The wonders of the world

by John Loraine Abbott

“Such are the unceasing works of creation, constantly taking place on the exterior surface of the earth; where, though less evident to the senses and experience of man, matter apparently inert is in as progressive a state of change, from the operation of unceasing and immutable causes, as in the visible generations of the animal and vegetable kingdoms. Thus water, wind and heat, the energies of which never cease to be exerted, are constantly producing new combinations, changes and creations; which, if they accord with the harmony of the whole, are fit and ‘good;’ but, if discordant, are speedily re-organized or extinguished by contrary and opposing powers. In a word, whatever is, is fit; and whatever is not fit, is not, or soon ceases to be! Such seems to be the governing principle of Nature, the key of all her mysteries, the primary law of creation! All things are the proximate effects of a balance of immutable powers; those powers are results of a primordial cause; while that cause is inscrutable and incomprehensible to creatures possessing but a relative being, who live only in time and space, and who feel and act merely by the impulse of limited senses and powers.”

And, again, the same writer introduces the following apposite remarks on this very interesting subject.

“As I approached a sequestered mansion-house, and the other buildings connected with it, I crossed a corner of the meadow toward an angle formed by a rude inlet of the Thames, which was running smoothly toward the sea, at the rate of four miles an hour. The tide unites here with the ordinary current, and running a few miles above this place, exhibits twice a day the finely reduced edge of that physical balance-wheel, or oscillating fluid-pendulum, which creates the earth’s centrifugal power, and varies the center of its forces. In viewing the beautiful process of nature, presented by a majestic river, we cease to wonder that priestcraft has often succeeded in teaching nations to consider rivers of divine origin, and as proximate living emblems of omnipotence. Ignorance, whose constant error is to look only to the last term of every series of causes, and which charges impiety on all who venture to ascend one term higher, and atheism on all who dare to explore several terms, (though every series implies a first term,) would easily be persuaded by a crafty priesthood to consider a beneficent river as a tangible branch of the Godhead. But we now know that the waters which flow down a river, are but a portion of the rains and snows which, having fallen near its source, are returning to the ocean, there to rise again and re-perform the same circle of vapors, clouds, rains and rivers. What a process of fertilization, and how still more luxuriant would have been this vicinity, if man had not leveled the trees, and carried away the crops of vegetation. What a place of shelter would thus have been afforded to tribes of amphibiæ, whose accumulated remains often surprise geologists, though necessarily consequent on the fall of crops of vegetation on each other, near undisturbed banks of rivers. Happily, in Britain, our coal-pits, or mineralized forests, have supplied the place of our living woods; or man, regardless of the fitness of all the parts to the perfection of every natural result, might here, as in other long-peopled countries, ignorantly have thwarted the course of nature by cutting down the timber, which, acting on the electricity of the clouds, affects their destiny, and causes them to fall in fertilizing showers. Such has been the fate of all the countries famous in antiquity. Persia, Syria, Arabia, parts of Turkey, and the Barbary coast, have been rendered arid deserts by this inadvertency. The clouds from the Western ocean would long since have passed over England without disturbance from the conducting power of leaves of trees, or blades of grass, if our coal-works had not saved our natural conductors; while the Thames, the agent of so much abundance and of so much wealth, might, in that case, have become a shallow brook, like the once equally famed Jordan, Granicus, or Ilyssus.

“I now descended toward a rude space near the river, which appeared to be in the state in which the occasional overflowings and gradual retrocession of the river had left it. It was one of those wastes which the lord of the manor had not yet enabled some industrious cultivator to disguise; and in large tracts of which Great Britain still exhibits the surface of the earth in the pristine state in which it was left by the secondary causes that have given it form. The Thames, doubtless, in a remote age, covered the entire site; but it is the tendency of rivers to narrow themselves, by promoting prolific vegetable creations on their consequently increasing and encroaching banks, though the various degrees of fall produce every variety of currents, and, consequently, every variety of banks, in their devious course. In due time, the course of the river becomes choked where a flat succeeds a rapid, and the detained waters then form lakes in the interior. These lakes likewise generate encroaching banks, which finally fill up their basins, when new rivers are formed on higher levels. These in their turn, become interrupted, and repetitions of the former circle of causes produce one class of those elevations of land above the level of the sea, which have so much puzzled geologists. The only condition which a surface of dry land requires to increase and raise itself, is the absence of salt water, consequent on which is an accumulation of vegetable and animal remains. The Thames has not latterly been allowed to produce its natural effects, because for two thousand years the banks have been inhabited by man, who unable to appreciate the general laws by which the phenomena of the earth are produced, has sedulously kept open the course of the river, and prevented the formation of interior lakes. The Caspian sea, and all similar inland seas and lakes, were, for the most part, formed from the choking up of rivers which once constituted their outlets. If the course of nature be not interrupted by the misdirected industry of man, the gradual desiccation of all such collections of water will, in due time, produce land of higher levels on their sites. In like manner, the great lakes of North America, if the St. Lawrence be not sedulously kept open, will in the course of ages, be filled up by the gradual encroachment of their banks, and the raising of their bottoms with strata of vegetable and animal remains. New rivers would then flow over these increased elevations, and the ultimate effect would be to raise that part of the continent of North America several hundred feet above its present level. Even the very place on which I stand was, according to Webster, once a vast basin, extending from the Nore to near Reading, but now filled up with vegetable and animal remains; and the illustrious Cuvier has discovered a similar basin round the site of Paris. These once were Caspians, created by the choking and final disappearance of some mighty rivers; they have been filled up by gradual encroachments, and now the Thames and the Seine flow over them; but these, if left to themselves, will, in their turn, generate new lakes or basins, and the successive recurrence of a similar series of causes will continue to produce similar effects, till interrupted by superior causes.

