Archibald Geikie

“ It is the fate of continents, no less than of the human communities that inhabit them, to have their first origin shrouded in obscurity. When the curtain of darkness begins to rise from our primeval Europe, it reveals to us a scene marvelously unlike that of the existing continent. The land then lay chiefly to the north and northwest, probably extending as far as the edge of the great submarine plateau by which the European ridge is prolonged under the Atlantic for 230 miles to the west of Ireland. ”

“ The land has had a history, not less than the human races that inhabit it.
One can hardly consider attentively the future progress of geography without being convinced that, in the wide development yet in store for this branch of human inquiry, one of its main lines of advance must be in the direction of what may be termed geographical evolution. The geographer will no longer be content to take continents and islands, mountain-chains and river valleys, table-lands and plains, as initial or aboriginal outlines of the earth's surface. ”

“ It may be likened to a block of marble raised out of the quarry—rough and rude in outline, massive in solidity and strength, but giving no indication of the grace into which it will grow under the hand of the sculptor. What art effects upon the marble block, Nature accomplishes upon the surface of the land. ”

“ With the advent of a milder temperature the Arctic vegetation has gradually disappeared from the plains. Driven up step by step before the advancing flora from more genial climates, it retired into the mountains and there to this day continues to maintain itself. The present Alpine flora of the Pyrenees, the Alps, Britain, and Scandinavia, is thus a living record of the ice age. The reindeer and his friends have long since been forced to return to their northern homes.
After this long succession of physical revolutions, man appears as a denizen of the Europe thus prepared for him. ”

“ But in course of time, as civilization grew, he asserted his claim to be one of the geographical forces of the globe. Not content with gathering the fruits and capturing the animals which he found needful for his wants, he gradually entered on a contest with Nature to subdue the earth and to possess it. Nowhere has this warfare been fought out so vigorously as on the surface of Europe. On the one hand, wide dark regions of ancient forest have given place to smiling cornfields. ”

“ No part of the results obtained by the Challenger Expedition has a profounder interest for geologists and geographers than the proof which they furnish that the floor of the ocean-basins has no real analogy among the sedimentary formations which form most of the framework of the land. We now know by actual dredging and inspection that the ordinary sediment washed off the land sinks to the sea-bottom before it reaches the deeper abysses, and that, as a rule, only the finer particles are carried more than a few score of miles from the shore. ”

“ For many generations the surface of the continent has been covered with roads, villages, and towns, bridges, aqueducts, and canals, to which this century has added a multitudinous network of railways, with their embankments and tunnels. In short, wherever man has lived, the ground beneath him bears witness to his presence. ”

“ They will be succeeded by a race that will find its laurels more difficult to win—a race from which more will be expected and which will need to make up in the variety, amount, and value of its detail, what it lacks in the freshness of first glimpses into new lands.
With no other science has geography become more intimately connected than with geology, and the connection is assuredly destined to become yet deeper and closer. ”

“ From the earliest geological times the great area of deposit has been, as it still is, the marginal belt of sea-floor skirting the land. It is there that nature has always strewed "the dust of continents to be." The decay of old rocks has been unceasingly in progress on the land, and the building up of new rocks has been as unintermittently going on underneath the adjoining sea. The two phenomena are the complementary sides of one process, which belongs to the terrestrial and shallow oceanic parts of the earth's surface and not to the wide and deep ocean-basins. ”

“ Thus it ran as a strait between the Bay of Biscay and the Mediterranean, cutting off the Pyrenees and Spain from the rest of the continent. It swept round the north of France, covering the rich fields of Touraine and the wide flats of the Netherlands. It rolled far up the plains of the Danube and stretched thence eastward across the south of Russia into Asia.
By this time not a few of the species of shells which still people the European seas had appeared. So long have they been natives of our area that they have witnessed the rise of a great part of the continent. ”

