hon. JOHN WILSON CROKER.
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Disraeli, Markland, Lockhart, &c.
Seventh Edition, With Portraits. One Volume. Medium 8ro. 12j.
THE SPEAKER'S COMMENTARY ON THE
OLD TESTAMENT.
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Edited by F. C. COOK, M.A.,
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Vol. L— Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. 30«.
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