The ship will have to lie-to, and anchor if she can; it may be a mile, it may be only a few yards, from the land. For between it and the land will be a line of breakers, raging in before the warm trade- wind. And this, you will be told, marks the edge of the coral reef.

You will have to go ashore in a boat, over a sea which looks unfathomable, and which may be a mile or more in depth, and search for an opening in the reef, through which the boat can pass without being knocked to pieces.

You find one: and in a moment, what a change! The deep has suddenly become shallow; the blue white, from the gleam of the white coral at the bottom. But the coral is not all white, only indeed a little of it; for as you look down through the clear water, you find that the coral is starred with innumerable live flowers, blue, crimson, grey, every conceivable hue; and that these are the coral polypes, each with its ring of arms thrust out of its cell, who are building up their common habitations of lime. If you want to understand, by a rough but correct description, what a coral polype is: all who have been to the sea-side know, or at least have heard of, sea-anemones. Now coral polypes are sea-anemones, which make each a shell of lime, growing with its growth. As for their shapes, the variety of them, the beauty of them, no tongue can describe them. If you want to see them, go to the Coral Rooms of the British or Liverpool Museums, and judge for yourselves. Only remember that you must re-clothe each of those exquisite forms with a coating of live jelly of some delicate hue, and put back into every one of the thousand cells its living flower; and into the beds, or rather banks, of the salt-water flower garden, the gaudiest of shell-less sea-anemones, such as we have on our coasts, rooted in the cracks, and live shells and sea-slugs, as gaudy as they, crawling about, with fifty other forms of fantastic and exuberant life. You must not overlook, too, the fish, especially the parrot-fish, some of them of the gaudiest colours, who spend their lives in browsing on the live coral, with strong clipping and grinding teeth, just as a cow browses the grass, keeping the animal matter, and throwing away the lime in the form of an impalpable white mud, which fills up the interstices in the coral beds.

The bottom, just outside the reef, is covered with that mud, mixed with more lime-mud, which the surge wears off the reef; and if you have, as you should have, a dredge on board, and try a haul of that mud as you row home, you may find, but not always, animal forms rooted in it, which will delight the soul of a scientific man. One, I hope, would be some sort of Terebratula, or shell akin to it. You would probably think it a cockle: but you would be wrong. The animal which dwells in it has about the same relationship to a cockle as a dog has to a bird. It is a Brachiopod; a family with which the ancient seas once swarmed, but which is rare now, all over the world, having been supplanted and driven out of the seas by newer and stronger forms of shelled animals. The nearest spot at which you are likely to dredge a live Brachiopod will be in the deep water of Loch Fyne, in Argyleshire, where two species still linger, fastened, strangely enough, to the smooth pebbles of a submerged glacier, formed in the open air during the age of ice, but sunk now to a depth of eighty fathoms. The first time I saw those shells come up in the dredge out of the dark and motionless abyss, I could sympathise with the feelings of mingled delight and awe which, so my companion told me, the great Professor Owen had in the same spot first beheld the same lingering remnants of a primaeval world.

The other might be (but I cannot promise you even a chance of dredging that, unless you were off the coast of Portugal, or the windward side of some of the West India Islands) a live Crinoid; an exquisite starfish, with long and branching arms, but rooted in the mud by a long stalk, and that stalk throwing out barren side branches; the whole a living plant of stone. You may see in museums specimens of this family, now so rare, all but extinct. And yet fifty or a hundred different forms of the same type swarmed in the ancient seas: whole masses of limestone are made up of little else but the fragments of such animals.

But we have not landed yet on the dry part of the reef. Let us make for it, taking care meanwhile that we do not get our feet cut by the coral, or stung as by nettles by the coral insects. We shall see that the dry land is made up entirely of coral, ground and broken by the waves, and hurled inland by the storm, sometimes in huge boulders, mostly as fine mud; and that, under the influence of the sun and of the rain, which filters through it, charged with lime from the rotting coral, the whole is setting, as cement sets, into rock. And what is this? A long bank of stone standing up as a low cliff, ten or twelve feet above high-water mark. It is full of fragments of shell, of fragments of coral, of all sorts of animal remains; and the lower part of it is quite hard rock. Moreover, it is bedded in regular layers, just such as you see in a quarry. But how did it get there? It must have been formed at the sea-level, some of it, indeed, under the sea; for here are great masses of madrepore and limestone corals imbedded just as they grew. What lifted it up? Your companions, if you have any who know the island, have no difficulty in telling you. It was hove up, they say, in the earthquake in such and such a year; and they will tell you, perhaps, that if you will go on shore to the main island which rises inside the reef, you may see dead coral beds just like these lying on the old rocks, and sloping up along the flanks of the mountains to several hundred feet above the sea. I have seen such many a time.

Thus you find the coral being converted gradually into a limestone rock, either fine and homogeneous, composed of coral grown into pulp, or filled with corals and shells, or with angular fragments of older coral rock. Did you never see that last? No? Yes, you have a hundred times. You have but to look at the marbles commonly used about these islands, with angular fragments imbedded in the mass, and here and there a shell, the whole cemented together by water holding in solution carbonate of lime, and there see the very same phenomenon perpetuated to this day.

Thus, I think, we have got first from the known to the unknown; from a tropic coral island back here to the limestone hills of Great Britain; and I did not speak at random when I said that I was not leading you away as far as you fancied by several thousand miles.

