Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man/Chapter 3

by Charles Lyell

 

CHAPTER III.

FOSSIL HUMAN REMAINS AND WORKS OF ART OF THE RECENT PERIOD,

Continued.

DELTA AND ALLUVIAL PLAIN OF THE NILE—BURNT BRICKS IN EGYPT BEFORE THE ROMAN ERA—BORINGS IN 1851–54—ANCIENT MOUNDS OF THE VALLEY OF THE OHIO—THEIR ANTIQUITY—SEPULCHRAL MOUND AT SANTOS IN BRAZIL—DELTA OF THE MISSISSIPPI—ANCIENT HUMAN REMAINS IN CORAL REEFS OF FLORIDA—CHANGES IN PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY IN THE HUMAN PERIOD—BURIED CANOES IN MARINE STRATA NEAR GLASGOW—UPHEAVAL SINCE THE ROMAN OCCUPATION OF THE SHORES OF THE FIRTH OF FORTH—FOSSIL WHALES NEAR STIRLING—UPRAISED MARINE STRATA OF SWEDEN ON SHORES OF THE BALTIC AND THE OCEAN—ATTEMPTS TO COMPUTE THEIR AGE.

 

Delta and Alluvial Plain of the Nile.

SOME new facts of high interest illustrating the geology of the alluvial land of Egypt were brought to light between the years 1851 and 1854, in consequence of investigations suggested to the Royal Society by Mr. Leonard Horner, and which were partly carried out at the expense of the Society. The practical part of the undertaking was entrusted by Mr. Horner to an Armenian officer of engineers, Hekekyan Bey, who had for many years pursued his scientific studies in England, and was in every way highly qualified for the task.

It was soon found that to obtain the required information respecting the nature, depth, and contents of the Nile mud in various parts of the valley, a larger outlay was called for than had been originally contemplated. This expense the late viceroy, Abbas Pacha, munificently undertook to defray out of his treasury, and his successor, after his death, continued the operations with the same princely liberality.

Several engineers and a body of sixty workmen were employed under the superintendence of Hekekyan Bey, men inured to the climate, and able to carry on the sinking of shafts and borings during the hot months, after the waters of the Nile had subsided, and in a season which would have been fatal to Europeans.

The results of chief importance arising out of this enquiry were obtained from two sets of shafts and borings sunk at intervals in lines crossing the great valley from east to west. One of these consisted of no less than fifty-one pits and artesian perforations, made where the valley is sixteen miles wide from side to side between the Arabian and Lybian deserts, in the latitude of Heliopolis, about eight miles above the apex of the delta. The other line of borings and pits, twenty-seven in number, was in the parallel of Memphis, where the valley is only five miles broad.

Everywhere in these sections the sediment passed through was similar in composition to the ordinary Nile mud of the present day, except near the margin of the valley, where thin layers of quartzose sand, such as is sometimes blown from the adjacent desert by violent winds, was observed to alternate with the loam.

A remarkable absence of lamination and stratification was observed almost universally in the sediment brought up from all points except where the sandy layers above alluded to occurred, the mud agreeing closely in character with the ancient loam of the Rhine, called loess. Mr. Horner attributes this want of all indication of successive deposition to the extreme thinness of the film of matter which is thrown down annually on the great alluvial plain during the season of inundation. The tenuity of this layer must indeed be extreme, if the French engineers are tolerably correct in their estimate of the amount of sediment formed in a century, which they suppose not to exceed on the average five inches. When the waters subside, this thin layer of new soil, exposed to a hot sun, dries rapidly, and clouds of dust are raised by the winds. The superficial deposit, moreover, is disturbed almost everywhere by agricultural labours, and even were this not the case, the action of worms, insects, and the roots of plants would suffice to confound together the deposits of two successive years.

All the remains of organic bodies, such as land-shells, and the bones of quadrupeds, found during the excavations be longed to living species. Bones of the ox, hog, dog, dromedary, and ass were not uncommon, but no vestiges of extinct mammalia. No marine shells were anywhere detected; but this was to be expected, as the borings, though they sometimes reached as low as the level of the Mediterranean, were never carried down below it,—a circumstance much to be regretted, since where artesian perforations have been made in deltas, as in those of the Po and Granges, to the depth of several hundred feet below the sea level, it has been found, contrary to expectation, that the deposits passed through were fluviatile throughout, implying, probably, that a general subsidence of those deltas and alluvial formations has taken place. Whether there has been in like manner a sinking of the land in Egypt, we have as yet no means of proving; but Sir Gardner Wilkinson infers it from the position in the delta on the shore near Alexandria of the tombs commonly called Cleopatra's Baths, which cannot, he says, have been originally built so as to be exposed to the sea which now fills them, but must have stood on land above the level of the Mediterranean. The same author adduces, as additional signs of subsidence, some ruined towns, now half under water, in the Lake Menzaleh, and channels of ancient arms of the Nile submerged with their banks beneath the waters of that same lagoon.

