waves from the north,' or the ' waves of translation' driven this drift under the chalk? About as much as they have collected the mixture of pebbles on our present sea-shores. The sands of Northern Germany and of European Russia have been deposited in shallow seas. What then can be more natural than that lines of travelled boulders should remain where sea-shores were? Chalk 'Elephant The Brighton Elephant Bed' rests on an The Brighton ancient sea beach containing such a mixture of Bed. boulders. The Elephant bed itself is composed of unworn or slightly worn materials. rubble, loam, chalk flints and masses of Druid sandstone and conglomerates. These are sometimes cemented into what is called coombe rock by water containing carbonate of lime. Throughout the Elephant bed the remains of elephants, horses, deer and oxen are found. The shingle of the ancient beach below contains boulders of porphyry, granite and slate. The sand below the shingle contains bones of whales with sea shell fish of existing species. I consider this Elephant bed to be a land drift which reached the seashore after the beach was raised. Abstract the sea and there would be deposits of this sort around the whole of England. The sea sweeps the shore clear now of all that will float as muddy water. Mantell does not think so. He gives this engrav K ing in the Wonders of Geology,' and supposes that when the ancient raised beach B was at the level of the sea the whole line of coast subsided South The sea. North ELEVATED STRATA AND BEACH AT BRIGHTON, EAST OF KEMP TOWN. A, Elephant bed; B, Ancient bed of Shingle; c, the Chalk; D, Terrace of Chalk beneath the ancient sea-beach. 1. (A), Chalk, rubble, loam, &c., obscurely stratified; this deposit, from its containing many teeth and bones of elephants, I have named the elephant bed; it constitutes the upper three-fourths of the cliffs. 2. (B), Shingle, or sea beach and sand, several feet above high-water mark. This ancient shingle, which from the inroads of the sea extends in the cliffs beyond Kemp Town but a short distance inland, is constantly found beneath the loam and clay, several hundred yards North of the shore, in the Western part of Brighton. In wells sunk in the Western road, the shingle bed was reached at a depth of fifty-four feet. 3. (c), The undisturbed chalk, which forms a sloping cliff, inland, behind the Elephant bed, (▲) and shingle (B), passes under the latter, and appears as a terrace at the foot of the present cliffs, (D). to the depth at least of the present top of the Elephant bed A, and that the Elephant bed was deposited on the ancient beach under the sea, and that the whole has been raised again. I quite disagree. There has been no sinking since the formation of the ancient beach, but simply one rise to the small height above the sea which that beach stands at. This laid dry a vast extent of sea-bed. The action of the sea which had formerly kept the cliff C precipitous is removed. The cliff becomes a sloping cliff inland,' and down its steep sides the Elephant bed has passed simply by the wash of rain and has been deposited on the dry ancient beach. It is a land drift deposited on land, and therefore contains remains of land animals, consequently its materials are unworn or only slightly worn. But it is curious to consider the mixture of travelled materials, organic and inorganic, which meet in this land drift and the ancient and modern beaches below without the aid of ice or icebergs or waves of translation, but by the simple operations of rain, rivers and the sea. The sea not only peremptorily refuses burial to our dead in her vast cemetery; but how often does she cast her own dead on to our shores, and thus we here find the largest animals of the land not mingled but in contact with the largest inhabitants of the deep. And it is curious to remark how Nature blows hot and blows cold at every turn. I do not mean that with one breath Nature blows the globe into a state of igneous fusion to please Leibnitz, and with the next breath into an icicle to please Agassiz. But observe the contrary effects which she makes to follow on each other from the same causes. I have mentioned the throwing up a protecting dam of beach at the centre of the bay by the very power which is scooping the bay out. Again, Nature has no sooner, by rain and rivers and the sea, cut the estuary deep below the level of the sea than with the very same workmen she fills up the cutting. She dams the sea out with its own beach and shovels the contents of the widening, ever lowering, ever lengthening valley into the estuary. Or in other cases, at her omnipotent will she makes the victorious land to follow the sea into its own regions, and protrudes a delta into it of thousands of square miles in extent. So in the case of Giens and of Portland, Nature has no sooner divided the island from the continent than by hoisting up the land she sets the same workman, the sea, whom she first employed to sever them from the land, to join them to the land again. What can be more contradictory or impossible than all this in theory? Yet in practice it has taken place for ever all over the world and is taking place all over the world now. CHAPTER IX. SEDGWICK'S DOCTRINE THAT DENUDATION IS ONLY ON LINES. AQUEOUS DENUDATION IS UNIVERSAL, AND IS NOT CONFINED WHILE RISING MAY BE DECREASING IN HEIGHT. MOUNTAINS AERIAL ACCORDING to Professor Sedgwick (Lyell's 6 Prin- Aqueous deupon universal, and ciples,' p. 684), torrents and rivers act nudation is is not confined only to the lines of tor rents and rivers. |