Examine any average limestone quarry from Bristol to Berwick, and you will see there all that I have been describing; that is, all of it which is not soft animal matter, certain to decay. You will see the lime-mud hardened into rock beds; you will see the shells embedded in it; you will see the corals in every stage of destruction; you will see whole layers made up of innumerable fragments of Crinoids—no wonder they are innumerable, for, it has been calculated, there are in a single animal of some of the species 140,000 joints—140,000 bits of lime to fall apart when its soft parts decay. But is it not all there? And why should it not have got there by the same process by which similar old coral beds get up the mountain sides in the West Indies and elsewhere; namely, by the upheaving force of earthquakes? When you see similar effects, you have a right to presume similar causes. If you see a man fall off a house here, and break his neck; and some years after, in London or New York, or anywhere else, find another man lying at the foot of another house, with his neck broken in the same way, is it not a very fair presumption that he has fallen off a house likewise?

You may be wrong. He may have come to his end by a dozen other means: but you must have proof of that. You will have a full right, in science and in common sense, to say—That man fell off the house, till some one proves to you that he did not.

In fact, there is nothing which you see in the limestones of these isles—save and except the difference in every shell and coral—which you would not see in the coral-beds of the West Indies, if such earthquakes as that famous one at St. Thomas's, in 1866, became common and periodic, upheaving the land (they needs upheave it a very little, only two hundred and fifty feet), till St. Thomas's, and all the Virgin Isles, and the mighty mountain of Porto Rico, which looms up dim and purple to the west, were all joined into dry land once more, and the lonely coral-shoal of Anegada were raised, as it would be raised then, into a limestone table-land, like that of Central Ireland, of Galway, or of County Clare.

But you must clearly understand, that however much these coralline limestones have been upheaved since they were formed, yet the sea- bottom, while they were being formed, was sinking and not rising. This is a fact which was first pointed out by Mr. Darwin, from the observations which he made in the world-famous Voyage of the Beagle; and the observations of subsequent great naturalists have all gone to corroborate his theory.

It was supposed at first, you must understand, that when a coral island rose steeply to the surface of the sea out of blue water, perhaps a thousand fathoms or more, that fact was plain proof that the little coral polypes had begun at the bottom of the sea, and, in the course of ages, built up the whole island an enormous depth.

But it soon came out that that theory was not correct; for the coral polypes cannot live and build save in shallow water—say in thirty to forty fathoms. Indeed, some of the strongest and largest species work best at the very surface, and in the cut of the fiercest surf. And so arose a puzzle as to how coral rock is often found of vast thickness, which Mr. Darwin explained. His theory was, and there is no doubt now that it is correct, that in these cases the sea-bottom is sinking; that as it sinks, carrying the coral beds down with it, the coral dies, and a fresh live crop of polypes builds on the top of the houses of their dead ancestors: so that, as the depression goes on, generation after generation builds upwards, the living on the dead, keeping the upper surface of the reef at the same level, while its base is sinking downward into the abyss.

Applying this theory to the coral reef of the Pacific Ocean, the following interesting facts were made out:

That where you find an Island rising out of deep water, with a ring of coral round it, a little way from the shore—or, as in Eastern Australia, a coast with a fringing reef (the Flinders reef of Australia is eleven thousand miles long)—that is a pretty sure sign that that shore, or mountain, is sinking slowly beneath the sea. That where you find, as you often do in the Pacific, a mere atoll, or circular reef of coral, with a shallow pond of smooth water in the centre, and deep sea round, that is a pretty sure sign that the mountain-top has sunk completely into the sea, and that the corals are going on building where its peak once was.

And more. On working out the geography of the South Sea Islands by the light of this theory of Mr. Darwin's, the following extraordinary fact has been discovered:

That over a great part of the Pacific Ocean sinking is going on, and has been going on for ages; and that the greater number of the beautiful and precious South Sea Islands are only the remnants of a vast continent or archipelago, which once stretched for thousands of miles between Australia and South America.

Now, applying the same theory to limestone beds, which are, as you know, only fossil coral reefs, we have a right to say, when we see in England, Scotland, Ireland, limestones several thousand feet thick, that while they were being laid down as coral reef, the sea-bottom, and probably the neighbouring land, must have been sinking to the amount of their thickness—to several thousand feet—before that later sinking which enabled several hundred feet of millstone grit to be laid down on the top of the limestone.

This millstone grit is a new and a very remarkable element in our strange story. From Derby to Northumberland it forms vast and lofty moors, capping, as at Whernside and Penygent, the highest limestone hills with its hard, rough, barren, and unfossiliferous strata. Wherever it is found, it lies on the top of the "mountain," or carboniferous limestone. Almost everywhere, where coal is found in England, it lies on the millstone grit. I speak roughly, for fear of confusing my readers with details. The three deposits pass more or less, in many places, into each other: but always in the order of mountain limestone below, millstone grit on it, and coal on that again.

Now what does its presence prove? What but this? That after the great coral reefs which spread over Somersetshire and South Wales, around the present estuary of the Severn,—and those, once perhaps joined to them, which spread from Derby to Berwick, with a western branch through North-east Wales,—were laid down—after all this, I say, some change took place in the sea-bottom, and brought down on the reefs of coral sheets of sand, which killed the corals and buried them in grit. Does any reader wish for proof of this? Let him examine the "cherty," or flinty, beds which so often appear where the bottom of the millstone grit is passing into the top of the mountain limestone—the beds, to give an instance, which are now quarried on the top of the Halkin Mountain in Flintshire, for chert, which is sent to Staffordshire to be ground down for the manufacture of china. He will find layers in those beds, of several feet in thickness, as hard as flint, but as porous as sponge. On examining their cavities he will find them to be simply hollow casts of innumerable joints of Crinoids, so exquisitely preserved, even to their most delicate markings, that it is plain they were never washed about upon a beach, but have grown where, or nearly where, they lie. What then, has happened to them? They have been killed by the sand. The soft parts of the animals have decayed, letting the 140,000 joints (more or less) belonging to each animal fall into a heap, and be imbedded in the growing sand-rock; and then, it may be long years after, water filtering through the porous sand has removed the lime of which the joints were made, and left their perfect casts behind.

