Town Geology

by Charles Kingsley

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 Bêche 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.