In some instances, the excavations made under the superintendence of Hekekyan Bey were on a large scale for the first sixteen or twenty-four feet, in which cases jars, vases, pots, and a small human figure in burnt clay, a copper knife, and other entire articles were dug up; but when water soaking through from the Nile was reached, the boring instrument used was too small to allow of more than fragments of works of art being brought up. Pieces of burnt brick and pottery were extracted almost everywhere, and from all depths, even where they sank sixty feet below the surface towards the central parts of the valley. In none of these cases did they get to the bottom of the alluvial soil. It has been objected, among other criticisms, that the Arabs can always find whatever their employers desire to obtain. Even those who are too well acquainted with the sagacity and energy of Hekekyan Bey to suspect him of having been deceived, have suggested that the artificial objects might have fallen into old wells which had been filled up. This notion is inadmissible for many reasons. Of the ninety-five shafts and borings, seventy or more were made far from the sites of towns or villages; and allowing that every field may once have had its well, there would be but small chance of the borings striking upon the site even of a small number of them in seventy experiments.

Others have suggested that the Nile may have wandered over the whole valley, undermining its banks on one side and filling up old channels on the other. It has also been asked whether the delta with the numerous shifting arms of the river may not once have been at every point where the auger pierced.^[1] To all these objections there are two obvious answers:—First, in historical times the Nile has on the whole been very stationary, and has not shifted its position in the valley; secondly, if the mud pierced through had been thrown down by the river in ancient channels, it would have been stratified, and would not have corresponded so closely with inundation mud. We learn from Captain Newbold that he observed in some excavations in the great plain alternations of sand and clay, such as are seen in the modern banks of the Nile; but in the borings made by Hekekyan Bey, such stratification seems scarcely in any case to have been detected.

The great aim of the criticisms above enumerated has been to get rid of the supposed anomaly of finding burnt brick and pottery at depths and places which would give them claim to an antiquity far exceeding that of the Roman domination in Egypt. For until the time of the Romans, it is said, no clay was burnt into bricks in the valley of the Nile. But a distinguished antiquary, Mr. S. Birch, assures me that this notion is altogether erroneous, and that he has under his charge in the British Museum, first, a small rectangular baked brick, which came from a Theban tomb, which bears the name of Thothmes, a superintendent of the granaries of the god Amen Ra, the style of art, inscription, and name, showing that it is as old as the 18th dynasty (about 1450 B.C.); secondly, an arched brick, or one which with others made up an arch, having an inscription, partly obliterated, but ending with the words 'of the temple of Amen Ra.' This brick, decidedly long anterior to the Roman dominion, is referred conjecturally, by Mr. Birch, to the 19th dynasty, or 1300 B.C.

M. Girard, of the French expedition to Egypt, supposed the average rate of the increase of Nile mud on the plain between Asouan and Cairo to be five English inches in a century. This conclusion, according to Mr. Horner, is very vague, and founded on insufficient data; the amount of matter thrown down by the waters in different parts of the plain varying so much, that to strike an average with any approach to accuracy must be most difficult. Were we to assume six inches in a century, the burnt brick met with at a depth of sixty feet would be 12,000 years old.

Another fragment of red brick was found by Linant Bey, in a boring seventy-two feet deep, being two or three feet below the level of the Mediterranean, in the parallel of the apex of the delta, 200 metres distant from the river, on the Libyan side of the Rosetta branch.^[2] M. Rosière, in the great French work on Egypt, has estimated the mean rate of deposit of sediment in the delta at two inches and three lines in a century^[3]; were we to take two and a half inches, a work of art seventy-two feet deep must have been buried more than 30,000 years ago. But if the boring of Linant Bey was made where an arm of the river had been silted up at a time when the apex of the delta was somewhat farther south, or more distant from the sea than now, the brick in question might be comparatively very modern.

The experiments instituted by Mr. Horner, in the hope of obtaining an accurate chronometric scale for testing the age of a given thickness of Nile sediment, are not considered by experienced Egyptologists to have been satisfactory. The point sought to be determined was the exact amount of Nile mud which had accumulated in 3000 or more years, since the time when certain ancient monuments, such as the obelisk at Heliopolis, or the statue of king Ramesses at Memphis, are supposed by some antiquaries to have been erected. Could we have obtained possession of such a measure, the rate of deposition might be judged of, approximately at least, whenever similar mud was observed in other places, or below the foundations of those same monuments. But the ancient Egyptians are known to have been in the habit of enclosing with embankments, the areas on which they erected temples, statues, and obelisks, so as to exclude the waters of the Nile; and the point of time to be ascertained, in every case where we find a monument buried to a certain depth in mud, as at Memphis and Heliopolis, is the era when the city fell into such decay that the ancient embankments were neglected, and the river allowed to inundate the site of the temple, obelisk, or statue.