So much for the millstone grits. How long the deposition of sand went on, how long after it that second deposition of sands took place, which goes by the name of the "gannister," or lower coal- measures, we cannot tell. But it is clear, at least, that parts of that ancient sea were filling up and becoming dry land. For coal, or fossilised vegetable matter, becomes more and more common as we ascend in the series of beds; till at last, in the upper coal- measures, the enormous wealth of vegetation which grew, much of it, where it is now found, prove the existence of some such sheets of fertile and forest-clad lowland as I described in my last paper.

Thousands of feet of rich coral reef; thousands of feet of barren sands; then thousands of feet of rich alluvial forest—and all these sliding into each other, if not in one place, then in another, without violent break or change; this is the story which the lime in the mortar and the coal on the fire, between the two, reveal.



VI. THE SLATES ON THE ROOF



The slates on the roof should be, when rightly understood, a pleasant subject for contemplation to the dweller in a town. I do not ask him to imitate the boy who, cliff-bred from his youth, used to spend stolen hours on the house-top, with his back against a chimney-stalk, transfiguring in his imagination the roof-slopes into mountain-sides, the slates into sheets of rock, the cats into lions, and the sparrows into eagles. I only wish that he should—at least after reading this paper—let the slates on the roof carry him back in fancy to the mountains whence they came; perhaps to pleasant trips to the lakes and hills of Cumberland, Westmoreland, and North Wales; and to recognise—as he will do if he have intellect as well as fancy—how beautiful and how curious an object is a common slate.

Beautiful, not only for the compactness and delicacy of its texture, and for the regularity and smoothness of its surface, but still more for its colour. Whether merely warm grey, as when dry, or bright purple, as when wet, the colour of the English slate well justifies Mr. Ruskin's saying, that wherever there is a brick wall and a slate roof there need be no want of rich colour in an English landscape. But most beautiful is the hue of slate, when, shining wet in the sunshine after a summer shower, its blue is brought out in rich contrast by golden spots of circular lichen, whose spores, I presume, have travelled with it off its native mountains. Then, indeed, it reminds the voyager of a sight which it almost rivals in brilliancy— of the sapphire of the deep ocean, brought out into blazing intensity by the contrast of the golden patches of floating gulf-weed beneath the tropic sun.

Beautiful, I say, is the slate; and curious likewise, nay, venerable; a most ancient and elaborate work of God, which has lasted long enough, and endured enough likewise, to bring out in it whatsoever latent capabilities of strength and usefulness might lie hid in it; which has literally been—as far as such words can apply to a thing inanimate—

Heated hot with burning fears, And bathed in baths of hissing tears, And battered by the strokes of doom To shape and use.

And yet it was at first naught but an ugly lump of soft and shapeless ooze.

Therefore, the slates to me are as a parable, on which I will not enlarge, but will leave each reader to interpret it for himself. I shall confine myself now to proofs that slate is hardened mud, and to hints as to how it assumed its present form.

That slate may have been once mud, is made probable by the simple fact that it can be turned into mud again. If you grind tip slate, and then analyse it, you will find its mineral constituents to be exactly those of a fine, rich, and tenacious clay. The slate districts (at least in Snowdon) carry such a rich clay on them, wherever it is not masked by the ruins of other rocks. At Ilfracombe, in North Devon, the passage from slate below to clay above, may be clearly seen. Wherever the top of the slate beds, and the soil upon it, is laid bare, the black layers of slate may be seen gradually melting—if I may use the word—under the influence of rain and frost, into a rich tenacious clay, which is now not black, like its parent slate, but red, from the oxidation of the iron which it contains.

But, granting this, how did the first change take place?

It must be allowed, at starting, that time enough has elapsed, and events enough have happened, since our supposed mud began first to become slate, to allow of many and strange transformations. For these slates are found in the oldest beds of rocks, save one series, in the known world; and it is notorious that the older and lower the beds in which the slates are found, the better, that is, the more perfectly elaborate, is the slate. The best slates of Snowdon—I must confine myself to the district which I know personally—are found in the so-called "Cambrian" beds. Below these beds but one series of beds is as yet known in the world, called the "Laurentian." They occur, to a thickness of some eighty thousand feet, in Labrador, Canada, and the Adirondack mountains of New York: but their representatives in Europe are, as far as is known only to be found in the north-west highlands of Scotland, and in the island of Lewis, which consists entirely of them. And it is to be remembered, as a proof of their inconceivable antiquity, that they have been upheaved and shifted long before the Cambrian rocks were laid down "unconformably" on their worn and broken edges.

Above the "Cambrian" slates—whether the lower and older ones of Penrhyn and Llanberris, which are the same—one slate mountain being worked at both sides in two opposite valleys—or the upper and newer slates of Tremadoc, lie other and newer slate-bearing beds of inferior quality, and belonging to a yet newer world, the "Silurian." To them belong the Llandeilo flags and slates of Wales, and the Skiddaw slates of Cumberland, amid beds abounding in extinct fossil forms. Fossil shells are found, it is true, in the upper Cambrian beds. In the lower they have all but disappeared. Whether their traces have been obliterated by heat and pressure, and chemical action, during long ages; or whether, in these lower beds, we are actually reaching that "Primordial Zone" conceived of by M. Barrande, namely, rocks which existed before living things had begun to people this planet, is a question not yet answered. I believe the former theory to be the true one. That there was life, in the sea at least, even before the oldest Cambrian rocks were laid down, is proved by the discovery of the now famous fossil, the Eozoon, in the Laurentian limestones, which seems to have grown layer after layer, and to have formed reefs of limestone as do the living coral-building polypes. We know no more as yet. But all that we do know points downwards, downwards still, warning us that we must dig deeper than we have dug as yet, before we reach the graves of the first living things.

Let this suffice at present for the Cambrian and Laurentian rocks.

