Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky | Page 8

parts of Asia and America at other times, may have slowly sunk beneath the ocean, and after long remaining there have slowly risen again.
This is by no means so wild a supposition as it may seem when first heard, and as it doubtless did seem when first proposed. For even in the present day these movements of the solid crust of our earth are going on. The coasts of Sweden and Finland have long been slowly and steadily rising out of the sea, so that the waves can no longer reach so high upon those shores as in years gone by they used to reach. In Greenland, on the contrary, land has long been slowly and steadily sinking, so that what used to be the shore now lies under the sea. Other such risings and sinkings might be mentioned, as also many more in connection with volcanoes and earthquakes, which are neither slow nor steady, but sudden and violent.
So it becomes no impossible matter to believe that, in the course of ages past, all those wide reaches of our continents and islands, where sedimentary rocks are to be found, were each in turn, at one time or another, during long periods, beneath the rolling waters of the ocean....
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These built-up rocks are not only called "Stratified," and "Sedimentary." They have also the name of Aqueous Rock, from the Latin word _aqua, water_; because they are believed to have been formed by the action of the water.
They have yet another and fourth title, which is, Fossiliferous Rocks.
Fossils are the hardened remains of animals and vegetables found in rocks. They are rarely, if ever, seen in unstratified rocks; but many layers of stratified rocks abound in these remains. Whole skeletons as well as single bones, whole tree-trunks as well as single leaves, are found thus embedded in rock-layers, where in ages past the animal or plant died and found a grave. They exist by thousands in many parts of the world, varying in size from the huge skeleton of the elephant to the tiny shell of the microscopic animalcule.
[Illustration: FOSSIL OF CARBONIFEROUS FERN.]
Fossils differ greatly in kind. Sometimes the entire shell or bone is changed into stone, losing all its animal substance, but retaining its old outline and its natural markings. Sometimes the fossil is merely the hardened impress of the outside of a shell or leaf, which has dented its picture on soft clay, and has itself disappeared, while the soft clay has become rock, and the indented picture remains fixed through after-centuries. Sometimes the fossil is the cast of the inside of a shell; the said shell having been filled with soft mud, which has taken its exact shape and hardened, while the shell itself has vanished. The most complete description of fossil is the first of these three kinds. It is wonderfully shown sometimes in fossil wood, where all the tiny cells and delicate fibres remain distinctly marked as of old, only the whole woody substance has changed into hard stone.
[Illustration: FOOTPRINTS FROM TRIASSIC SANDSTONE OF CONNECTICUT.]
But although the fossil remains of quadrupeds and other land-animals are found in large quantities, their number is small compared with the enormous number of fossil sea-shells and sea-animals.
[Illustration: FOSSIL FOOTPRINTS.]
Land-animals can, as a rule, have been so preserved, only when they have been drowned in ponds or rivers, or mired in bogs and swamps, or overtaken by frost, or swept out to sea.
Sea-animals, on the contrary, have been so preserved on land whenever that land has been under the sea; and this appears to have been the case, at one or another past age, with the greater part of our present continents. These fossil remains of sea-animals are discovered in all quarters of the world, not only on the seashore but also far inland, not only deep down underground but also high up on the tops of lofty mountains--a plain proof that over the summits of those mountains the ocean must once have rolled, and this not for a brief space only, but through long periods of time. And not on the mountain-summit only are these fossils known to abound, but sometimes in layer below layer of the mountain, from top to bottom, through thousands of feet of rock.
[Illustration: FOSSIL SHELLS.]
This may well seem puzzling at first sight. Fossils of sea-creatures on a mountain-top are startling enough; yet hardly so startling as the thought of fossils inside that mountain. How could they have found their way thither?
The difficulty soon vanishes, if once we clearly understand that all these thousands of feet of rock were built up slowly, layer after layer, when portions of the land lay deep under the sea. Thus each separate layer of mud or sand or other material became in its turn the top layer, and