noes to the level of the
ocean; and while the Old Red Sandstone, thus produced, and charged with
fish killed by the heat, was settling on their flanks, they themselves,
as if seized by black vomit, began to disgorge in vast quantities, coal
in the liquid state. Very opportunely, just ere it cooled, enormous
quantities of vegetables, washed out to sea by the extraordinary land
floods, were precipitated immediately over it; and, sticking in its
viscid surface, or sinking into its substance through cracks formed in
it during the cooling, they became attached to it in such considerable
masses, as to lead long after to the very mistaken notion that coal
itself was of vegetable origin. Then there ensued another deposit of red
sand, with salt boiled into it; and then a deposition of lime and clay.
The land floods still continuing, the great Sauroid reptiles which had
haunted the rivers and lower plains began to yield to their force, and
their carcasses, floating out to sea, sank amid the slowly subsiding
lime and clay, now known as the Lias. The volcanoes too were still very
active; and the lighter shells, ammonites, and the like, which had been
previously bobbing up and down on the boiling surface, now sank by
myriads; for the viscid argillaceous mud thrown up by the fiery
ebullitions from beneath stuck fast to them, and dragged them down. Then
came the formation of the Oolite, rolled into little egg-like pellets by
the waves; and last of all, the Green sand and Chalk; after which the
waters ran off, and sank into the deep hollow which now forms the bed of
the ocean, but which previous to the cataclysm had been the place of the
land. The dean, as he went on, fell into some little confusion regarding
the true place of some of his animals, such as the megatherium, which
arrived in his arrangement a little too soon. He spoke, too--if a
newspaper report is to be credited--of a heavy creature soon overtaken
and drowned by the rising waters, which he termed the _pterogactylus_,
and which does not seem to have turned up, either in the body or out of
it, since it was lost on that memorable occasion. Nor did he make any
provision in his arrangement for the formation of the various Tertiary
deposits. But then all these are slight matters, that could be very
easily woven into his hypothesis. As the flood rose along the hill
sides, first such of the weightier animals would perish as could not
readily climb steep acclivities; and then the o