the strange existences described by Cuvier enjoyed life during the earlier ages of the Tertiary. As we descend towards the present state of things, and lands and seas approximate to their existing relations, the geographic data become more certain. One side of the globe has, we find, its vanishing continent, the other its disappearing ocean. The northern portion of our own country presents almost the identical outline which the modern geographer transfers to his atlas, save that there is here and there a narrow selvage clipped off and given to the sea, and that while the loftier headlands protrude as far as now into the ocean, the friths and bays sweep further inland: but in the southern part of the island the map is greatly different; a broad channel sweeps onwards through the middle of the land; and the Highlands of Wales, south and north, exist as a detached, bold-featured island, placed half-way between the coasts of England and Ireland. I found it exceedingly pleasant to lie this day on the soft short sward, and look down through the half-shut eye, as the clouds sailed slowly athwart the landscape, on an apparition of this departed sea, now in sunshine, now in shadow. Adventurous keel had never ploughed it, nor had human dwelling arisen on its shores; but I could see, amid its deep blue, as the light flashed out amain, the white gleam of wings around the dark tumbling of the whale and the grampus: and now, as the shadows rested on it dim and sombre, a huge shoal of ice-floes came drifting drearily from the north, the snow-laden rack brushing their fractured summits, and the stormy billows chafing angrily below.

Was it the sound of the distant surf that was in mine ears, or the low moan of the breeze, as it crept through the neighboring wood? O, that hoarse voice of Ocean, never silent since time first began, where has it not been uttered! There is stillness amid the calm of the arid and rainless desert, where

no spring rises and no streamlet flows, and the long caravan plies its weary march amid the blinding glare of the sand, and the red unshaded rays of the fierce sun. But once and again, and yet again, has the roar of Ocean been there. It is his sands that the winds heap up; and it is the skeleton remains of his vassals shells, and fish, and the stony coral that the rocks underneath enclose. There is silence on the tall mountain-peak, with its glittering mantle of snow, where the panting lungs labor to inhale the thin bleak air, — where no insect murmurs and no bird flies, and where the eye wanders over multitudinous hill-tops that lie far beneath, and vast dark forests that sweep on to the distant horizon, and along long hollow. valleys where the great rivers begin. And yet once and again, and yet again, has the roar of Ocean been there. The effigies of his more ancient denizens we find sculptured on the crags, where they jut from beneath the ice into the mist-wreath; and his later beaches, stage beyond stage, terrace the descending. slopes. Where has the great destroyer not been, the devourer of continents, the blue foaming dragon, whose vocation it is to eat up the land? His ice-floes have alike furrowed the flat steppes of Siberia and the rocky flanks of Schehallion; and his nummulites and fish lie imbedded in great stones of the pyramids, hewn in the times of the old Pharaohs, and in rocky folds of Lebanon still untouched by the tool. So long as Ocean exists there must be disintegration, dilapidation, change; and should the time ever arrive when the elevatory agencies, motionless and chill, shall sleep within their profound depths, to awaken no more, and should the sea still continue to

impel its currents and to roll its waves, every continent and island would at length disappear, and again, as of old, “when the fountains of the great deep were broken up,”

“A shoreless ocean tumble round the globe.”

Was it with reference to this principle, so recently recognized, that we are so expressly told in the Apocalypse respecting the tenovated earth, in which the state of things shall be fixed and eternal, that "there shall be no more sea"? or are we to regard the revelation as the mere hieroglyphic the pictured shape. of some analogous moral truth? "Reasoning from what we know," and what else remains to us?- an earth without a sea would be an earth without rain, without vegetation, without life, a dead and doleful planet of waste places, such as the telescope reveals to us in the moon. And yet the Ocean does seem peculiarly a creature of time, — of all the great agents of vicissitude and change, the most influential and untiring; and to a state in which there shall be no vicissitude and no change, - in which the earthquakes shall not heave from beneath, nor the mountains wear down and the continents melt away, - it seems inevitably necessary that there should be "no more sea.” But, carried away by the speculation, I lag in my geological survey.

CHAPTER XII.

Geological Coloring of the Landscape. — Close Proximity in this Neighborhood of the various Geologic Systems. The Oolite; its Medicinal Springs; how formed. Cheltenham. - Strathpeffer. The Saliferous System; its Organic Remains and Foot-prints. - Record of Curious Passages in the History of the Earlier Reptiles. - Salt Deposits. Theory. The Abstraction of Salt from the Sea on a large Scale probably necessary to the continued Existence of its Denizens. Lower New Red Sandstone. Great Geologic Revolution. - Elevation of the Trap. - Hills of Clent; Era of the Elevation. — Coal Measures ; their three Forests in the Neighborhood of Wolverhampton. — Comparatively small Area of the Birmingham Coal-field. — Vast Coal-fields of the United States. Berkeley's Prophecy. - Old Red Sandstone. -Silurian System. Blank.

LET us now raise from off the landscape another integument, let us remove the boulder clays and gravels, as we formerly removed the vegetable mould, and lay the rock everywhere bare. There is no longer any lack of color in the prospect; it resembles, on the contrary, a map variously tinted by the geographer, to enable the eye to trace his several divisions, natural or arbitrary. The range of trap-hills which furnishes our peak of survey is of a deep olive-green; the New Red Sandstone that spreads out so widely around it, of a bright brick-red. There is a coal-field on either hand, the barren field of the Forest of Wyre, and the singularly productive field of Dudley; and they both are irregularly checkered black, yellow, and gray. Beyond the Wyre field lies an immense district of a deep chocolate-red tint,- a huge development of the Old Red Sandstone. Still further beyond, we may discern in the distance a bluish-gray province of great extent, much broken.

into hills, which consists of an at least equally huge development of the Silurian; while, rising over the red saliferous marls in an opposite direction, we may see a series of flat, low-lying rocks of the Oolitic system, passing from a pale neutral tint into a smoky brown and a light straw-yellow. In such close proximity are the geological systems in this part of the country, that the geologist who passes the night in Birmingham on the Lower New Red Sandstone, may go and take an early breakfast on the Silurian, the Old Red, the Carboniferous, the Saliferous, or the Oolitic systems, just as he inclines. Good sections, such as our northern sea-coasts furnish, are all that are wanting to render the locality one of the finest in the kingdom to the student of the stony science: but these he misses sadly; and he, alas! cannot deal with the stubborn integuments of the country in reality, as we are dealing with them so much at our ease in imagination, on one of the summits of the Clent Hills.

The integument that falls to be examined first in order, after the boulder drift and the gravels, is the Oolitic one; but it occupies merely a corner on the verge of the horizon, and need not engage us long. One remark regarding it, however, though rendered familiar to the geologic reader by the writings of Murchison and Mantell, I shall venture to repeat. We have seen how this central district of the kingdom has its storehouses of coal, iron, salt, lime, liberal donations to the wants of the human animal, from the Carboniferous, Saliferous, and Silurian systems; and to these we must now add its inexhaustible deposits of medicine, — contributions to the general stock by the Oolitic system. Along the course of the Lias, medicinal springs abound; there is no other part of England where they rise so thickly, or of a quality that exerts a more powerful influence on the human frame. The mineral waters of Cheltenham, for instance, so celebrated for their virtues, are of the number; and