Page:Early Man in Britain and His Place in the Tertiary Period.djvu/73

] lifted up their heads in Wales, Cumbria, and Scotland not less than about 10,000 feet above the sea.



. 7.—Section through Beinn More. The dotted line = Meiocene Surface.

The fossil vegetation under the sheets of basalt and of volcanic tufa in the Hebrides and in the north of Ireland, proves that in the north and west of the British Isles there were active volcanoes in the Meiocene age. Some of these were of enormous size. "The base of the volcano of Mull" (Fig. 7), writes Professor Judd, "must have had a circumference of at least forty miles; Etna, which has a greatly truncated cone, nevertheless rises to over the height of 10,900 feet from a base of only thirty miles in circumference. A similar relation between the base and the altitude of the great volcanoes of Sicily and Mull would lead us to infer that the elevation of the latter was at least 14,500 feet." From another calculation, founded on the inclination of the beds of lava, he infers that the volcano of Mull could not have been less than 10,000 feet high. The volcano of Skye was not smaller than that of Mull, and those of Rum, Ardnamurchan, and St. Kilda, though smaller, were mountains of great