Archibald Geikie

“ On every side objects of historic interest lie crowded together, about which many pleasant volumes have been and might still be written. If the observer be a lover of geological science he will find an examination of the structure of the hill to impart an additional interest to the scene. From the wide panorama of hill and dale, river and sea, with all its battle-fields, castles, and abbeys, and all its memories of the olden time, let him turn into one of the quarries that indent the flanks of the hill, and try to decipher there the records of a still older history. ”

“ Yonder lies a drier islet, rolling with ferns of every shape and size, with here and there a lofty tree-fern, waving its massive boughs high overhead. The vegetation, rank and luxuriant in the extreme, strikes us as different from anything visible at the present day, though, as our eyes rest on the muddy discoloured current, we can mark, now and then, huge trunks, branchless and bare, that recall some of the living pine-trees. The denizens of the water seem to be equally strange. ”

“ In the stillness of the mountain-glen, he will see on every side traces of the waves of ocean, and when dipping his oars into the unruffled sea among groups of wasted rocks, miles from shore, he will bethink him, perchance, of some old forest-covered land, of which these battered islets are the sole memorials. His enjoyment of the scenery of nature is thus increased manifold, and he carries about with him a power of making even the tamest landscape interesting. ”

“ The traveller who stands on those plains where the human race was cradled, marks still the same valleys with their winding rivers, still the same rocks and hills, still the same blue sky overhead. The dust of centuries has gathered over the graves and the dwellings of the early races, yet the covering is but thin, and if we could conjure from their resting-place some of these venerable patriarchs, they might perhaps see little or no change on the haunts of their boyhood. We feel it otherwise, however, when we contemplate the ocean. In sunshine and in storm its surface never rests. ”

“ He who has witnessed a storm along a rocky coast-line, has marked the breakers battering against the weather-bleached cliffs, and heard the thunder-like rattle of the shingle at the recoil of every wave, needs not to be told how vast an amount of sediment must in this way be formed. The pebbles of the beach are ground down still smaller, the sand produced by their friction finds its way to a lower level, while the finer particles taken up by the water are borne out to sea, and if a current traverse the locality may be transported for leagues, till they at last settle to the bottom. ”

“ A bed of unios will tell us of old rivers and lakes that spread out their blue waters where now, perchance, there lie waving fields of corn. A bed of corals and stone-lilies will lay before us the bottom of an ancient ocean that rolled its restless waves where to-day, perhaps, the quarryman plies his task amid the gloom of dark pine-woods. In short, these organic remains are to the history of the earth what ancient monuments are to the history of man. ”

“ Putting now all these deductions together, our mason would have evolved a very interesting history. He would have ascertained that in a bygone age the spot on which he stood was the site of a lake, tenanted by delicate shells and fringed with reeds and rushes, where the coot and the mallard may have reared their young; that in process of time the vegetation gained upon the water, choking up the lake, so as gradually to form a soil firm enough to support sheep, deer, and oxen, and yielding shady coverts whither the antlered stag could retire and lay him down to die ”

“ That craving for the grand and the sublime, that hungering after cataclysms and convulsions, that insatiable appetite for upheavals, and Titanic earth-throes, and all the mightier machinery of Nature, has done no little mischief to geology. Men have reasoned that gigantic results in the physical structure of the earth must have had equally gigantic causes operating in sublime conflict and in periodic paroxysms, now heaving a mountain chain to the clouds of heaven, now swallowing up a continent in the depths of the sea. ”

“ Thousands of years pass away and we see these same rocks higher and steeper in their outline, brown with algæ and ever wet with surf, while around them stretches a shoreless sea. Ages again roll on, and we mark still the same rocks shooting up as bleak crags covered with ice and snow. Another interval of untold extent elapses, and rock, snow, and ice have all disappeared beneath a broad ocean cumbered with ice-floes and wandering bergs. ”

“ We have lingered, perhaps, too long over the remains of these old carboniferous animals. But the delay may be not without its use if, by thus bringing before us some of the more marked points in the structure of creatures that for ages peopled our planet, it broaden our view of creation; and by lifting the curtain from off a dim, distant period of our world's long history, it show, amid all diversities of arrangement, and all varieties of form, still the same grand principles of design, and the same modes of working as those which we can see and compare among the living forms around us. ”

“ I know of few employments more pleasant than to sit there, amid the calm stillness of a summer evening, when the shadows are beginning to steal along the valleys and creep up the hill-sides, and in that dim fading light to try in fancy to clothe these dry bones with life, to picture the time when they lived and moved in the glassy depths of lakes and seas, or amid the solitudes of jungles and forests, and so to spend a pleasant hour in reverie, till roused at last by the vesper song of the lark, or the low meanings of the night wind as it sighs mournfully through the woods. ”

“ Far away, the distant hills lay shaggy with pine-woods, and nursed in their solitudes the springs and rivulets that worked a devious course through forest, and glen, and valley, until, united into one broad river, they crept through the rich foliage of the delta and finally passed away out to sea, bearing with them a varied burden of drift-wood, pine-trees from the hills, and stray leaves and cones from the lower grounds. ”

“ We have ransacked hundreds of soils replete with the fossil roots of trees,—have dug out hundreds of erect trunks and stumps, which stood in the position in which they grew,—have broken up myriads of cubic feet of fuel, still retaining its vegetable structure,—and, after all, we continue almost as much in the dark regarding the invertebrate air-breathers of this epoch, as if the coal had been thrown down in mid-ocean. ”

“ He will try to thread the windings of the stately river through brakes - 224 - of ferns and calamites, and banks richly hung with tree-ferns and sigillariæ, and then upward through dark shaggy pine-woods, silent and gloomy, with the water creeping lazily through the shade or dashing in white cascades over dripping rocks, and onward still, far away among the distant hills till the fountainhead of the great stream is reached, gushing from the splintered sides of some lone rock, or pouring perchance out of the glimmering caverns of some massive glacier high amid the regions of perpetual snow. ”

