Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 24.djvu/73

Rh The attempt has lately been made to account for these breaks by the assumption that the geological record relates only to periods of submergence, and gives no information as to those of elevation. This is manifestly untrue. In so far as marine life is concerned, the periods of submergence are those in which new forms abound for very obvious reasons already hinted. But the periods of new forms of land and fresh-water life are those of elevation, and these have their own records and monuments, often very rich and ample; as, for example, the swamps of the carboniferous, the transition from the cretaceous subsidence to the Laramie elevation, the tertiary lake-basins of the West, the terraces and raised beaches of the pleistocene. Had I time to refer in detail to the breaks in the continuity of life, which can not be explained by the imperfection of the record, I could show at least that nature, in this case, does advance per saltum—by leaps, rather than by a slow, continuous process. Many able reasoners, as Le Conte in this country, and Mivart and Collard in England, hold this view.

Here, as elsewhere, a vast amount of steady conscientious work is required to enable us to solve the problems of the history of life. But, if so, the more the hope for the patient student and investigator. I know nothing more chilling to research, or unfavorable to progress, than the promulgation of a dogmatic decision that there is nothing to be learned but a merely fortuitous and uncaused succession, amenable to no law, and only to be covered, in order to hide its shapeless and uncertain proportions, by the mantle of bold and gratuitous hypothesis.

So soon as we find evidence of continents and oceans, we raise the question, "Have these continents existed from the first in their present position and form, or have the land and water changed places in the course of geological time?" In reality both statements are true in a certain limited sense. On the one hand, any geological map whatever suffices to show that the general outline of the existing land began to be formed in the first and oldest crumplings of the crust. On the other hand, the greater part of the surface of the land consists of marine sediments which must have been derived from land that has perished in the process, while all the continental surfaces, except, perhaps, some high peaks and ridges, have been many times submerged. Both of these apparently contradictory statements are true; and, without assuming both, it is impossible to explain the existing contours and reliefs of the surface.

In the case of North America, the form of the old nucleus of Laurentian rock in the north already marks out that of the finished continent, and the successive later formations have been laid upon the edges of this, like the successive loads of earth dumped over an embankment. But, in order to give the great thickness of the palæozoic sediments, the land must have been again and again submerged, and for long periods of time. Thus, in one sense, the continents have been fixed;