Even if we knew the date of the abandonment of such embankments, the enclosed areas would not afford a favourable opportunity for ascertaining the average rate of deposit in the alluvial plain; for Herodotus tells us that in his time those spots from which the Nile waters had been shut out for centuries appeared sunk, and could be looked down into from the surrounding grounds, which had been raised by the gradual accumulation over them of sediment annually thrown down. If the waters at length should break into such depressions, they must at first carry with them into the enclosure much mud washed from the steep surrounding banks, so that a greater quantity would be deposited in a few years than perhaps in as many centuries on the great plain outside the depressed area, where no such disturbing causes intervened.

 

Ancient Mounds of the Valley of the Ohio.

As I have already given several European examples of monuments of pre-historic date belonging to the recent period, I will now turn to the American continent. Before the scientific investigation by Messrs. Squier and Davis of the 'Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley,'^[4] no one suspected that the plains of that river had been occupied, for ages before the French and British colonists settled there, by a nation of older date, and more advanced in the arts than the Red Indians whom the Europeans found there. There are hundreds of large mounds in the basin of the Mississippi, and especially in the valleys of the Ohio and its tributaries, which have served, some of them for temples, others for outlook or defence, and others for sepulture. The unknown people by whom they were constructed, judging by the form of several skulls dug out of the burial-places, were of the Mexican or Toltecan race. Some of the earthworks are on so grand a scale as to embrace areas of fifty or a hundred acres within a simple enclosure, and the solid contents of one mound are estimated at twenty millions of cubic feet, so that four of them would be more than equal in bulk to the Great Pyramid of Egypt, which comprises seventy-five millions. From several of these repositories pottery and ornamental sculpture have been taken, and various articles in silver and copper, also stone weapons, some composed of hornstone unpolished, and much resembling in shape some ancient flint implements found near Amiens and other places in Europe, to be alluded to in the sequel.

It is clear that the Ohio mound-builders had commercial intercourse with the natives of distant regions, for among the buried articles some are made of native copper from Lake Superior, and there are also found mica from the Alleghanies, sea-shells from the Gulf of Mexico, and obsidian from the Mexican mountains.

The extraordinary number of the mounds implies a long period, during which a settled agricultural population had made considerable progress in civilization, so as to require large temples for their religious rites, and extensive fortifications to protect them from their enemies. The mounds were almost all confined to fertile valleys or alluvial plains, and some at least are so ancient, that rivers have had time since their construction to encroach on the lower terraces which support them, and again to recede for the distance of nearly a mile, after having undermined and destroyed a part of the works. When the first European settlers entered the valley of the Ohio, they found the whole region covered with an uninterrupted forest, and tenanted by the Red Indian hunter, who roamed over it without any fixed abode, or any traditionary connection with his more civilized predecessors. The only positive data as yet obtained for calculating the minimum of time which must have elapsed since the mounds were abandoned, has been derived from the age and nature of the trees found growing on some of these earthworks. When I visited Marietta in 1842, Dr. Hildreth took me to one of the mounds, and showed me where he had seen a tree growing on it, the trunk of which when cut down displayed eight hundred rings of annual growth.^[5] But the late General Harrison, President in 1841 of the United States, who was well skilled in woodcraft, has remarked, in a memoir on this subject, that several generations of trees must have lived and died before the mounds could have been overspread with that variety of species which they supported when the white man first beheld them, for the number and kinds of trees were precisely the same as those which distinguished the surrounding forest. 'We may be sure,' observed Harrison, 'that no trees were allowed to grow so long as the earthworks were in use; and when they were forsaken, the ground, like all newly cleared land in Ohio, would for a time be monopolised by one or two species of tree, such as the yellow locust and the black or white walnut. When the individuals which were the first to get possession of the ground had died out one after the other, they would in many cases, instead of being replaced by the same species, be succeeded (by virtue of the law which makes a rotation of crops profitable in agriculture) by other kinds, till at last, after a great number of centuries (several thousand years, perhaps), that remarkable diversity of species characteristic of North America, and far exceeding what is seen in European forests, would be established.'

 

Mounds of Santos in Brazil.