“ But whatever may have been the special features of its scenery, there can be no doubt of the land's existence. The carbonized plants stand up to tell us of its strange and luxuriant vegetation. We have listened to their story, and suffered them to lead us away into forest, and lake, and sea, to look on the various forms of life, vegetable and animal, which abounded in that far-distant age. ”

“ Above high-water mark and thus away from the dash of the waves, we can often trace the progress of decay among such sedimentary rocks as sandstones and conglomerates. Worn into holes and scars, projecting cusps and tapering pinnacles, or eaten away into the rude semblance of a human form, headless perchance, or into the shape of a huge table poised on a narrow pedestal, the rock affords an endless variety of aspects and a continual source of pleasure. ”

“ And thus, in what may seem to us sublime antagonism, land is ever rising in the domain of ocean, and ocean ever encroaching on the regions of land. No sooner does a new island, or mountain peak, or wide area of continent, appear above the waves, than the abrading agencies are at work again. Rain, air, frost, rivers, currents, breakers, all begin anew the process of destruction, and cease not until the land has utterly disappeared, and its worn debris has sunk in mid-ocean to be in process of time once more dry land, and suffer another slow process of obliteration. ”

“ East, west, and south, the broad expanse of green field and clustering wood swells upward to the distant hills that encircle the landscape with a wavy line of softest blue. Northward the eye rests on the Firth of Forth with its solitary sails, bounded by the bosky heights of Fife, and opening outwards by the May Island and the Bass Rock into the far-off hazy ocean. ”

“ Every fragment of the rock shows its dozens, nay, hundreds, of stone-lily joints, disjointed indeed, yet easily recognisable. They must have swarmed as thickly along the floor of the sea as the strong-stemmed tangle that darkens the bottom of many a picturesque bay along our western coasts, yet with a gracefulness of outline such as none of our larger sea-weeds can boast. ”

“ Mingled among the minuter quartzy particles lay scores of shells, some with the colour not yet faded, and the valves still together—the delicate tellina, with its polished surface, and its flush of pink; the cardium with its strong white plaited sides, and the turritella with its circling spire; some were worn down and sorely effaced, others broken into fragments by the ceaseless grinding of the waves. It was pleasant labour in such a sultry noon to pick out the shells of one species in all stages of decay. ”

“ We sail on, and soon a sudden turn brings us abruptly to the mouth of the sound. A bold headland, studded around with rocky islets, rises perpendicularly from the sea, bleak and bare, without a bush or tree, or the faintest trace of the proximity of man. The broad swell of the Atlantic comes rolling in among these rocks, and breaks in foam against the grey cliffs overhead. In tempests, such a scene must be of the most terrific kind. Wo to the hapless vessel that is sucked into the vortex of these breakers, whose roar is sometimes heard at the distance of miles! ”

“ Hugh Miller, that a seam of shale abounding in liassic fossils, had been found intercalated among the boulder-clay beds in the vicinity of Eathie. He explained its occurrence there by supposing that it had formed a reef along a shore where ground-ice was forming; and so having been firmly frozen in, it was torn up on the breaking of the ice, and deposited at a distance among the mud at the sea-bottom.
Few sights in nature are more imposing than that of the huge, solitary iceberg, as, regardless alike of wind and tide, it steers its course across the face of the deep far away from land. ”

“ We muse on these petrified relics, gilded by the last rays of the setting sun, when slowly, like a dissolving view, sunset and herbage melt away, and the bottom of the old carboniferous ocean lies before us with its corals and shells and stone-lilies, stretching out their quivering arms, or expanding and contracting their flower-like petals amid a scene of ceaseless animation and activity. ”

“ Occasionally a massive head, with sharp formidable tusks, peers above the surface, and then the gleam of fins and scales reveals a creature some twenty or thirty feet long. Glancing down into the clearer spots, we can detect many other forms of the finny tribes, all cased in a strong glistening armature of scales, and darting about with ceaseless activity. Beyond this scene of almost tropical luxuriance, on the one side, lies the blue ocean, with its countless shells and corals, its stone-lilies and sea-urchins, and its large predaceous fish ”

“ The Hebrides are but the shattered relics of an old land that had its mountain-peaks and its glens, its streams and lakes, and may have nursed in its solitude the red-deer and the eagle, but was never trodden by the foot of man. ”

“ Having now satisfied ourselves that there goes on all over the world an incessant waste of the solid lands, that the disintegrated debris is washed down by rains and transported seawards by rivers, and that the waves are ever eating their way into the iron-bound coast-line as well as into the low alluvial shore, we naturally come to ask the result and end of all this decay. ”

“ Hills rise on all sides, and the water, smooth as a polished mirror, shows so pure and limpid that in the sunshine we can see the white pebbles that strew its bed many fathoms down. The eastern shore is often abruptly interrupted by long-receding lochs edged round with lofty mountains, and thus, where we had looked to see a deep heathy glen, with, perchance, a white tree-shaded mansion in the far distance, and a few dun smoking cottages in front, we are surprised to catch a glimpse of the white sails of a yacht, or the darker canvas of the herring-boats. ”

“ Those who have had experience of field-geology, know how vain it is to attempt to compress into a page or two the results of years, and that a few vague general directions are about the utmost that can be attempted. The practice of the science cannot be taught in books, far less in prefaces, neither can it be learned from them. And so I once more repeat the advice: Get away to the fields. Seek to decipher the geological records for yourself, and look with your own eyes into the long series of ages whose annals lie inscribed among the rocks. ”