The Silurian rocks, lower and upper, which in these islands have their chief development in Wales, and which are nearly thirty-eight thousand feet thick; and the Devonian or Old Red sandstone beds, which in the Fans of Brecon and Carmarthenshire attain a thickness of ten thousand feet, must be passed through in an upward direction before we reach the bottom of that Carboniferous Limestone of which I spoke in my last paper. We thus find on the Cambrian rocks forty- five thousand feet at least of newer rocks, in several cases lying unconformably on each other, showing thereby that the lower beds had been upheaved, and their edges worn off on a sea-shore, ere the upper were laid down on them; and throughout this vast thickness of rocks, the remains of hundreds of forms of animals, corals, shells, fish, older forms dying out in the newer rocks, and new ones taking their places in a steady succession of ever-varying forms, till those in the upper beds have become unlike those in the lower, and all are from the beginning more or less unlike any existing now on earth. Whole families, indeed, disappear entirely, like the Trilobites, which seem to have swarmed in the Silurian seas, holding the same place there as crabs and shrimps do in our modern seas. They vanish after the period of the coal, and their place is taken by an allied family of Crustaceans, of which only one form (as far as I am aware) lingers now on earth, namely, the "King Crab," or Limulus, of the Indian Seas, a well-known animal, of which specimens may sometimes be seen alive in English aquaria. So perished in the lapse of those same ages, the armour-plated or "Ganoid" fish which Hugh Miller made so justly famous—and which made him so justly famous in return— appearing first in the upper Silurian beds, and abounding in vast variety of strange forms in the old Red Sandstone, but gradually disappearing from the waters of the world, till their only representatives, as far as known, are the Lepidostei, or "Bony Pikes," of North America; the Polypteri of the Nile and Senegal; the Lepidosirens of the African lakes and Western rivers; the Ceratodus or Barramundi of Queensland (the two latter of which approach Amphibians), and one or two more fantastic forms, either rudimentary or degraded, which have lasted on here and there in isolated stations through long ages, comparatively unchanged while all the world is changed around them, and their own kindred, buried like the fossil Ceratodus of the Trias beneath thousands of feet of ancient rock, among creatures the likes whereof are not to be found now on earth. And these are but two examples out of hundreds of the vast changes which have taken place in the animal life of the globe, between the laying down of the Cambrian slates and the present time.

Surely—and it is to this conclusion I have been tending throughout a seemingly wandering paragraph—surely there has been time enough during all those ages for clay to change into slate.

And how were they changed?

I think I cannot teach my readers this more simply than by asking them first to buy Sheet No. LXXVIII. S.E. (Bangor) of the Snowdon district of the Government Geological Survey, which may be ordered at any good stationer's, price 3s.; and study it with me. He will see down the right-hand margin interpretations of the different colours which mark the different beds, beginning with the youngest (alluvium) atop, and going down through Carboniferous Limestone and Sandstone, Upper Silurian, Lower Silurian, Cambrian, and below them certain rocks marked of different shades of red, which signify rocks either altered by heat, or poured out of old volcanic vents. He will next see that the map is covered with a labyrinth of red patches and curved lines, signifying the outcrop or appearance at the surface of these volcanic beds. They lie at every conceivable slope; and the hills and valleys have been scooped out by rain and ice into every conceivable slope likewise. Wherefore we see, here a broad patch of red, where the back of a sheet of Lava, Porphyry, Greenstone, or what not is exposed; there a narrow line curving often with the curve of the hill-side, where only the edge of a similar sheet is exposed; and every possible variety of shape and attitude between these two. He will see also large spaces covered with little coloured dots, which signify (as he will find at the margin) beds of volcanic ash. If he look below the little coloured squares on the margin, he will see figures marking the strike, or direction of the inclination of the beds—inclined, vertical, horizontal, contorted; that the white lines in the map signify faults, i.e. shifts in the strata; the gold lines, lodes of metal—the latter of which I should advise him strongly, in this district at least, not to meddle with: but to button up his pockets, and to put into the fire, in wholesome fear of his own weakness and ignorance, any puffs of mining companies which may be sent him—as one or two have probably been sent him already.

Furnished with which keys to the map, let him begin to con it over, sure that there is if not an order, still a grand meaning in all its seeming confusion; and let him, if he be a courteous and grateful person, return due thanks to Professor Ramsay for having found it all out; not without wondering, as I have often wondered, how even Professor Ramsay's acuteness and industry could find it all out.

When my reader has studied awhile the confusion—for it is a true confusion—of the different beds, he will ask, or at least have a right to ask, what known process of nature can have produced it? How have these various volcanic rocks, which he sees marked as Felspathic Traps, Quartz Porphyries, Greenstones, and so forth, got intermingled with beds which he is told to believe are volcanic ashes, and those again with fossil-bearing Silurian beds and Cambrian slates, which he is told to believe were deposited under water? And his puzzle will not be lessened when he is told that, in some cases, as in that of the summit of Snowdon, these very volcanic ashes contain fossil shells.

The best answer I can give is to ask him to use his imagination, or his common sense; and to picture to himself what must go on in the case of a submarine eruption, such as broke out off the coast of Iceland in 1783 and 1830, off the Azores in 1811, and in our day in more than one spot in the Pacific Ocean.

A main bore or vent—or more than one—opens itself between the bottom of the sea and the nether fires. From each rushes an enormous jet of high-pressure steam and other gases, which boils up through the sea, and forms a cloud above; that cloud descends again in heavy rain, and gives out often true lightning from its under side.