I will next say a few words respecting certain human bones embedded in a solid rock at Santos in Brazil, to which I called attention in my Travels in America in 1842.^[6] I then imagined the deposit containing them to be of submarine origin,—an opinion which I have long ceased to entertain. We learn from a memoir of Dr. Meigs, that the River Santos has undermined a large mound, fourteen feet in height, and about three acres in area, covered with trees, near the town of St. Paul, and has exposed to view many skeletons, all inclined at angles between 20º and 25º, and all placed in a similar east and west position.^[7] Seeing, in the Museum of Philadelphia, fragments of the calcareous stone or tufa from this spot, containing a human skull with teeth, and in the same matrix, oysters with serpulæ attached, I at first concluded that the whole deposit had been formed beneath the waters of the sea, or at least, that it had been submerged after its origin, and again upheaved; also, that there had been time since its emergence for the growth on it of a forest of large trees. But after reading again, with more care, the original memoir of Dr. Meigs, I cannot doubt that the shells, like those of eatable kinds, so often accumulated in the mounds of the North American Indians not far from the sea, may have been brought to the place and heaped up with other materials at the time when the bodies were buried. Subsequently, the whole artificial earthwork, with its shells and skeletons, may have been bound together into a solid stone by the infiltration of carbonate of lime, and the mound may therefore be of no higher antiquity than some of those above alluded to on the Ohio, which, as we have seen, have in like manner been exposed in the course of ages to the encroachments and undermining action of rivers.

 

Delta of the Mississippi.

I have shown in my Travels in North America that the deposits forming the delta and alluvial plain of the Mississippi consist of sedimentary matter, extending over an area of 30,000 square miles, and known in some parts to be several hundred feet deep. Although we cannot estimate correctly how many years it may have required for the river to bring down from the upper country so large a quantity of earthy matter—the data for such a computation being as yet incomplete—we may still approximate to a minimum of the time which such an operation must have taken, by ascertaining experimentally the annual discharge of water by the Mississippi, and the mean annual amount of solid matter contained in its waters. The lowest estimate of the time required would lead us to assign a high antiquity, amounting to many tens of thousands of years (probably more than 100,000) to the existing delta.

Whether all or how much of this formation may belong to the recent period, as above defined, I cannot pretend to decide, but in one part of the modern delta near New Orleans, a large excavation has been made for gas-works, where a succession of beds, almost wholly made up of vegetable matter, has been passed through, such as we now see forming in the cypress swamps of the neighbourhood, where the deciduous cypress (Taxodium distichum), with its strong and spreading roots, plays a conspicuous part. In this excavation, at the depth of sixteen feet from the surface, beneath four buried forests superimposed one upon the other, the workmen are stated by Dr. B. Dowler to have found some charcoal and a human skeleton, the cranium of which is said to belong to the aboriginal type of the Red Indian race. As the discovery in question had not been made when I saw the excavation in progress at the gas-works in 1846, I cannot form an opinion as to the value of the chronological calculations which have led Dr. Dowler to ascribe to this skeleton an antiquity of 50,000 years. In several sections, both natural in the banks of the Mississippi and its numerous arms, and where artificial canals had been cut, I observed erect stumps of trees, with their roots attached, buried in strata at different heights, one over the other. I also remarked, that many cypresses which had been cut through, exhibited many hundreds of rings of annual growth, and it then struck me that nowhere in the world could the geologist enjoy a more favourable opportunity for estimating in years the duration of certain portions of the recent epoch.^[8]

 

Coral Reefs of Florida.

Professor Agassiz has described a low portion of the peninsula of Florida as consisting of numerous reefs of coral, which have grown in succession so as to give rise to a continual annexation of land, gained gradually from the sea in a southerly direction. This growth is still in full activity, and assuming the rate of advance of the land to be one foot in a century, the reefs being built up from a depth of seventy-five feet, and that each reef has in its turn added ten miles to the coast, Professor Agassiz calculates that it has taken 135,000 years to form the southern half of this peninsula. Yet the whole is of post-tertiary origin, the fossil zoophytes and shells being all of the same species as those now inhabiting the neighbouring sea.^[9] In a calcareous conglomerate forming part of the above-mentioned series of reefs, and supposed by Agassiz, in accordance with his mode of estimating the rate of growth of those reefs, to be about 10,000 years old, some fossil human remains were found by Count Pourtalis. They consisted of jaws and teeth, with some bones of the foot.

 

Recent Deposits of Seas and Lakes.

I have shown, in the Principles of Geology, where the recent changes of the earth illustrative of geology are described at length, that the deposits accumulated at the bottom of lakes and seas within the last 4000 or 5000 years can neither be insignificant in volume or extent. They lie hidden, for the most part, from our sight; but we have opportunities of examining them at certain points where newly-gained land in the deltas of rivers has been cut through during floods, or where coral reefs are growing rapidly, or where the bed of a sea or lake has been heaved up by subterranean movements and laid dry.

