Page:Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man.djvu/196

178 Embedded in the same bone breccia, and enveloped with red earth like the mammalian remains, were detected shells of the Mytilus edulis before mentioned, implying that the marine formation containing shells and pottery had been already upheaved and exposed to denudation before the remains of quadrupeds were washed into these rents and included in the red earth. In the vegetable soil covering the upraised marine stratum, with the older works of art, fragments of Roman pottery occur.

If we assume the average rate of upheaval to have been, as before hinted, p. 58, two and a half feet in a century, 300 feet would give an antiquity of 12,000 years to the Cagliari pottery, even if we simply confine our estimate to the upheaval above the sea-level, without allowing for the original depth of water in which the mollusca lived. Even then our calculation would merely embrace the period during which the upward movement was going on; and we can form at present no conjecture as to the probable era of its commencement or termination. I learn from Capt. Spratt, R.N., that the island of Crete or Candia, about 135 miles in length, has been raised at its western extremity about twenty-five feet; so that ancient ports are now high and dry above the sea, while at its eastern end it has sunk so much that the ruins of old towns are seen under water. Revolutions like these in the physical geography of the countries bordering the Mediterranean, may well help us to understand the phenomena of the Palermo caves, and the presence in Sicily of African species of mammalia.

As I have alluded more than once in this chapter (pp. 172, 175) to the occurrence of the remains of the hippopotamus in places where there are now no rivers, not even a rill of water, and as other bones of the same genus have been met