But it does more. It acts as a true steam-gun, hurling into the air fragments of cold rock rasped off from the sides of the bore, and fragments also of melted lava, and clouds of dust, which fall again into the sea, and form there beds either of fine mud or of breccia— that is, fragments of stone embedded in paste. This, the reader will understand, is no fancy sketch, as far as I am concerned. I have steamed into craters sawn through by the sea, and showing sections of beds of ash dipping outwards and under the sea, and in them boulders and pebbles of every size, which had been hurled out of the crater; and in them also veins of hardened lava, which had burrowed out through the soft ashes of the cone. Of those lava veins I will speak presently. What I want the reader to think of now is the immense quantity of ash which the steam-mitrailleuse hurls to so vast a height into the air, that it is often drifted many miles down to leeward. To give two instances: The jet of steam from Vesuvius, in the eruption of 1822, rose more than four miles into the air; the jet from the Souffriere of St. Vincent in the West Indies, in 1812, probably rose higher; certainly it met the N.E. trade-wind, for it poured down a layer of ashes, several inches thick, not only on St. Vincent itself, but on Barbadoes, eighty miles to windward, and therefore on all the sea between. Now let us consider what that represents—a layer of fine mud, laid down at the bottom of the ocean, several inches thick, eighty miles at least long, and twenty miles perhaps broad, by a single eruption. Suppose that hardened in long ages (as it would be under pressure) into a bed of fine grained Felstone, or volcanic ash; and we can understand how the ash-beds of Snowdonia—which may be traced some of them for many square miles— were laid down at the bottom of an ancient sea.

But now about the lavas or true volcanic rocks, which are painted (as is usual in geological maps) red. Let us go down to the bottom of the sea, and build up our volcano towards the surface.

First, as I said, the subterranean steam would blast a bore. The dust and stones, rasped and blasted out of that hole would be spread about the sea-bottom as an ash-bed sloping away round the hole; then the molten lava would rise in the bore, and flow out over the ashes and the sea-bottom—perhaps in one direction, perhaps all round. Then, usually, the volcano, having vented itself, would be quieter for a time, till the heat accumulated below, and more ash was blasted out, making a second ash-bed; and then would follow a second lava flow. Thus are produced the alternate beds of lava and ash which are so common.

Now suppose that at this point the volcano was exhausted, and lay quiet for a few hundred years, or more. If there was any land near, from which mud and sand were washed down, we might have layers on layers of sediment deposited, with live shells, etc., living in them, which would be converted into fossils when they died; and so we should have fossiliferous beds over the ashes and lavas. Indeed, shells might live and thrive in the ash-mud itself, when it cooled, and the sea grew quiet, as they have lived and thriven in Snowdonia.

Now suppose that after these sedimentary beds are laid down by water, the volcano breaks out again—what would happen?

Many things: specially this, which has often happened already.

The lava, kept down by the weight of these new rocks, searches for the point of least resistance, and finds it in a more horizontal direction. It burrows out through the softer ash-beds, and between the sedimentary beds, spreading itself along horizontally. This process accounts for the very puzzling, though very common case in Snowdon and elsewhere, in which we find lavas interstratified with rocks which are plainly older than those lavas. Perhaps when that is done the volcano has got rid of all its lava, and is quiet. But if not, sooner or later, it bores up through the new sedimentary rocks, faulting them by earthquake shocks till it gets free vent, and begins its layers of alternate ash and lava once more.

And consider this fact also: If near the first (as often happens) there is another volcano, the lava from one may run over the lava from the other, and we may have two lavas of different materials overlying each other, which have come from different directions. The ashes blown out of the two craters may mingle also, and so, in the course of ages, the result may be such a confusion of ashes, lavas, and sedimentary rocks as we find throughout most mountain ranges in Snowdon, in the Lake mountains, in the Auvergne in France, in Sicily round Etna, in Italy round Vesuvius, and in so many West Indian Islands; the last confusion of which is very likely to be this:

That when the volcano has succeeded—as it did in the case of Sabrina Island off the Azores in 1811, and as it did, perhaps often, in Snowdonia—in piling up an ash cone some hundred feet out of the sea; that—as has happened to Sabrina Island—the cone is sunk again by earthquakes, and gnawn down at the same time by the sea-waves, till nothing is left but a shoal under water. But where have all its vast heaps of ashes gone? To be spread about over the bottom of the sea, to mingle with the mud already there, and so make beds of which, like many in Snowdon, we cannot say whether they are of volcanic or of marine origin, because they are of both.

But what has all this to do with the slates?

I shall not be surprised if my readers ask that question two or three times during this paper. But they must be kind enough to let me tell my story my own way. The slates were not made in a day, and I fear they cannot be explained in an hour: unless we begin carefully at the beginning in order to end at the end. Let me first make my readers clearly understand that all our slate-bearing mountains, and most also of the non-slate-bearing ones likewise, are formed after the fashion which I have described, namely, beneath the sea. I do not say that there may not have been, again, and again, ash-cones rising above the surface of the waves. But if so, they were washed away, again and again, ages before the land assumed anything of its present shape; ages before the beds were twisted and upheaved as they are now.

And therefore I beg my readers to put out of their minds once and for all the fancy that in any known part of these islands craters are to be still seen, such as exist in Etna, or Vesuvius, or other volcanoes now at work in the open air.

It is necessary to insist on this, because many people hearing that certain mountains are volcanic, conclude—and very naturally and harmlessly—that the circular lakes about their tops are true craters. I have been told, for instance, that that wonderful little blue Glas Llyn, under the highest cliff of Snowdon, is the old crater of the mountain; and I have heard people insist that a similar lake, of almost equal grandeur, in the south side of Cader Idris, is a crater likewise.

But the fact is not so. Any one acquainted with recent craters would see at once that Glas Llyn is not an ancient one; and I am not surprised to find the Government geologists declaring that the Llyn on Cader Idris is not one either. The fact is, that the crater, or rather the place where the crater has been, in ancient volcanoes of this kind, is probably now covered by one of the innumerable bosses of lava.