As examples of such changes of level by which marine deposits of the recent period have become accessible to human observation, I have adduced the strata near Naples in which the Temple of Serapis at Pozzuoli was entombed.^[10] These upraised strata, the highest of which are about twenty-five feet above the level of the sea, form a terrace skirting the eastern shore of the Bay of Baiæ. They consist partly of clay, partly of volcanic matter, and contain fragments of sculpture, pottery, and the remains of buildings, together with great numbers of shells, retaining in part their colour, and of the same species as those now inhabiting the neighbouring sea. Their emergence can be proved to have taken place since the beginning of the sixteenth century.

In the same work, as an example of a fresh-water deposit of the recent period, I have described certain strata in Cashmere, a country where violent earthquakes, attended by alterations in the level of the ground, are frequent, in which fresh-water shells of species now inhabiting the lakes and rivers of that region are embedded, together with the remains of pottery, often at the depth of fifty feet, and in which a splendid Hindoo temple has lately been discovered, and laid open to view by the removal of the lacustrine silt which had enveloped it for four or five centuries.

In the same treatise (ch. xxix.) it is stated, that the west coast of South America, between the Andes and the Pacific, is a great theatre of earthquake movements, and that permanent upheavals of the land of several feet at a time have been experienced since the discovery of America. In various parts of the littoral region of Chili and Peru, strata have been observed enclosing shells in abundance, all agreeing specifically with those now swarming in the Pacific. In one bed of this kind, in the island of San Lorenzo, near Lima, Mr. Darwin found, at the altitude of eighty-five feet above the sea, pieces of cotton-thread, plaited rush, and the head of a stalk of Indian corn, the whole of which had evidently been embedded with the shells. At the same height, on the neighbouring mainland, he found other signs corroborating the opinion that the ancient bed of the sea had there also been uplifted eighty-five feet since the region was first peopled by the Peruvian race. But similar shelly masses are also met with at much higher elevations, at innumerable points between the Chilian and Peruvian Andes and the sea-coast, in which no human remains have as yet been observed. The preservation for an indefinite period of such perishable substances as thread is explained by the entire absence of rain in Peru. The same articles, had they been enclosed in the permeable sands of an European raised beach, or in any country where rain falls even for a small part of the year, would probably have disappeared entirely.

In the literature of the last century, we find frequent allusion to the 'era of existing continents,' a period supposed to have coincided in date with the first appearance of man upon the earth, since which event it was imagined that the relative level of the sea and land had remained stationary, no important geographical changes having occurred, except some slight additions to the deltas of rivers, or the loss of narrow strips of land where the sea had encroached upon its shores. But modern observations have tended continually to dispel this delusion, and the geologist is now convinced that at no given era of the past have the boundaries of land and sea, or the height of the one and depth of the other, or the geographical range of the species inhabiting them, whether of animals or plants, become fixed and unchangeable. Of the extent to which fluctuations have been going on since the globe had already become the dwelling-place of man, some idea may be formed from the examples which I shall give in this and the next nine chapters.

 

Upheaval since the Human Period of the Central District of Scotland.

It has long been a fact familiar to geologists, that, both on the east and west coasts of the central part of Scotland, there are lines of raised beaches, containing marine shells of the same species as those now inhabiting the neighbouring sea.^[11] The two most marked of these littoral deposits occur at heights of about forty and twenty-five feet above high-water mark, that of forty feet being considered as the more ancient, and owing its superior elevation to a longer continuance of the upheaving movement. They are seen in some places to rest on the boulder clay of the glacial period, which will be described in future chapters.

In those districts where large rivers, such as the Clyde, Forth, and Tay, enter the sea, the lower of the two deposits, or that of twenty-five feet, expands into a terrace fringing the estuaries, and varying in breadth from a few yards to several miles. Of this nature are the flat lands which occur along the margin of the Clyde at Glasgow, which consist of finely laminated sand, silt, and clay. Mr. John Buchanan, a zealous antiquary, writing in 1855, informs us, that in the course of the eighty years preceding that date, no less than seventeen canoes had been dug out of this estuarine silt, and that he had personally inspected a large number of them before they were exhumed. Five of them lay buried in silt under the streets of Glasgow, one in a vertical position with the prow uppermost as if it had sunk in a storm. In the inside of it were a number of marine shells. Twelve other canoes were found about a hundred yards back from the river, at the average depth of about nineteen feet from the surface of the soil, or seven feet above high-water mark; but a few of them were only four or five feet deep, and consequently more than twenty feet above the sea-level. One was sticking in the sand at an angle of 45º, another had been capsized, and lay bottom uppermost; all the rest were in a horizontal position, as if they had sunk in smooth water.^[12]

