I Now Discovered The
Source Of The Beautiful Pebbles Which Had So Pleased Me In The
Riverbed.
The slatey rocks had ceased, and these mountains seemed
to consist of a sandstone conglomerate, which was in some places
a mere mass of pebbles cemented together.
I might have known that
such small streams could not produce such vast quantities of
well-rounded pebbles of the very hardest materials. They had
evidently been formed in past ages, by the action of some
continental stream or seabeach, before the great island of Borneo
had risen from the ocean. The existence of such a system of hills
and valleys reproducing in miniature all the features of a great
mountain region, has an important bearing on the modern theory
that the form of the ground is mainly due to atmospheric rather
than to subterranean action. When we have a number of branching
valleys and ravines running in many different directions within a
square mile, it seems hardly possible to impute their formation,
or even their origination, to rents and fissures produced by
earthquakes. On the other hand, the nature of the rock, so easily
decomposed and removed by water, and the known action of the
abundant tropical rains, are in this case, at least, quite
sufficient causes for the production of such valleys. But the
resemblance between their forms and outlines, their mode of
divergence, and the slopes and ridges that divide them, and those
of the grand mountain scenery of the Himalayas, is so remarkable,
that we are forcibly led to the conclusion that the forces at
work in the two cases have been the same, differing only in the
time they have been in action, and the nature of the material
they have had to work upon.
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