Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/619

Rh A curious fact deserves to be noticed here. During the convulsions by which the sediments of the Silurian sea-floor were crumpled up, crystallized, and elevated into land, the area of Russia seems to have remained nearly unaffected. Not only so, but the same immunity from violent disturbance has prevailed over that vast territory during all subsequent geological periods. The Ural Mountains on the east have again and again served as lines of relief, and have been from time to time ridged up anew. The German domains on the west have likewise suffered extreme convulsion. But the wide intervening plateau of Russia has apparently always maintained its flatness either as sea-bottom or as terrestrial plains.

By the time of the coal-growths, the aspect of the European area had still further changed. It then consisted of a series of low ridges or islands in the midst of a shallow sea or of wide salt-water lagoons. A group of islands occupied the site of some of the existing high grounds of Britain. A long, irregular ridge ran across what is now France from Brittany to the Mediterranean. The Spanish Peninsula stood as a detached island. The future Alps rose as a long, low ridge, to the north of the eastern edge of which lay another insular place, where now we find the high grounds of Bavaria and Bohemia. The shallow waters which wound among these scattered patches of land were gradually silted up. Many of them became marshes, crowded with a most luxuriant cryptogamic vegetation, specially of lycopods and ferns, while the dry grounds waved green with coniferous trees. By a slow intermittent subsidence, islet after islet sank beneath the verdant swamps. Each fresh depression submerged the rank jungles and buried them under sand and mud, where they were eventually compressed into coal. To this united coöperation of dense vegetable growth, accumulation of sediment, and slow subterranean movement, Europe owes her coal-fields.

All this time the chief area of high ground in Europe appears still to have lain to the north and northwest. The old gnarled gneiss of that region, though constantly worn down and furnishing materials toward each new formation, yet rose up as land. It no doubt received successive elevations, during the periods of disturbance, which more or less compensated for the constant loss from its surface.

The next scene we may contemplate brings before us a series of salt lakes, covering the center of the continent from the north of Ireland to the heart of Poland. These basins were formed by the gradual cutting off of portions of the sea which had spread over the region. Their waters were red and bitter, and singularly unfavorable to life. On the low intervening ridges a coniferous and cycadaceous vegetation grew, sometimes in quantity sufficient to supply materials for the formation of coal-seams. The largest of these salt lakes stretched from the edge of the old plateau of Central France along the base of the Alpine ridge to the high grounds of Bohemia, and included the