Nearly all of these ancient boats were formed out of a single oak-stem, hollowed out by blunt tools, probably stone axes, aided by the action of fire; a few were cut beautifully smooth, evidently with metallic tools. Hence a gradation could be traced from a pattern of extreme rudeness to one showing no small mechanical ingenuity. Two of them were built of planks, one of which, dug up on the property of Bankton in 1853, was eighteen feet in length, and very elaborately constructed. Its prow was not unlike the beak of an antique galley; its stern, formed of a triangular-shaped piece of oak, fitted in exactly like those of our day. The planks were fastened to the ribs, partly by singularly shaped oaken pins, and partly by what must have been square nails of some kind of metal; these had entirely disappeared, but some of the oaken pins remained. This boat had been upset, and was lying keel uppermost, with the prow pointing straight up the river. In one of the canoes, a beautifully polished celt or axe of greenstone was found, in the bottom of another a plug of cork, which, as Mr. Geikie remarks, "could only have come from the latitudes of Spain, Southern France, or Italy."^[13]

There can be no doubt that some of these buried vessels are of far more ancient date, than others. Those most roughly hewn, may be relics of the stone period; those more smoothly cut, of the bronze age; and the regularly built boat of Bankton may perhaps come within the age of iron. The occurrence of all of them in one and the same upraised marine formation by no means implies that they belong to the same era, for in the beds of all great rivers and estuaries, there are changes continually in progress brought about by the deposition, removal, and redeposition of gravel, sand, and fine sediment, and by the shifting of the channel of the main currents from year to year, and from century to century. All these it behoves the geologist and antiquary to bear in mind, so as to be always on their guard, when they are endeavouring to settle the relative date, whether of objects of art or of organic remains embedded in any set of alluvial strata. Some judicious observations on this head occur in Mr. Geikie's memoir above cited, which are so much in point that I shall give them in full, and in his own words.

'The relative position in the silt, from which the canoes were exhumed, could help us little in any attempt to ascertain their relative ages, unless they had been found vertically above each other. The varying depths of an estuary, its banks of silt and sand, the set of its currents, and the influence of its tides in scouring out alluvium from some parts of its bottom and redepositing it in others, are circumstances which require to be taken into account in all such calculations. Mere coincidence of depth from the present surface of the ground, which is tolerably uniform in level, by no means necessarily proves contemporaneous deposition. Nor would such an inference follow even from the occurrence of the remains in distant parts of the very same stratum. A canoe might be capsized and sent to the bottom just beneath low-water mark; another might experience a similar fate on the following day, but in the middle of the channel. Both would become silted up on the floor of the estuary; but as that floor would be perhaps twenty feet deeper in the centre than towards the margin of the river, the one canoe might actually be twenty feet deeper in the alluvium than the other; and on the upheaval of the alluvial deposits, if we were to argue merely from the depth at which the remains were embedded, we should pronounce the canoe found at the one locality to be immensely older than the other, seeing that the fine mud of the estuary is deposited very slowly and that it must therefore have taken a long period to form so great a thickness as twenty feet. Again, the tides and currents of the estuary, by changing their direction, might sweep away a considerable mass of alluvium from the bottom, laying bare a canoe that may have foundered many centuries before. After the lapse of so long an interval, another vessel might go to the bottom in the same locality, and be there covered up with the older one, on the same general plane. These two vessels, found in such a position, would naturally be classed together as of the same age, and yet it is demonstrable that a very long period may have elapsed between the date of the one and that of the other. Such an association of these canoes, therefore, cannot be regarded as proving synchronous deposition; nor, on the other hand can we affirm any difference of age from mere relative position, unless we see one canoe actually buried beneath another.'^[14]

At the time when the ancient vessels, above described, were navigating the waters, where the city of Glasgow now stands, the whole of the low lands which bordered the present estuary of the Clyde, formed the bed of a shallow sea. The emergence appears to have taken place gradually and by intermittent movements, for Mr. Buchanan describes several narrow terraces one above the other on the site of the city itself, with steep intervening slopes composed of the laminated estuary formation. Each terrace and steep slope probably mark pauses in the process of upheaval, during which low cliffs were formed, with beaches at their base. Five of the canoes were found within the precincts of the city at different heights on or near such terraces.

As to the date of the upheaval, the greater part of it cannot be assigned to the stone period, but must have taken place after tools of metal had come into use.

Until lately, when attempts were made to estimate the probable antiquity of such changes of level, it was confidently assumed, as a safe starting-point, that no alteration had occurred in the relative level of land and sea, in the central district of Scotland, since the construction of the Roman or Pictish wall (the 'Wall of Antonine'), which reached from the Firth of Forth to that of the Clyde. The two extremities, it was said, of this ancient structure, bear such a relation to the present level of the two estuaries, that neither subsidence nor elevation of the land could have occurred for seventeen centuries at least.

