any others yet taken. They have revealed the fact that at least two hundred and thirty miles from the coast of Ireland the water is still shallow; or in other words that there is another Ireland only waiting to be raised-thus reversing the famous panacea for keeping the country quiet. It is just beyond this that the true Atlantic begins, the gulf suddenly sinking to nine thousand feet. Thus Ireland may one day have a coast-line as high as the Alps. The whole floor of the Atlantic is paved with a soft sticky substance, called oaze, nine-tenths consisting of very minute animals, many of them mere lumps of jelly and thousands of which could float with case in a drop of water; some resembling toothed wheels, others bundles of spines or threads shooting from a little globule. Some however are endowed with the property of separating flint from the sea-water which is more than every chemist could do. There are hundreds of square miles covered with the skeletons of these little creatures. Part of this oaze is doubtless from the clouds of raindust, which rise from the vast steppes of South America in such masses as to darken the sun and make the animals fly to shelter, and which, after sweeping like a simoom over the country, lose themselves in the "steep Atlantic." No bones have been found of the larger animals, so that the kraken and sea-serpent might sleep their last sleep and leave not a tooth or a vertebra to tell the tale. Not a mast or anchor, not a block or strand, not a coin or a keepsake, has been found to testify of the countless gallant ships and more gallant men who have gone down amid the pitiless waves. "Instead," says Lyell, "of its being part of the plan of Nature to store up enduring records of a large number of the individual plants and animals which have lived on the surface,, it seems to be her chief care to provide the means of disencumbering the habitable areas lying above and below the waters, of those myriads of solid skeletons of animals and those massive trunks of trees, which would otherwise soon choke up every river and fill every valley. To prevent this inconvenience she employs the heat and moisture of the sun and atmosphere, the dissolving power of carbonic and other acids, the grinding teeth and gastric juices of quadrupeds, birds, reptiles, and fish, and the agency of many of the invertebrata." We are all familiar with the efficacy of these and other causes on the land, and as to the bottoms of seas, we have only to read the published reports of Mr. McAndrew, the late Edward Forbes, and other experienced dredgers, who, while they failed utterly in drawing up from the deep a single human bone, declared that they scarcely ever met with a work of art, even after counting tens of thousands of shells and zoophytes collected on a coast-line of several hundred miles in extent, where they often approached within less than half a mile of a land peopled by millions of human beings. A gentleman employed by the dutch government to construct a geological map of Holland, and who accompanied Lyell in a journey over what had once been the Haarlem sea, told Sir Charles that he and those who worked with him had vainly searched for human bones in the deposits which had constituted for three centuries the bed of the great lake. "There had been many a shipwreck and many a naval fight in those waters, and hundreds of dutch and spanish soldiers and sailors had met there with a watery grave. The population which lived on the borders of this ancient sheet of water numbered between thirty and forty thousand souls. In digging the great canal, a fine section had been laid open, about thirty miles long, of the deposits which formed the ancient bottom of the lake. Trenches also innumerable, several feet deep, had been freshly dug on all the farms, and their united length must have amounted to thousands of miles." But all the bed of the sea gave up were a few arms and coins, and some parts of one or two wrecked spanish ships. If so much had perished in a century or two, of all that sank in this dreary sea, it seems strange that anything has been preserved of man in river-beds and old lakes. On our coast the water has been incessantly wearing away one place and filling up another. Tynemouth Castle now overhangs the sea though once separated from it by a tolerably wide tract. At Sunderland the beacon stands or stood where, almost within the memory of old men, people used to go to drink the waters of a In Yorkshire the coast is fast wasting away; of spa. many villages marked in the old maps only the name now remains. Lincoln with its sea-wall scarcely keeps out the encroaching waves; Norfolk and Suffolk are rapidly and ceaselessly eaten away piecemeal. In 1837 Lyell stated there was a depth of twenty feet of water, where forty-eight years before there was a cliff fifty feet high with houses on it. Further south again, Shipden, Wimpwell, and many ancient villages have disappeared. In old times there was a wood a mile and a half east of Dunwich, but the greedy ocean has swallowed both the wood and old Dunwich itself. The church of Minster now near the coast once stood in the middle of the Isle of Sheppey. Reculvers, now being undermined, lay at a safe distance from the ocean; in Leland's time it was nearly half a mile from the seashore, while along the south and west coasts the same wasting is going on. In other parts the restless waves have silted up valuable harbours as if in compensation. The land on which Yarmouth stands only became dry firm ground in the eleventh century, and the sand-hills around it are continually increasing. The Ness in Suffolk is gaining on the sea. Rye, once destroyed by the sea, is now two miles from it. Sandwich, once a port, is now far inland, and from Richbury Castle the sea has still further receded, so that ere an age in geology has rolled by, the map of England will have to be recast. But the havoc the seas work in this way is not so much their doing as that of the restless rising and sinking of the earth, which bars them out on one side only to let them in on the other; it is not the waters that encroach but the land that yields; the ocean does not retire, it is the upheaval of the land that rolls it back. Were Norfolk to rise and Kent to sink, the long buried lands would soon be reclaimed, and the long dried up harbours again echo with the unwonted din of commerce. The waters would soon do their *Bibliotheca Topograph. Brit. 1790. |