“ Without entering into this difficult problem in physical geology, it may suffice if we carry with us the idea that our globe must once have had a greater diameter than it now possesses, and that the crumpling of its outer layers, whether due to mere contraction or, as has been suggested, to the escape also of subterranean vapors, affords evidence of this diminution. A little reflection suffices to show us that, even without any knowledge of the actual history of the contraction, we might anticipate that the effects would neither be continuous nor everywhere uniform. ”

“ According to a popular belief, shared in perhaps by not a few geologists, land and sea have been continually changing places. It is supposed that while, on the one hand, there is no part of a continent over which sea-waves may not have rolled, so, on the other, there is no lonely abyss of the ocean where a wide continent may not have bloomed. That this notion rests upon a mistaken interpretation of the facts may be shown from an examination— (1) of the rocks of the land, and (2) of the bottom of the ocean. ”

“ Modern geography studies the distribution of vegetable and animal life over the earth's surface, with the action and reaction between it and the surrounding inorganic world. It traces how man, alike unconsciously and knowingly, has changed the face of nature, and how, on the other hand, the conditions of his geographical environment have molded his own progress. ”

“ At the outset it is of course obvious that, in seeking for data bearing on the general question of rock-weathering, we must admit the kind and amount of such weathering, visible in a town, to be in some measure different from what is normal in nature. So far as the disintegration of rock-surfaces is effected by mineral acids, for example, there must be a good deal more of such chemical change where sulphuric acid is copiously evolved into the atmosphere from thousands of chimneys, than in the pure air of country districts. ”

“ Europe, having nearly its present height and outlines, is swathed deep in snow and ice. Scandinavia and Finland are one vast sheet of ice, that creeps down from the watershed into the Atlantic on the one side, and into the basin of the Baltic on the other. All the high grounds of Britain are similarly buried. The bed of the North Sea as well as of the Baltic is in great measure choked with ice. The Alps, the Pyrenees, the Carpathians, and the Caucasus send down vast glaciers into the plains at their base. ”

“ To this period, termed by geologists the Jurassic, we can trace back the origin of a large part of the rock now forming the surface of the continent, from the low plains of Central England up to the crests of the northern Alps, while in the Mediterranean basin, rocks of the same age cover a large area of the plateau of Spain, and form the central mass of the chain of the Apennines. It is interesting to know that the northwest of Britain continued still to rise as land in spite of all the geographical changes which had taken place to the south and east. ”

“ The soil under old cities has been increased to a depth of many feet by the rubbish of his buildings; the level of the streets of modern Rome stands high above that of the pavement of the Cæsars, and that again above the roadways of the early republic. Over cultivated fields his potsherds are turned up in abundance by the plow. The loam has risen within the walls of his graveyards as generation after generation has moldered into dust. ”

“ So slow and measured has been their march, that even from the earliest times of human history they seem hardly to have advanced at all. But none the less are they surely and steadily transpiring around us. ”

“ In short, the more attentively the stratified rocks of the crust of the earth are studied, the more striking becomes the absence of any formations among them which can legitimately be considered those of a deep sea. ”

“ Angus Smith has pointed out that in towns the mortar of walls may be observed to swell up and lose cohesion from a conversion of its lime into the condition of sulphate. I have already mentioned that sulphate does exist within the substance of the marble, but that its quantity so far as I have observed is too small to be taken into account in this question. The expansive power is exerted in such a way as not sensibly to affect the internal structure and composition of the stone, and this, I imagine, is most probably the work of frost. ”

“ But to learn that it gathers so slowly that the very star-dust which falls from outer space forms an appreciable part of it, brings home to us, as hardly anything else could do, the idea of undisturbed and excessively slow accumulation.
From all this evidence we may legitimately conclude that the present land of the globe, though formed in great measure of marine formations, has never lain under the deep sea ”

“ Thus, while on the one hand we meet with beds of lava and consolidated volcanic ashes, which were undoubtedly erupted at the surface of the ground in ancient periods, and were subsequently buried deep beneath sedimentary accumulations now removed, on the other hand, we find masses of igneous rock which certainly never came near the surface, but must have been arrested in their ascent from below, while still at a great depth, and have been laid bare to the light after the removal of the pile of rock under which they originally lay. ”

