level, is an ancient sea-beach, five-and-thirty feet thick, lying
on great ice-scratched boulders, which again lie on the mountain
slates. It was discovered by the late Mr. Trimmer, now, alas! lost
to Geology. Out of that beach fifty-seven different species of
shells have been taken; eleven of them are now exclusively Arctic,
and not found in our seas; four of them are still common to the
Arctic seas and to our own; and almost all the rest are northern
shells.

Fourteen hundred feet above the present sea: and that, it must be
understood, is not the greatest height at which such shells may be
found hereafter. For, according to Professor Ramsay, drift of the
same kind as that on Moel Tryfaen is found at a height of two
thousand three hundred feet.

Now I ask my readers to use their common sense over this astounding
fact--which, after all, is only one among hundreds; to let (as Mr.
Matthew Arnold would well say) their "thought play freely" about it;
and consider for themselves what those shells must mean. I say not
may, but must, unless we are to believe in a "Deus quidam deceptor,"
in a God who puts shells upon mountain-sides only to befool honest
human beings, and gives men intellects which are worthless for even
the simplest work. Those shells must mean that that mountain, and
therefore the mountains round it, must have been once fourteen
hundred feet at least lower than they are now. That the sea in which
they were sunk was far colder than now. That icebergs brought and
dropped boulders round their flanks. That upon those boulders a sea-
beach formed, and that dead shells were beaten into it from a sea-
bottom close by. That, and no less, Moel Tryfaen must mean.

But it must mean, also, a length of time which has been well called
"appalling." A length of time sufficient to let the mountain sink
into the sea. Then length of time enough to enable those Arctic
shells to crawl down from the northward, settle, and propagate
themselves generation after generation; then length of time enough to
uplift their dead remains, and the beach, and the boulders, and all
Snowdonia, fourteen hundred feet into the air. And if anyone should
object that the last upheaval may have been effected suddenly by a
few tremendous earthquakes, we must answer--We have no proof of it.
Earthquakes upheave lands now only by slight and intermittent upward
pulses; nay, some lands we know to rise without an