Page:Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man.djvu/370

350 to the sea. Were it otherwise we should not find conformable strata of all ages, including the primary fossiliferous of shallow-water origin, which must have remained horizontal throughout vast areas during downward movements of several thousand feet, going on at the period of their accumulation. Still less should we find the same primary strata, such as the carboniferous, Devonian, or Silurian, still remaining horizontal over thousands of square leagues, as in parts of North America and Russia, having escaped dislocation and flexure throughout the entire series of epochs which separate paleozoic from recent times. Not that they have been motionless, for they have undergone so much denudation, and of such a kind, as can only be explained by supposing the strata to have been subjected to great oscillations of level, and exposed in some cases repeatedly to the destroying and planing action of the waves of the sea. It seems probable that the successive convulsions in Möen were contemporary with those upward and downward movements of the glacial period which were described in the thirteenth and some of the following chapters, and that they ended before the upper beds of No. 5, p. 346, with its large erratic blocks, were deposited, as some of those beds occurring in the disturbed parts of Möen appear to have escaped the convulsions to which Nos. 2, 3, and 4 were subjected. If this be so, the whole derangement, although post-pliocene, may have been anterior to the human epoch, or rather to the earliest date to which the existence of man has as yet been traced back.