“ Their undulations become more frequent and steeper, until, entering within the mountain-region, we find the rocks curved, crumpled, fractured, inverted, tossed over each other into yawning gulf and towering crest, like billows arrested at the height of a furious storm. ”

“ There can be little doubt that it is mainly sulphate of lime. The crust which forms upon our marble tombstones is thus a product of the reaction of the sulphuric acid of the town rain upon the carbonate of lime. A pellicle of amorphous gypsum is deposited upon the marble and incloses the particles of dust which give the characteristic sooty aspect to the stone. This pellicle, of course, when once formed, is comparatively little affected by the chemical activity of rain-water. Hence the conservation of the even surface of the marble. ”

“ While generation after generation of sea creatures drops its bones to the bottom, now here, now there, so exceedingly feeble is the rate of deposit of sediment, that they lie uncovered, mayhap, for centuries, so that the remains which sink today may lie side by side with the moldered and incrusted bones that found their way to the bottom hundreds of years ago. ”

“ When we read a volume of recent travel, while warmly appreciating the spirit of adventure, fertility of resource, presence of mind, and other moral qualities of its author, we instinctively ask ourselves, as we close its pages, What may be the sum of its additions to our knowledge of the earth? ”

“ Granite has been employed for too short a time as a monumental stone in our cemeteries to afford any ready means of measuring even approximately its rate of weathering. Traces of decay in some of its feldspar-crystals may be detected, yet in no case that I have seen is the decay of a polished granite surface sensibly apparent after exposure for fifteen or twenty years. That the polish will disappear, and the surface will gradually roughen as the individual component crystals are more or less easily attacked by the weather, is of course sufficiently evident. ”

“ It seeks to present a luminous picture of the earth's surface, its various forms of configuration, its continents, islands, and oceans, its mountains, valleys, and plains, its rivers and lakes, its climates, plants, and animals. It thus endeavors to produce a picture which shall not be one of mere topographical detail. It ever looks for a connection between scattered facts, tries to ascertain the relations which subsist between the different parts of the globe, their reactions on each other and the function of each in the general economy of the whole. ”

“ Stripping forests from hill and mountain, he has gained his immediate object in the possession of their abundant stores of timber; but he has laid open the slopes to be parched by drought, or to be swept bare by rain. Countries once rich in beauty, and plenteous in all that was needful for his support, are now burned and barren, or almost denuded of their soil. ”

“ The only cause which, so far as our present knowledge goes, could have produced such wide-spread changes is a general contraction of the earth's mass. There can be no doubt that at one time our planet existed in a gaseous, then in a liquid condition. Since these early periods it has continued to lose heat, and consequently to contract and to grow more and more solid, until, as the physicists insist, it has now become practically as rigid as a globe of glass or of steel. ”

“ The ancient high-grounds of Bohemia, the Alps, the Pyrenees, and the Spanish table-land, were either entirely submerged, or at least had their area very considerably reduced. The submergence likewise affected the northwest of Britain; the western Highlands of Scotland lay more than one thousand feet below their present level.
When we turn to the succeeding geological period, that of the Eocene, the proofs of wide-spread submergence are still more striking. A large part of the Old World seems to have sunk down ”

“ The granules which have been cut across or bruised in the cutting and polishing process are first attacked, and removed in solution or drop out of the stone. An obelisk in Greyfriars Churchyard, erected in memory of a lady who died in 1864, has so rough and granular a surface that it might readily be taken for a sandstone. So loosely are the grains held together that a slight motion of the finger will rub them off. In the course of solution and removal, the internal structure of the marble begins to reveal itself. ”

“ Gradually he has been taught by his own bitter experience, that while his aim still is to subdue the earth, he can attain it, not by setting Nature and her laws at defiance, but by enlisting them in his service. ”