“This situation was so sequestered, and therefore so favorable to contemplation, that I could not avoid indulging myself. What, then, are those superior causes, I exclaimed, which will interrupt this series of natural operations to which man is indebted for the enchanting visions of hill and dale, and for the elysium of beauty and plenty in which he finds himself? Alas! facts prove that all things are transitory, and that change of condition is the constant and necessary result of that motion which is the chief instrument of eternal causation, but which, in causing all phenomena, wears out existing organizations while it is generating new ones. In the motions of the earth as a planet, doubtless are to be discovered the superior causes which convert seas into continents, and continents into seas. These sublime changes are occasioned by the progress of the perihelion point of the earth’s orbit through the ecliptic, which passes from extreme northern to extreme southern declination, and vice versa, every ten thousand, four hundred and fifty years; and the maxima of the central forces in the perihelion occasion the waters to accumulate alternately upon either hemisphere. During ten thousand, four hundred and fifty years, the sea is therefore gradually retiring and encroaching in both hemispheres: hence all the varieties of marine appearances and accumulations of marine remains in particular situations; and hence the successions of layers or strata, one upon another, of marine and earthly remains. It is evident, from observation of those strata, that the periodical changes have occurred at least three times; or in other words, it appears that the site on which I now stand has been three times covered by the ocean, and three times has afforded an asylum for vegetables and animals! How sublime, how interesting, how affecting is such a contemplation! How transitory, therefore, must be the local arrangements of man, and how puerile the study of the science miscalled antiquities! How foolish the pride which vaunts itself on splendid buildings and costly mausoleums! How vain the ostentation of large estates, of extensive boundaries, and of great empires! All, all will, in due time, be swept away and defaced by the unsparing ocean; and, if recorded in the frail memorials of human science, will be spoken of like the lost Atlantis, and remembered only as a philosophical dream!”

Such are the speculations of Phillips, containing many things highly interesting and instructive; though, with our advanced knowledge of geology, we involuntarily smile at his “periods” of “ten thousand, four hundred and fifty years,” knowing, as we now do, that some of the great changes of which he speaks must have occupied the long ages of the earth’s chaotic state, before God, by his word, formed it again to life and order and beauty. The merest tyro in science now knows, that in the great facts of geology God as truly speaks by his works, as in the book of revelation he speaks by his word; and though we are far more liable to misunderstand and misinterpret the former than the latter, yet rightly understood there is no discrepancy between the two, but both speak the same language of truth. In the very structure of the earth itself, we have the evidence of the changes it has passed through. The wonderful wrecks of a former state of nature, preserved, like ancient medals or marbles in the ruins of an extinct empire, tell of the progress of the earth in past ages, and teach us that many of the changes which Phillips would refer to comparatively modern times, belong to a period far back of the creation of our first parents, when our planet, though existing, had not as yet been prepared for the habitation of mankind. We will not, however, dwell on these points; but merely allude to them, referring our readers to any of the elementary treatises on geology, where they may find the full details of facts, and also the various theories which reconcile these facts with the statements of the Mosaic history.

EXTRANEOUS FOSSILS.

The fossil remains of animals not now in existence, entombed and preserved in solid rocks, present us with durable monuments of the great changes which our planet has undergone in former ages. We are led to a period when the waters of the primitive ocean must have covered the summits of our highest mountains, and are irresistibly compelled to admit one of two conclusions: either that the sea has retired, and sunk beneath its former level; or that some power, operating from beneath, has lifted up the islands and continents, with all their hills and mountains, from the watery abyss to their present elevation above its surface.

The calcareous, or limestone mountains in Derbyshire, and at Craven, in Yorkshire, having an elevation of about two thousand feet above the present level of the sea, contain, in a greater or less abundance, and throughout their whole extent, fossil remains of zoophytes, shell-fish, and marine animals. No remains of vegetables have been found in the calcareous mountains of England; but, in the thick beds of shale and gritstone lying upon them, are found various vegetable impressions, and above these regular beds of coal, with strata, containing shells of fresh-water mussels[mussels]. In the earthy limestone of the upper strata are sometimes found fossil flat-fish, with the impression of the scales and bones quite distinct. The mountains of the Pyrenees are covered in the highest part, at Mont Perdu, with calcareous rocks, containing impressions of marine animals; and, even where the impressions are not visible in the limestone, it yields a fetid cadaverous odor, when dissolved in acids, owing, in all probability, to the animal matters it contains. Mont Perdu, which rises ten thousand five hundred feet, or about two miles above the level of the sea, is the highest situation in which any marine remains have been found in Europe. In the Andes they have been observed by Humboldt at the hight of fourteen thousand feet, more than two miles and a half. Lastly, in southern countries, in and under beds of clay-covering chalk, the bones of the elephant, and of the rhinoceros are frequently found.

These bones, as they have been brought from different parts of the world, have been examined with the utmost attention by the sagacious naturalist Cuvier. He has observed characteristic variations of structure, which prove that they belong to animals not now existing on our globe: nor have many of the various zoöphytes and shell-fish, found in calcareous rocks, been discovered in our present seas. From these very curious facts he makes the following deductions.