Penny Blood: Serial Sensation and Working-Class Entertainment — page 240: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

‘CH. xvit.] EXPLAINED. 223 which enables us at once to appreciate the immense amount of material that has been removed. This is not a singular case, It is a universal phenomenon. Now there is much less diffi- culty in conceiving strata to have been slowly lifted up from below concurrently with their degradation, than in supposing that the dry lands of old time were thousands of feet high where now we measure them by hundreds. We have also the correlative fact of the excessive amount of sediment which an elevated tract has been found capable of yielding, and yet it remains an elevated tract still. Series of strata, five, six, or seven miles thick, and of great superficial extent, can be more easily thus accounted for, than by supposing the area from which they have been derived to have been five, six, or seven miles higher than it stands at present, even if it be now reduced below the sea-level. The doctrine that areas must sink when loaded, and mise when relieved of a load, may perhaps explain other known phenomena, It is not impossible that the raised shell beds of Scandinavia may be partly accounted for by the country having been depressed owing to its being formerly loaded with heavy ice-fields, and that its gradual subsequent rise may have been caused by the ice having been melted off. These beaches are found up to an altitude of about 700 feet’. Putting three feet of ice as equivalent to one of rock, a liberal estimate, 2310 feet additional of ice would, upon the suppositions we have made respecting the relative densities of the crust and sub- stratum, effect this amount of depression’. This would be 1 Lyell’s ‘‘Elements of Geology,” Vol. 1, p. 133, 10th edn, 1872. It may, however, be objected to this idea that several of the species in the shells’ beds are of a Mediterranean type. Croll’s ‘‘Climate and Time,” p. 253. 2 Let x be the height of the surface above the mean upper level when there is no ice, y the depth of the root under the same circumstances. 2’, y’, the like quantities when there is a thickness of z ice. Then we have the four equations, y= 102, y’ =102’ : x’ =2 — 700 + 42, (see text} eo’ +y=2ot+y + yz. Whence z= 2310 feet. CONNEC OOO @ (CO)