Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/617

 varied—air, frost, rain, springs, torrents, rivers, avalanches, glaciers, and the sea—each producing its own characteristic traces in the sculpture. With these implements, out of the huge bulk of the land she cuts the valleys and ravines, scoops the lake-basins, hews with bold, free hand the colossal outline of the mountains, carves out peak and crag, crest and cliff, chisels the courses of the torrents, splinters the sides of the precipices, and leaves her impress upon every lineament of the land. Patiently and unceasingly has this great earth-sculptor sat at her task since the land first rose above the sea, washing down into the ocean the débris of her labor, to form the materials for the framework of future countries; and there will she remain at work, so long as mountains stand, and rain falls, and rivers flow.

—Passing now from the general principles with which we have hitherto been dealing, we may seek an illustration of their application to the actual history of a large mass of land. For this purpose, let me ask your attention to some of the more salient features in the gradual growth of Europe. This continent has not the simplicity of structure elsewhere recognizable; but, without entering into detail or following a continuous sequence of events, our present purpose will be served by a few broad outlines of the condition of the European area at successive geological periods.

It is the fate of continents, no less than of the human communities that inhabit them, to have their first origin shrouded in obscurity. When the curtain of darkness begins to rise from our primeval Europe, it reveals to us a scene marvelously unlike that of the existing continent. The land then lay chiefly to the north and northwest, probably extending as far as the edge of the great submarine plateau by which the European ridge is prolonged under the Atlantic for 230 miles to the west of Ireland. Worn fragments of that land exist in Finland, Scandinavia, and the northwest of Scotland, and there are traces of what seem to have been some detached islands in Central Europe, notably in Bohemia and Bavaria. Its original height and extent can of course never be known; but some idea of them may be formed by considering the bulk of solid rock which was formed out of the waste of that land. I find that if we take merely one portion of the detritus washed from its surface and laid down in the sea, viz., that which is comprised in what is termed the Silurian system, and if we assume that it spreads over 60,000 square miles of Britain with an average thickness of 16,000 feet, or three miles, which is probably under the truth, then we obtain the enormous mass of 180,000 cubic miles. The magnitude of this pile of material may be better realized if we reflect that it would form a mountain-ridge three times as long as the Alps, or from the North Cape to Marseilles (1,800 miles), with a breadth of more than thirty-three miles, and an average height of 16,000 feet, that is, higher than the summit of Mont Blanc. All this vast pile of sedimentary rock was worn from the slopes and shores of the primeval northern land. Yet it represents but