The World Before the Deluge

by Louis Figuier

III. A period of comparative repose followed. Beds of shells and bands of coral were formed upon the more ancient rocks, interrupted with beds of sand and mud; processes many times repeated: and thus, in a long succession of ages, were the deposits of the upper series completed.

IV. Towards the end of the period, mountain-masses and eruptive rocks were pushed up through the older deposits. After many revolutions, all the divisions of the slate-series were upheaved and contorted by movements which did not affect the newer formations.

V. The conglomerates of the Old Red Sandstone were now spread out by the beating of an ancient surf, continued through many ages, against the upheaved and broken slates.

VI. Another period of comparative repose followed: the coral-reefs of the mountain limestone, and the whole carboniferous series, were formed, but not without any oscillations between the land and sea-levels.

VII. An age of disruption and violence succeeded, marked by the discordant position of the rocks, and by the conglomerate of the New Red Sandstone. At the beginning of this period the great north and south “Craven fault,” which rent off the eastern calcareous mountains from the old slates, was formed. Soon afterwards the disruption of the great “Pennine fault,” which ranges from the foot of Stanmore to the coast of North Cumberland, occurred, lifting up the terrace of Cross Fell above the plain of the Eden. About the same time some of the north and south fissures, which now form the valleys leading into Morecambe Bay, may have been formed.

VIII. The more tranquil period of the New Red Sandstone now dawns, but here our facts fail us on the skirts of the Lake Mountains.

IX. Thousands of ages rolled away during the Secondary and Tertiary periods, in which we can trace no movement. But the powers of Nature are never still: during this age of apparent repose many a fissure may have started into an open chasm, many a valley been scooped out upon the lines of “fault.”

X. Close to the historic times we have evidence of new disruptions and violence, and of vast changes of level between land and sea. Ancient valleys probably opened out anew or extended, and fresh ones formed in the changes of the oceanic level. Cracks among the strata may now have become open fissures, vertical escarpments formed by unequal elevations along the lines of fault; and subsidence may have given rise to many of the tarns and lakes of the district.

Such is the picture which one of our most eminent geologists gives as the probable process by which this region has attained its present appearance, after he had devoted years of study and observation to its peculiarities; and his description of one spot applies in its general scope to the whole district. At the close of the Silurian period our island was probably an archipelago, ranging over ten degrees of latitude, like many of the island groups now found in the great Pacific Ocean; the old gneissic hills of the western coast of Scotland, culminating in the granite range of Ben Nevis, and stretching to the southern Grampians, forming the nucleus of one island group; the south Highlands of Scotland, ranging from the Lammermoor hills, another; the Pennine chain and the Malvern hills, the third, and most easterly group; the Shropshire and Welsh mountains, a fourth; and Devon and Cornwall stretching far to the south and west. The basis of the calculation being, that every spot of this island lying now at a lower elevation than 800 feet above the sea, was under water at the close of the Silurian period, except in those instances where depression by subsidence has since occurred.

There is, however, another element to be considered, which cannot be better stated than in the picturesque language of M. Esquiros, an eminent French writer, who has given much attention to British geology. “The Silurian mountains,” he says, “ruins in themselves, contain other ruins. In the bosom of the Longmynd rocks, geologists discover conglomerates of rounded stones which bear no resemblance to any rocks now near them. These stones consequently prove the existence of rocks more ancient still; they are fragments of other mountains, of other shores, perhaps even of continents, broken up, destroyed, and crumbled by earlier seas. There is, then, little hope of one discovering the origin of life on the globe, since this page of the Genesis of the facts has been torn. For some years geologists loved to rest their eyes, in this long night of ages, upon an ideal limit beyond which plants and animals would begin to appear. Now, this line of demarcation between the rocks which are without vestiges of organised beings, and those which contain fossils, is nearly effaced among the surrounding ruins. On the horizon of the primitive world we see vaguely indicated a series of other worlds which have altogether disappeared; perhaps it is necessary to resign ourselves to the fact that the dawn of life is lost in this silent epoch, where age succeeds age, till they are clothed in the garb of eternity. The river of creation is like the Nile, which, as Bossuet says, hides its head—a figure of speech which time has falsified—but the endless speculations opened up by these and similar considerations led Lyell to say, ‘Here I am almost prepared to believe in the ancient existence of the Atlantis of Plato.’”