up of lakes, the formation of
deltas, the cutting power of running water, the deposit of travertines,
the denudation of immense tracts of country, the carrying of their
detritus into the sea, the changes of shores by tides and waves, the
formation of strata hundreds of miles in length, and the imbedding
therein of fossil remains in numbers almost beyond belief, furnished
many interesting and important facts. Of these not a few presented means
of computation. It would not be difficult to assign a date for such
geographical events as the production of the Caspian and Dead Seas from
an examination of the sum of saline material contained in their waters
and deposited in their bed, with the annual amount brought into them by
their supplying rivers. Such computations were executed as respects the
growth of Lower Egypt and the backward cutting of Niagara Falls, and,
though they might be individually open to criticism, their mutual
accordance and tendency furnished an evidence that could not be
gainsaid. The continual accumulation of such evidence ought not to be
without its weight on those who are still disposed to treat slightingly
the power of geological facts in developing truth.

[Sidenote: and from the movements of the earth's crust.] To such facts
were added all those, with which volumes might be filled, proving the
universality of the movements of the solid crust of the earth--strata
once necessarily horizontal now inclined at all angles, strata
unconformable to one another--a body of evidence most copious and most
satisfactory, yet demonstrating from the immensity of the results how
slowly the work had gone on.

How was it possible to conceive that beds many hundred feet in thickness
should have been precipitated suddenly from water? Their mechanical
condition implied slow disintegration and denudation in other localities
to furnish material; their contents showed no trace of violence; they
rather proved the deposition to have occurred in a tranquil and quiet
way. What interpretation could be put upon facts continually increasing
in number like those observed in the south-east of England, where
fresh-water beds a thousand feet thick are covered by other beds a
thousand feet thick, but of marine origin? What upon those in the north
of England, where masses once uplifted a thousand feet above the level,
and, at the time of their elevation, presenting abrupt precipices and
cliffs of that height, as is proved by the fract