For, as an eruption ceases, the melted lava cools in the vents, and hardens; usually into lava infinitely harder than the ash-cone round it; and this, when the ash-cone is washed off, remains as the highest part of the hill, as in the Mont Dore and the Cantal in France, and in several extinct volcanoes in the Antilles. Of course the lava must have been poured out, and the ashes blown out from some vents or other, connected with the nether world of fire; probably from many successive vents. For in volcanoes, when one vent is choked, another is wont to open at some fresh point of least resistance among the overlying rocks. But where are these vents? Buried deep under successive eruptions, shifted probably from their places by successive upheavings and dislocations; and if we wanted to find them we should have to quarry the mountain range all over, a mile deep, before we hit upon here and there a tap-root of ancient lava, connecting the upper and the nether worlds. There are such tap- roots, probably, under each of our British mountain ranges. But Snowdon, certainly, does not owe its shape to the fact of one of these old fire vents being under it. It owes its shape simply to the accident of some of the beds toward the summit being especially hard, and thus able to stand the wear and tear of sea-wave, ice, and rain. Its lakes have been formed quite regardless of the lie of the rocks, though not regardless of their relative hardness. But what forces scooped them out—whether they were originally holes left in the ground by earthquakes, and deepened since by rain and rivers, or whether they were scooped out by ice, or by any other means, is a question on which the best geologists are yet undecided—decided only on this—that craters they are not.

As for the enormous changes which have taken place in the outline of the whole of the mountains, since first their strata were laid down at the bottom of the sea: I shall give facts enough, before this paper is done, to enable readers to judge of them for themselves.

The reader will now ask, naturally enough, how such a heap of beds as I have described can take the shape of mountains like Snowdon.

Look at any sea cliff in which the strata are twisted and set on slope. There are hundreds of such in these isles. The beds must have been at one time straight and horizontal. But it is equally clear that they have been folded by being squeezed laterally. At least, that is the simplest explanation, as may be proved by experiment. Take a number of pieces of cloth, or any such stuff; lay them on each other and then squeeze them together at each end. They will arrange themselves in folds, just as the beds of the cliff have done. And if, instead of cloth, you take some more brittle matter, you will find that, as you squeeze on, these folds will tend to snap at the points of greatest tension or stretching, which will be of course at the anticlinal and synclinal lines—in plain English, the tops and bottoms of the folds. Thus cracks will be formed; and if the pressure goes on, the ends of the layers will shift against each other in the line of those cracks, forming faults like those so common in rocks.

But again, suppose that instead of squeezing these broken and folded lines together any more, you took off the pressure right and left, and pressed them upwards from below, by a mimic earthquake. They would rise; and as they rose leave open space between them. Now if you could contrive to squeeze into them from below a paste, which would harden in the cracks and between the layers, and so keep them permanently apart, you would make them into a fair likeness of an average mountain range—a mess—if I may make use of a plain old word—of rocks which have, by alternate contraction and expansion, helped in the latter case by the injection of molten lava, been thrust about as they are in most mountain ranges.

That such a contraction and expansion goes on in the crust of the earth is evident; for here are the palpable effects of it. And the simplest general cause which I can give for it is this: That things expand as they are heated, and contract as they are cooled.

Now I am not learned enough—and were I, I have not time—to enter into the various theories which philosophers have put forward, to account for these grand phenomena.

The most remarkable, perhaps, and the most probable, is the theory of M. Elie de Beaumont, which is, in a few words, this:

That this earth, like all the planets, must have been once in a state of intense heat throughout, as its mass inside is probably now.

That it must be cooling, and giving off its heat into space.

That, therefore, as it cools, its crust must contract.

That, therefore, in contracting, wrinkles (for the loftiest mountain chains are nothing but tiny wrinkles, compared with the whole mass of the earth), wrinkles, I say, must form on its surface from time to time. And that the mountain chains are these wrinkles.

Be that as it may, we may safely say this. That wherever the internal heat of the earth tends (as in the case of volcanoes) towards a particular spot, that spot must expand, and swell up, bulging the rocks out, and probably cracking them, and inserting melting lava into those cracks from below. On the other hand, if the internal heat leaves that spot again, and it cools, then it must contract more or less, in falling inward toward the centre of the earth; and so the beds must be crumpled, and crushed, and shifted against each other still more, as those of our mountains have been.

But here may arise, in some of my readers' minds, a reasonable question—If these upheaved beds were once horizontal, should we not be likely to find them, in some places, horizontal still?

A reasonable question, and one which admits of a full answer.

They know, of course, that there has been a gradual, but steady, change in the animals of this planet; and that the relative age of beds can, on the strength of that known change, be determined generally by the fossils, usually shells, peculiar to them: so that if we find the same fashion of shells, and still more the same species of shells, in two beds in different quarters of the world, then we have a right to say—These beds were laid down at least about the same time. That is a general rule among all geologists, and not to be gainsaid.

Now I think I may say, that, granting that we can recognise a bed by its fossils, there are few or no beds which are found in one place upheaved, broken, and altered by heat, which are not found in some other place still horizontal, unbroken, unaltered, and more or less as they were at first.

From the most recent beds; from the upheaved coral-rocks of the West Indies, and the upheaved and faulted boulder clay and chalk of the Isle of Moen in Denmark—downwards through all the strata, down to that very ancient one in which the best slates are found, this rule, I believe, stands true.

It stands true, certainly, of the ancient Silurian rocks of Wales, Cumberland, Ireland, and Scotland.

For, throughout great tracts of Russia, and in parts of Norway and Sweden, Sir Roderick Murchison discovered our own Silurian beds, recognisable from their peculiar fossils. But in what state? Not contracted, upheaved, and hardened to slates and grits, as they are in Wales and elsewhere: but horizontal, unbroken, and still soft, because undisturbed by volcanic rooks and earthquakes. At the bottom of them all, near Petersburg, Sir Roderick found a shale of dried mud (to quote his own words), "so soft and incoherent that it is even used by sculptors for modelling, although it underlies the great mass of fossil-bearing Silurian rocks, and is, therefore, of the same age as the lower crystalline hard slates of North Wales. So entirely have most of these eldest rocks in Russia been exempted from the influence of change, throughout those enormous periods which have passed away since their accumulation."

