detached groups of islands. There is, first, the British group, little different in form and extent from what it is now, save that the south-eastern corner of England is cut off diagonally, from the Wash to the Isle of Wight; next the Swedish and Norwegian group, consisting mainly of one great island and then a still larger group than either, scattered over the existing area of France, Southern Austria, part of Turkey in Europe, and part of Italy. Running through the midst, there is a broad ocean sound, that stretches across, where it opens into the German Sea, from Norway to Dover, and that then expands in breadth, and sweeps eastwards, covering in its course the beds of the Black and the Caspian Seas, into the great Asiatic basin. And in this Europe of shreds and fragments, of detached clusters of islets, with broad ocean channels flowing between,

boundary between the opposite currents would be between the latitudes of 28° and 30°, where a zone of still water would exist; and their maximum effort would be near the equator, and within the polar circle. When the land was rising, and near the surface of the water, or partially above it, the currents would produce the phenomena of Crag and Tail. The crag or head would point to the east within the tropics, and to the west in the temperate regions. The current would of course not flow invariably in one precise direction, but be occasionally deflected by high lands to the north or south of its true direction. We must keep in mind also, that though not perhaps very strong, it would be constant; and that transitory storms and hurricanes would generally incorporate themselves with it, and augment its force. A temporary current evidently would not explain the facts. If the same agent swept away the solid rocks which once environed and covered Arthur's Seat and North Berwick Law, and also deposited the tail of clay and gravel lying behind these mountains, it must have acted for thousands of years. But it is more probable that there were two or more currents at distant epochs. Perhaps New Holland, New Guinea, Borneo, the Philippines, and Spice Islands, may be the remnants of what was once the southern prolongation of the Asiatic continent, and which had been breached and divided by the tropical current before Africa and South America rose from the deep to arrest its free The idea, however, is thrown out merely as a conjecture on a subject requiring much additional investigation."

course.

the strange existences described by Cuvier enjoyed life during the earlier ages of the Tertiary. As we descend towards the present state of things, and lands and seas approximate to their existing relations, the geographic data become more certain. One side of the globe has, we find, its vanishing continent, the other its disappearing ocean. The northern portion of our own country presents almost the identical outline which the modern geographer transfers to his atlas, save that there is here and there a narrow selvage clipped off and given to the sea, and that while the loftier headlands protrude as far as now into the ocean, the friths and bays sweep further inland: but in the southern part of the island the map is greatly different; a broad channel sweeps onwards through the middle of the land; and the Highlands of Wales, south and north, exist as a detached, bold-featured island, placed half-way between the coasts of England and Ireland. I found it exceedingly pleasant to lie this day on the soft short sward, and look down through the half-shut eye, as the clouds sailed slowly athwart the landscape, on an apparition of this departed sea, now in sunshine, now in shadow. Adventurous keel had never ploughed it, nor had human dwelling arisen on its shores; but I could see, amid its deep blue, as the light flashed out amain, the white gleam of wings around the dark tumbling of the whale and the grampus: and now, as the shadows rested on it dim and sombre, a huge shoal of ice-floes came drifting drearily from the north, the snow-laden rack brushing their fractured summits, and the stormy billows chafing angrily below.

Was it the sound of the distant surf that was in mine ears, or the low moan of the breeze, as it crept through the neighboring wood? O, that hoarse voice of Ocean, never silent since time first began, where has it not been uttered! There is stillness amid the calm of the arid and rainless desert, where

eye

no spring rises and no streamlet flows, and the long caravan plies its weary march amid the blinding glare of the sand, and the red unshaded rays of the fierce sun. But once and again, and yet again, has the roar of Ocean been there. It is his sands that the winds heap up; and it is the skeleton remains of his vassals — shells, and fish, and the stony coral – that the rocks underneath enclose. There is silence on the tall mountain-peak, with its glittering mantle of snow, where the panting lungs labor to inhale the thin bleak air, where no insect murmurs and no bird flies, and where the wanders over multitudinous hill-tops that lie far beneath, and vast dark forests that sweep on to the distant horizon, and along long hollow valleys where the great rivers begin. And yet once and again, and yet again, has the roar of Ocean been there. The effigies of his more ancient denizens we find sculptured on the crags, where they jut from beneath the ice into the mist-wreath; and his later beaches, stage beyond stage, terrace the descending slopes. Where has the great destroyer not been, the devourer of continents, the blue foaming dragon, whose vocation it is to eat up the land? His ice-floes have alike furrowed the flat steppes of Siberia and the rocky flanks of Schehallion; and his nummulites and fish lie imbedded in great stones of the pyramids, hewn in the times of the old Pharaohs, and in rocky folds of Lebanon still untouched by the tool. So long as Ocean exists there must be disintegration, dilapidation, change; and should the time ever arrive when the elevatory agencies, motionless and chill, shall sleep within their profound depths, to awaken no more, and should the sea still continue to

impel its currents and to roll its waves, every continent and island would at length disappear, and again, as of old, "when the fountains of the great deep were broken up,"

"A shoreless ocean tumble round the globe."

Was it with reference to this principle, so recently recognized, that we are so expressly told in the Apocalypse respecting the tenovated earth, in which the state of things shall be fixed and eternal, that "there shall be no more sea"? or are we to regard the revelation as the mere hieroglyphic the pictured shape - of some analogous moral truth? "Reasoning from what we know," and what else remains to us?- an earth without a sea would be an earth without rain, without vegetation, without life, a dead and doleful planet of waste places, such as the telescope reveals to us in the moon. And yet the Ocean does seem peculiarly a creature of time, of all the great agents of vicissitude and change, the most influential and untiring; and to a state in which there shall be no vicissitude and no change, — in which the earthquakes shall not heave from beneath, nor the mountains wear down and the continents melt away, seems inevitably necessary that there should be "no more sea." But, carried away by the speculation, I lag in my geological

survey.

- it

CHAPTER XII.

Geological Coloring of the Landscape. Close Proximity in this Neigh borhood of the various Geologic Systems. The Oolite; its Medicinal Springs; how formed. — Cheltenham. — Strathpeffer. — The Saliferous System; its Organic Remains and Foot-prints. - Record of Curious Passages in the History of the Earlier Reptiles. - Salt Deposits. — Theory. The Abstraction of Salt from the Sea on a large Scale probably necessary to the continued Existence of its Denizens. - Lower New Red Sandstone. - Great Geologic Revolution. - Elevation of the Trap. - Hills of Clent; Era of the Elevation. - Coal Measures; their three Forests in the Neighborhood of Wolverhampton. — Comparatively small Area of the Birmingham Coal-field. — Vast Coal-fields of the United States. Berkeley's Prophecy. - Old Red Sandstone. -Silurian System. - Blank.

LET us now raise from off the landscape another integument,

let us remove the boulder clays and gravels, as we formerly removed the vegetable mould, and lay the rock everywhere bare. There is no longer any lack of color in the prospect; it resembles, on the contrary, a map variously tinted by the geographer, to enable the eye to trace his several divisions, natural or arbitrary. The range of trap-hills which furnishes our peak of survey is of a deep olive-green; the New Red Sandstone that spreads out so widely around it, of a bright brick-red. There is a coal-field on either hand, - the barren field of the Forest of Wyre, and the singularly productive field of Dudley; and they both are irregularly checkered black, yellow, and gray. Beyond the Wyre field lies an immense district of a deep chocolate-red tint,— a huge development of the Old Red Sandstone. Still further beyond, we may discern in the distance a bluish-gray province of great extent, much broken