The Plains, At First Sight, Would Appear To Have Been Brought Down By
The Rivers From The Mountains.
The stones upon them are all water-worn,
and they are traversed by a great number of old water-courses, all
tending more or less from the mountains to the sea.
How, then, are we
to account for the deep and very wide channels cut by the rivers? - for
channels, it may be, more than a mile broad, and flanked on either side
by steep terraces, which, near the mountains, are several feet high? If
the rivers cut these terraces, and made these deep channels, the plains
must have been there already for the rivers to cut them. It must be
remembered that I write without any scientific knowledge.
How, again, are we to account for the repetition of the phenomenon
exhibited by the larger rivers, in every tributary, small or great, from
the glaciers to the sea? They are all as like as pea to pea in
principle, though of course varying in detail. Yet every trifling
watercourse, as it emerges from mountainous to level ground, presents
the same phenomenon, namely, a large gully, far too large for the water
which could ever have come down it, gradually widening out, and then
disappearing. The general opinion here among the reputed cognoscenti
is, that all these gullies were formed in the process of the gradual
upheaval of the island from the sea, and that the plains were originally
sea-bottoms, slowly raised, and still slowly raising themselves.
Doubtless, the rivers brought the stones down, but they were deposited
in the sea.
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