But Mr. Geikie has lately shown that a depression of twenty-five feet on the Forth would not lay the eastern extremity of the Roman wall at Carriden under water, and he was therefore desirous of knowing whether the western end of the same would be submerged by a similar amount of subsidence. It has always been acknowledged that the wall terminated upon an eminence called the Chapel Hill, near the village of West Kilpatrick, on the Clyde. The foot of this hill, Mr. Geikie estimates to be about twenty-five or twenty-seven feet above high-water mark, so that a subsidence of twenty-five feet could not lay it under water. Antiquaries have sometimes wondered that the Romans did not carry the wall farther west than this Chapel Hill; but Mr. Geikie now suggests, in explanation, that all the low land at present intervening between that point and the mouth of the Severn, was, sixteen or seventeen centuries ago, washed by the tides at high water.

The wall of Antonine, therefore, yields no evidence in favour of the land having remained stationary since the time of the Romans, but on the contrary, appears to indicate that since its erection the land has actually risen. Recent explorations by Mr. Geikie and Dr. Young, of the sites of the old Roman harbours along the southern margin of the Firth of Forth, lead to similar inferences. In the first place, it has long been known that there is a raised beach containing marine shells of living littoral species, about twenty-five feet high, at Leith, as well as at other places along the coast above and below Edinburgh. Inveresk, a few miles below that city, is the site of an ancient Roman port, and if we suppose the sea at high water to have washed the foot of the heights on which the town stood, the tide would have ascended far up the valley of the Esk, and would have made the mouth of that river a safe and commodious harbour; whereas, had it been a shoaling estuary, as at present, it is difficult to see how the Romans should have made choice of it as a port.

At Cramond, at the mouth of the river Almond, above Edinburgh, was Alaterva, the chief Roman harbour on the southern coast of the Forth, where numerous coins, urns, sculptured stones, and the remnant of a harbour have been detected. The old Roman quays built along what must then have been the sea margin, have been found on what is now dry land, and although some silt carried down in suspension by the waters of the Forth may account for a part of the gain of low land, we yet require an upward movement of about twenty feet to explain the growth of the dreary expanse of mud now stretching along the shore and extending outwards, where it attains its greatest breadth, well-nigh two miles, across which vessels, even of light burden can now only venture at full tide. Had these shoals existed eighteen centuries ago, they would have prevented the Romans from selecting this as their chief port; whereas, if the land were now to sink twenty feet, Cramond would unquestionably be the best natural harbour along the whole of the south side of the Forth.^[15]

Corresponding in level with the raised beach at Leith, above mentioned (or about twenty-five feet above high-water mark), is the Carse of Stirling, a low tract of land consisting of loamy and peaty beds, in which several skeletons of whales of large size have been found. One of these was dug up at Airthrie^[16], near Stirling, about a mile from the river, and seven miles from the sea. Mr. Bald mentions, that near it were found two pieces of stag's horn, artificially cut, through one of which a hole, about an inch in diameter, had been perforated. Another whale, eighty-five feet long, was found at Dunmore, a few miles below Stirling^[17], which, like that of Airthrie, lay about twenty feet above high-water mark. Three other skeletons of whales were found at Blair Drummond, between the years 1819 and 1824, seven miles up the estuary above Stirling^[18], also at an elevation of between twenty and thirty feet above the sea. Near two of these whales, pointed instruments of deer's horn were found, one of which retained part of a wooden handle, probably preserved by having been enclosed in peat. This weapon is now in the museum at Edinburgh.

The position of these fossil whales and bone implements, and still more of an iron anchor found in the Carse of Falkirk, below Stirling, shows that the upheaval by which the raised beach of Leith was laid dry extended far westward probably as far as the Clyde, where, as we have seen, marine strata containing buried canoes rise to a similar height above the sea.

The same upward movement which reached simultaneously east and west from sea to sea was also felt as far north as the estuary of the Tay. This may be inferred from the Celtic name of Inch being attached to many hillocks, which rise above the general level of the alluvial plains, implying that these eminences were once surrounded by water or marshy ground. At various localities also in the silt of the Carse of Gowrie iron implements have been found.

The raised beach, also containing a great number of marine shells of recent species, traced up to a height of fourteen feet above the sea by Mr. W. J. Hamilton at Elie, on the southern coast of Fife, is doubtless another effect of the same extensive upheaval.^[19] A similar movement would also account for some changes which antiquaries have recorded much farther south, on the borders of the Solway Frith; though in this case, as in that of the estuary of the Forth, the conversion of sea into land has always been referred to the silting up of estuaries, and not to upheaval. Thus Horsley insists on the difficulty of explaining the position of certain Roman stations, on the Solway, the Forth, and the Clyde, without assuming that the sea has been excluded from certain areas which it formerly occupied.^[20]

On a review of the whole evidence, geological and archæological, afforded by the Scottish coast-line, we may conclude that the last upheaval of twenty-five feet took place not only since the first human population settled in the island; but long after metallic implements had come into use, and there seems even a strong presumption in favour of the opinion that the date of the elevation may have been subsequent to the Roman occupation.

