Chapter 1852
[←1842]
Violent minor cataclysms and colossal earthquakes are recorded in the annals of most nations—if not of all. Elevation and subsidence of continents is always in progress. The whole coast of South America has been raised up 10 to 15 feet and settled down again in an hour. Huxley has shown that the British Islands have been four times depressed beneath the ocean and subsequently raised again and peopled. The Alps, Himâlayas and Cordilleras were all the result of depositions drifted on to sea-bottoms and upheaved by Titanic forces to their present elevation. The Sahara was the basin of a Miocene sea. Within the last five or six thousand years the shores of Sweden, Denmark and Norway, have risen from 200 to 600 feet; in Scotland there are raised beaches with outlying stacks and skerries surmounting the shore now eroded by the hungry wave. The North of Europe is still rising from the sea, and South America presents the phenomenon of raised beaches of over 1,000 miles in length, now at a height varying from 100 to 1,300 feet above the sea-level. On the other hand, the coast of Greenland is sinking fast, so much so that the Greenlander will not build by the shore. All these phenomena are certain. Why then may not a gradual change have given place to a violent cataclysm in remote epochs—such cataclysms occurring on a minor scale even now, e.g., the case of Sunda Island with the destruction of 80,000 Malays?