Penny Blood: Serial Sensation and Working-Class Entertainment — page 98: what you’re looking at

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

cu. vi.] HYPOTUESIS OF SOLIDITY FAILS. oo lateral compression and elevation took place. Again it sunk, and unconformable beds were deposited. These were again elevated and compressed. Such at least appears to be the interpretation of the description given by the surveyors’. But the point which is material to our present subject is the sinking of the land surface to the depth of nearly three miles, while river deposits to that thickness were being laid down ; the whole being denuded off mountains whose spoils have in more recent times provided materials for the great plains of India; and still those mountains stand the highest in the world. That a sink- ing of the area of the plains of a similar character is yet in pro- gress, is shown by the boring at Fort William, near Calcutta, in which to the depth of 400 feet fresh-water deposits occurred. The conclusion seems irresistible that corresponding to the long, though occasionally interrupted, depression of these plains, a correlative elevation of the great range which has supplied the deposits has been going on. This sinking of river plains and estuaries is an apparently universal occurrence: the great thickness of fluviatile deposits in them cannot otherwise be accounted for. Thus the fluviatile accumulations have been proved in the case of the Po to the depth of 400 feet, of the Ganges to 481, and of the Mississippi to 630 feet”. The recent explorations of the region of the Rocky Mountains by the Government Survey of the United States, has greatly added to our knowledge about the movements of the earth’s crust both in kind and in degree. The rocks affected are of many periods, down to the newer tertiary, and even the quater- nary®. They are cut up by enormous faults into blocks, the throw of the faults being sometimes as much as 40,000 feet. Yet the movements have been so gradual that the rivers have had time to deepen their channels as the plateaux rose, so that they now flow in the profound “ Cafions of the Colorado” some- times more than a mile deep. 1 See Diagram, p. 44. 2 Dr Ricketts, ‘‘ Valleys, Deltas, Bays, and Estuaries,” p. 22. Liverpool, 1872. 8 “High Plateaus of Utah.” Capt. Dutton, Prefatory note by Major Powell, p. viii. See a review of this work by Prof. A. Geikie in “‘ Nature,” Vol, xx. p. 824. F. 6 GONG oOo SS (CO)