It would not be easy to restore, in imagination, the surrounding aspect of the superficial area now occupied by patches of the wealden formation. Take your station on the Peak of Derby, or Shotover Hill, or the heights of Ivanhoe—not so perilous adventure as that of the heroine of the tale on the battlements of Malvoisin—and you overlook a vast extent of vale and woodland, all then one broad expanse of water. This inland sea filled the whole intermediate district traced above, studded, in all probability, with islands, and fringed with shallows and rich arborescent headlands. Sharks prowled and darted in every direction; pterodactyles may be descried looming along the waste; while in terror or in joy, the plesiosaurus reared aloft his far-stretching neck, and then withdrew into his fenny retreats. The saurians, with their strong muscular jaws, are actively engaged, each according to his kind, by the shores or in the waters; while over the busy scene, the fierce-weltering ichthyosaurus looks in wild amazement, his large eyes leaping in their sockets, and spreading dismay among the tenants of the deep, as even now, when a kite enters a thorny brake, or pursues his stealthy flight over the meadows and green fields of timid nestling bird.
Nor would the land animals be less actively employed in maintaining the laws of their creation. No skeletons of birds have yet been detected; but their foot-prints, we have seen, are numerous. These clouds of insects, and other brilliant objects that flit with such rapidity across the sky, have all been stirred, and are leaping they know not whither, for the tread of a monster’s feet is heard through the forest, mailed in plated horn thicker than Ajax’s shield, and, pursued by another, presses and plunges onward in reckless haste. Imagine the many encounters during a single season between one set of the terrestrials only, the saurians; of the class, there are the remains of the megalosaurus, the great saurian—of the geosaurus, the land saurian—of the hylæosaurus, the forest saurian—of the teleosaurus, the perfect saurian,—all fitted with jaws and teeth, most cruelly bent on mischief, and restrained by no brotherly sympathies when accident or bold defiance bring them in the way of each other. The fell onslaughts of generous man, tribe against tribe, clan to clan, nation to nation, for some inconceivable nothing or unintended provocation, recorded within the brief historical epoch, may reconcile one to a picture of the irrationals similarly engaged, and throughout periods of time sufficient for the deposition of the entire oolitic series, before which the rule of earthly dynasties shrinks into utter insignificance.
These depositions accomplished, and successive races entombed within them, there is evidence that the floor of the ocean was raised above the waters, and that central Europe presented, all around, a breast of high land. There are various intercalations, in the series of marine and terrestrial deposits as well as of fresh and salt water fossils. Violent internal convulsions prevailed throughout the period, and the animals were all of a kind to care little for the war of the elements. Meanwhile a fresh water formation is completed in many places a thousand feet in thickness, and consisting of a series of beds; not continuous all round the shores of the oolitic detritus, but confined to a few localities, and characterized everywhere by its own group of organisms. This is the wealden formation. And the question arises, How this series of fresh water clays, and sands, and grits, was produced at a time when the sea prevailed so universally over the whole of continental Europe, and the eastern division of Great Britain? The solution is simpler than at first sight might appear, when viewed in connection with the existing distribution of all our great primary formations. The extent of dry land was such as to furnish watershed for numerous rivers. The mountains supplied the detrital matter. This was brought to the river’s mouth, where it formed deltas; or spread out on the floor of estuaries, where it received the few marine fossils which are found in the formation. Cast your eye along the geological map of western Europe, and—in the mountains of Wales, the silurian district of the north-west of France, the primary rocks of the tributaries of the Elbe, the Hartz mountains, and the gneiss and granites of Sutherland and Caithness—we have all the materials and requisites that are necessary for the silting process of the wealden, its accumulation, and geographical distribution as referred to in its range and extent.
The continuity of the coasts of France and England is herein supposed, and, upon geological data, this is a matter of far simpler inference than the framing even of a political constitution that will stand a decade of the years of our fleeting pilgrimage. The vision of Plato’s Atlantis in the great ocean becomes in the geologist’s creed a reality, who believes that a vast continent must have existed on our south and west, all now sunk and whelmed in the deep abyss. A chain of islands would just indicate the positions of the Alps, the Pyrenees, the Carpathians, and the Caucasian ranges, all then overlooking central and eastern Europe, not yet elevated above the waves. “At this period,” says Professor Ansted, “it is most probable that no great east and west subterranean movement had acted on the part of the earth’s crust now above the water in the northern hemisphere, and possibly the first intimation of such a disturbing force, may be traced, though faintly, in the existence of a considerable estuary, in which our wealden beds were deposited. From the condition of the upper Portland beds, we find, that, just at the close of the oolitic period, there were very numerous changes of level induced over a small area in the south-east of England, then, most likely, not far from the coast line of a large continent.”
It may seem to many presumptuous, and beyond all the usual latitude of exaggerated description to attempt to dwell thus minutely on physical arrangements, and a vegetable and animal economy, so remote and beyond the sphere of observation. Remarkable enough that our great healing springs of Bath, Cheltenham, Leamington, Tunbridge, and Harwich, are all situated among, or have their origin in, the series of deposits we have been considering. But the judgment, more than the fancy, is employed in studying the geography of the ancient world, in looking out from the heights around, and trying again to unite the waters and the dry land, to recall the vanishing traces of former sea-marks, and from the disinterred remains of the remarkable races that inhabited the island, and swarmed around its coasts, to contemplate the ways and doings of
“That Eternal Mind,
Who built the spacious universe, and decked
Each part so richly with whate’er pertains
To life, to health, to pleasure.”