Among the many discoveries which science owes to that illustrious veteran, I know none more valuable for its bearing on the whole question of the making of the earth-crust, than this one magnificent fact.

But what a contrast between these Scandinavian and Russian rocks and those of Britain! Never exceeding, in Scandinavia, a thousand feet in thickness, and lying usually horizontal, as they were first laid down, they are swelled in Britain to a thickness of thirty thousand feet, by intruded lavas and ashes; snapt, turned, set on end at every conceivable angle; shifted against each other to such an extent, that, to give a single instance, in the Vale of Gwynnant, under Snowdon, an immense wedge of porphyry has been thrust up, in what is now the bottom of the valley, between rocks far newer than it, on one side to a height of eight hundred, on the other to a height of eighteen hundred feet—half the present height of Snowdon. Nay, the very slate beds of Snowdonia have not forced their way up from under the mountain—without long and fearful struggles. They are set in places upright on end, then horizontal again, then sunk in an opposite direction, then curled like sea-waves, then set nearly upright once more, and faulted through and through, six times, I believe, in the distance of a mile or two; they carry here and there on their backs patches of newer beds, the rest of which has long vanished; and in their rise they have hurled back to the eastward, and set upright, what is now the whole western flank of Snowdon, a mass of rock which was then several times as thick as it is now.

The force which thus tortured them was probably exerted by the great mass of volcanic Quartz-porphyry, which rises from under them to the north-west, crossing the end of the lower lake of the Llanberris; and indeed the shifts and convulsions which have taken place between them and the Menai Straits are so vast that they can only be estimated by looking at them on the section which may be found at the end of Professor Ramsay's "Geological Survey of North Wales." But anyone who will study that section, and use (as with the map) a little imagination and common sense, will see that between the heat of that Porphyry, which must have been poured out as a fluid mass as hot, probably, as melted iron, and the pressure of it below, and of the Silurian beds above, the Cambrian mud-strata of Llanberris and Penrhyn quarries must have suffered enough to change them into something very different from mud, and, therefore, probably, into what they are now—namely, slate.

And now, at last, we have got to the slates on the roof, and may disport ourselves over them—like the cats.

Look at any piece of slate. All know that slate splits or cleaves freely, in one direction only, into flat layers. Now any one would suppose at first sight, and fairly enough, that the flat surface—the "plane of cleavage"—was also the plane of bedding. In simpler English we should say—The mud which has hardened into the slate was laid down horizontally; and therefore each slate is one of the little horizontal beds of it, perhaps just what was laid down in a single tide. We should have a right to do so, because that would be true of most sedimentary rocks. But it would not be true of slate. The plane of bedding in slate has nothing to do with the plane of cleavage. Or, more plainly, the mud of which the slate is made may have been deposited at the sea-bottom at any angle to the plane of cleavage. We may sometimes see the lines of the true bedding—the lines which were actually horizontal when the mud was laid down—in bits of slate, and find them sometimes perpendicular to, sometimes inclined to, and sometimes again coinciding with the plane of cleavage, which they have evidently acquired long after.

Nay, more. These parallel planes of cleavage, at each of which the slate splits freely, will run through a whole mountain at the same angle, though the beds through which they run may be tilted at different angles, and twisted into curves.

Now what has made this change in the rook? We do not exactly know. One thing is clear, that the particles of the now solid rock have actually moved on themselves. And this is proved by a very curious fact—which the reader, if he geologises about slate quarries much, may see with his own eyes. The fossils in the slate are often distorted into quaint shapes, pulled out long if they lie along the plane of cleavage, or squeezed together, or doubled down on both sides, if they lie across the plane. So that some force has been at work which could actually change the shape of hard shells, very slowly, no doubt, else it would have snapped and crumbled them.

If I am asked what that force was, I do not know. I should advise young geologists to read what Sir Henry de la Beche has said on it in his admirable "Geological Observer," pp. 706-725. He will find there, too, some remarks on that equally mysterious phenomena of jointing, which you may see in almost all the older rocks; it is common in limestones. All we can say is, that some force has gone on, or may be even now going on, in the more ancient rocks, which is similar to that which produces single crystals; and similar, too, to that which produced the jointed crystals of basalt, i.e. lava, at the Giant's Causeway, in Ireland, and Staffa, in the Hebrides. Two philosophers—Mr. Robert Were Fox and Mr. Robert Hunt—are of opinion that the force which has determined the cleavage of slates may be that of the electric currents, which (as is well known) run through the crust of the earth. Mr. Sharpe, I believe, attributes the cleavage to the mere mechanical pressure of enormous weights of rock, especially where crushed by earthquakes. Professor Rogers, again, points out that as these slates may have been highly heated, thermal electricity (i.e. electricity brought out by heat) may have acted on them.

One thing at least is clear. That the best slates are found among ancient lavas, and also in rocks which are faulted and tilted enormously, all which could not have happened without a proportionately enormous pressure, and therefore heat; and next, that the best slates are invariably found in the oldest beds—that is, in the beds which have had most time to endure the changes, whether mechanical or chemical, which have made the earth's surface what we see it now.

Another startling fact the section of Snowdonia, and I believe of most mountain chains in these islands, would prove—namely, that the contour of the earth's surface, as we see it now, depends very little, certainly in mountains composed of these elder rocks upon the lie of the strata, or beds, but has been carved out by great forces, long after those beds were not only laid down and hardened, but faulted and tilted on end. Snowdon itself is so remarkable an instance of this fact that, as it is a mountain which every one in these happy days of excursion-trains and steamers either has seen or can see, I must say a few more words about it.

