Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/72

62 Quaternary geology. For thirty years and more geologists have known, and have been staring helplessly on the fact, that in North Wales one of the hills of the Snowdon range is covered with a marine gravel at a level of 1,130 feet above that of the present sea. They have known the fact that this gravel contains shells in abundance, all of existing species. They have known it, but most of them have been reluctant to "occupy themselves about it in any way." Even in recording it they generally leave it, if not "with a smile and a shrug," at least with a timid and embarrassed glance. Yet nothing in the whole range of their science is more mysterious and instructive than that Moel Trefan top. Old Ocean has been there, and he has been there very lately. He has been there as regards the area and the locality, and he has been there in a passing way, but he has not necessarily been there as regards its existing level. Prof. Huxley tells us that a heaping of the sea over a particular place is a physical impossibility. I quite agree. Then it follows that Moel Trefan must have been sunk under the sea and raised out of it again, all within our existing age. Can the learned professor tell us how wide has been the area of depression in which Moel Trefan was included? Was it contemporaneous or not with a like submergence all over the Highlands of Scotland? And if so, where did it stop? Prof. Prestwich has said that it prevailed over the whole of Ireland, over the whole of Wales, over all the center and north of England, and over the whole of Scotland. A large part of Russia, and all northern Germany down to Holland, were also included, And is he certain that it was not wider still, and included larger areas of the whole northern hemisphere? Quaternary geology certainly suggests, even if it does not establish, that it did. Italian geologists of the highest authority report the same facts from Calabria and from Sicily. Gravels with three hundred kinds of existing shells are piled up at elevations 2,400 feet above the Mediterranean. Was Charles Darwin an ignoramus in geology when he recognized exactly the same phenomena on the vast continent of South America? The facts he records respecting the massive marine gravels of Patagonia, the recency of them, and the correlative destruction of the great mammalia, are more astonishing even than the parallel facts in Europe. Are the geologists of Canada deceived when they report similar facts as establishing similar conclusions over the greater part of northern America? If the submergence was local, but the locality was as large at least as the British Islands, how "particularly absurd" is the assumed impossibility of a partial deluge! If it was far wider, then how