areas within reach
of the waves; fresh portions will each time be removed from the surfaces
previously denuded; and further, some of the newly-formed strata, being
elevated nearly to the level of the water, will be washed away and
re-deposited. In course of time the harder formations of the upraised
sea-bottom will be uncovered. These, being less easily destroyed, will
remain permanently above the surface; and at their margins will arise
the usual breaking down of rocks into beach-sand and pebbles. While in
the slow course of this elevation, going on at the rate of perhaps two
or three feet in a century, most of the sedimentary deposits produced
will be again and again destroyed and reformed; there will, in those
adjacent areas of subsidence which accompany areas of elevation, be more
or less continuous successions of sedimentary deposits lying on the
pre-existing ocean bed. And now, what will be the character of these
strata, old and new? They will contain scarcely any traces of life. The
deposits that had previously been slowly formed at the bottom of this
wide ocean, would be sprinkled with fossils of but few species. The
oceanic Fauna is not a rich one; its hydrozoa do not admit of
preservation; and the hard parts of its few kinds of molluscs and
crustaceans and insects are mostly fragile. Hence, when the ocean-bed
was here and there raised to the surface--when its strata of sediment
with their contained organic fragments were torn up and long washed
about by the breakers before being re-deposited--when the re-deposits
were again and again subject to this violent abrading action by
subsequent small elevations, as they would mostly be; what few fragile
organic remains they contained, would be in nearly all cases destroyed.
Thus such of the first-formed strata as survived the repeated changes of
level, would be practically "azoic;" like the Cambrian of our
geologists. When by the washing away of the soft deposits, the hard
sub-strata had been exposed in the shape of rocky islets, and a footing
had thus been furnished, the pioneers of a new life might be expected to
make their appearance. What would they be? Not any of the surrounding
oceanic species, for these are not fitted for a littoral life; but
species flourishing on some of the far-distant shores of the Pacific. Of
such, the first to establish themselves would be sea-weeds and
zoophytes; because the most readily conveyed on floating wood, &c., and
because when c