Any one who saw that noble peak leaping high into the air, dominating all the country round, at least upon three sides, and was told that its summit consisted of beds much newer, not much older, than the slate-beds fifteen hundred feet down on its north-western flank—any one, I say, would have the right at first sight, on hearing of earthquake faults and upheavals, to say—The peak of Snowdon has been upheaved to its present height above and out of the lower lands around. But when he came to examine sections, he would find his reasonable guess utterly wrong. Snowdon is no swelling up of the earth's crust. The beds do not, as they would in that case, slope up to it. They slope up from it, to the north-west in one direction, and the south-south-west in the other; and Snowdon is a mere insignificant boss, left hanging on one slope of what was once an enormous trough, or valley, of strata far older than itself. By restoring these strata, in the direction of the angles, in which they crop out, and vanish at the surface, it is found that to the north- west—the direction of the Menai Straits—they must once have risen to a height of at least six or seven thousand feet; and more, by restoring them, specially the ash-bed of Snowdon, towards the south- east—which can be done by the guidance of certain patches of it left on other hills—it is found that south of Ffestiniog, where the Cambrian rocks rise again to the surface, the south side of the trough must have sloped upwards to a height of from fifteen to twenty thousand feet, whether at the bottom of the sea, or in the upper air, we cannot tell. But the fact is certain, that off the surface of Wales, south of Ffestiniog a mass of solid rock as high as the Andes has been worn down and carried bodily away; and that a few miles south again, the peak of Arran Mowddy, which is now not two thousand feet high, was once—either under the sea or above it—nearer ten thousand feet.

If I am asked whither is all that enormous mass of rock—millions of tons—gone? Where is it now? I know not. But if I dared to hazard a guess, I should say it went to make the New Red sandstones of England.

The New Red sandstones must have come from somewhere. The most likely region for them to have come from is from North Wales, where, as we know, vast masses of gritty rock have been ground off, such as would make fine sandstones if they had the chance. So that many a grain of sand in Chester walls was probably once blasted out of the bowels of the earth into the old Silurian sea, and after a few hundreds of thousands of years' repose in a Snowdonian ash-bed, was sent eastward to build the good old city and many a good town more.

And the red marl—the great deposit of red marl which covers a wide region of England—why should not it have come from the same quarter? Why should it not be simply the remains of the Snowdon Slate? Mud the slate was, and into mud it has returned. Why not? Some of the richest red marl land I know, is, as I have said, actually being made now, out of the black slates of Ilfracombe, wherever they are weathered by rain and air. The chemical composition is the same. The difference in colour between black slate and red marl is caused simply by the oxidation of the iron in the slate.

And if my readers want a probable cause why the sandstones lie undermost, and the red marl uppermost—can they not find one for themselves? I do not say that it is the cause, but it is at least a causa vera, one which would fully explain the fact, though it may be explicable in other ways. Think, then, or shall I think for my readers?

Then do they not see that when the Welsh mountains were ground down, the Silurian strata, being uppermost, would be ground down first, and would go to make the lower strata of the great New Red Sandstone Lowland; and that being sandy, they would make the sandstones? But wherever they were ground through, the Lower Cambrian slates would be laid bare; and their remains, being washed away by the sea the last, would be washed on to the top of the remains of the Silurians; and so (as in most cases) the remains of the older rock, when redeposited by water, would lie on the remains of the younger rock. And do they not see that (if what I just said is true) these slates would grind up into red marl, such as is seen over the west and south of Cheshire and Staffordshire and far away into Nottinghamshire? The red marl must almost certainly have been black slate somewhere, somewhen. Why should it not have been such in Snowdon? And why should not the slates in the roof be the remnants of the very beds which are now the marl in the fields?

And thus I end my story of the slates in the roof, and these papers on Town Geology. I do so, well knowing how imperfect they are: though not, I believe, inaccurate. They are, after all, merely suggestive of the great amount that there is to be learnt about the face of the earth and how it got made, even by the townsman, who can escape into the country and exchange the world of man for the world of God, only, perhaps, on Sundays—if, alas! even then—or only once a year by a trip in a steamer or an excursion train. Little, indeed, can he learn of the planet on which he lives. Little in that direction is given to him, and of him little shall be required. But to him, for that very reason, all that can be given should be given; he should have every facility for learning what he can about this earth, its composition, its capabilities; lest his intellect, crushed and fettered by that artificial drudgery which we for a time miscall civilisation, should begin to fancy, as too many do already, that the world is composed mainly of bricks and deal, and governed by acts of parliament. If I shall have awakened any townsmen here and there to think seriously of the complexity, the antiquity, the grandeur, the true poetry, of the commonest objects around them, even the stones beneath their feet; if I shall have suggested to them the solemn thought that all these things, and they themselves still more, are ordered by laws, utterly independent of man's will about them, man's belief in them; if I shall at all have helped to open their eyes that they may see, and their ears that they may hear, the great book which is free to all alike, to peasant as to peer, to men of business as to men of science, even that great book of nature, which is, as Lord Bacon said of old, the Word of God revealed in facts—then I shall have a fresh reason for loving that science of geology, which has been my favourite study since I was a boy.



Footnotes:

{1} See "Nature," No. XXV. (Macmillan & Co.)

{2} These Lectures were delivered to the members of the Natural Science Class at Chester in 1871.

{3} See a most charming paper on "The Physics of Arctic Ice," by Dr. Robert Brown of Campster, published in the Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, June, 1870. This article is so remarkable, not only for its sound scientific matter, but for the vividness and poetic beauty of its descriptions, that I must express a hope that the learned author will some day enlarge it, and publish it in a separate form.

{4} See Lyell, "Antiquity of Man," p. 294 et seq.

THE END