But the twenty-five feet rise is only the last stage of a long antecedent process of elevation, for examples of recent marine shells have been observed forty feet and upwards above the sea in Ayrshire. At one of these localities, Mr. Smith of Jordanhill informs me that a rude ornament made of cannel coal has been found on the coast in the parish of Dundonald, lying fifty feet above the sea-level, on the surface of the boulder-clay or till, and covered with gravel, containing marine shells. If we suppose the upward movement to have been uniform in central Scotland before and after the Roman era, and assume that as twenty-five feet indicate seventeen centuries, so fifty feet imply a lapse of twice that number, or 3400 years, we should then carry back the date of the ornament in question to fifteen centuries before our era, or to the days of Pharaoh, and the period usually assigned to the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt.

But all such estimates must be considered, in the present state of science, as tentative and conjectural, since the rate of movement of the land may not have been uniform, and its direction not always upwards, and there may have been long stationary periods, one of which of more than usual duration seems indicated by the forty foot raised beach, which has been traced for vast distances along the western coast of Scotland.

 

Coast of Cornwall.

Sir H. De la Beche has adduced several proofs of changes of level, in the course of the human period, in his 'Report on the Geology of Cornwall and Devon for 1839.' He mentions (p. 406) that several human skulls and works of art, buried in an estuary deposit, were found in mining gravel for tin, at Pertuan, the skulls lying at the depth of forty feet from the surface, and others at Carnon, at the depth of fifty-three feet. The overlying strata were marine, containing sea-shells of living species, and bones of whales, besides the remains of several living species of mammalia.

Other examples of works of art, such as stone hatchets, canoes, and ships, buried in ancient river-beds in England, and in peat and shell-marl, I have mentioned in my work before cited.^[21]

 

Sweden and Norway.

In the same work I have shown that near Stockholm, in Sweden, there occur, at slight elevations above the sea-level, horizontal beds of sand, loam, and marl, containing the same peculiar assemblage of testacea which now live in the brackish waters of the Baltic. Mingled with these, at different depths, have been detected various works of art implying a rude state of civilization, and some vessels built before the introduction of iron, and even the remains of an ancient hut, the whole marine formation having been upraised, so that the upper beds are now sixty feet higher than the surface of the Baltic. In the neighbourhood of these recent strata, both to the northwest and south of Stockholm, other deposits similar in mineral composition occur, which ascend to greater heights, in which precisely the same assemblage of fossil shells is met with, but without any intermixture, so far as is yet known, of human bones or fabricated articles.

On the opposite or western coast of Sweden, at Uddevalla, post-tertiary strata, containing recent shells, not of that brackish water character peculiar to the Baltic, but such as now live in the Northern Ocean, ascend to the height of 200 feet; and beds of clay and sand of the same age attain elevations of 300 and even 600 feet in Norway, where they have been usually described as 'raised beaches.' They are, however, thick deposits of submarine origin, spreading far and wide, and filling valleys in the granite and gneiss, just as the tertiary formations, in different parts of Europe, cover or fill depressions in the older rocks.

Although the fossil fauna characterising these upraised sands and clays consists exclusively of existing northern species of testacea, it is more than probable that they may not all belong to that division of the post-tertiary strata which we are now considering. If the contemporary mammalia were known, they would, in all likelihood, be found to be referable, at least in part, to extinct species; for, according to Lovén (an able living naturalist of Norway), the species do not constitute such an assemblage as now inhabits corresponding latitudes in the German Ocean. On the contrary, they decidedly represent a more arctic fauna. In order to find the same species nourishing in equal abundance, or in many cases to find them at all, we must go northwards to higher latitudes than Uddevalla in Sweden, or even nearer the pole than Central Norway.

Judging by the uniformity of climate now prevailing from century to century, and the insensible rate of variation in the geographical distribution of organic beings in our own times, we may presume that an extremely lengthened period was required, even for so slight a modification in the range of the molluscous fauna, as that of which the evidence is here brought to light. There are also other independent reasons for suspecting that the antiquity of these deposits may be indefinitely great as compared to the historical period. I allude to their present elevation above the sea, some of them rising, in Norway, to the height of 600 feet or more. The upward movement now in progress in parts of Norway and Sweden, extends, as I have elsewhere shown^[22], throughout an area about 1000 miles north and south, and for an unknown distance east and west, the amount of elevation always increasing as we proceed towards the North Cape, where it is said to equal five feet in a century. If we could assume that there had been an average rise of two and a half feet in each hundred years for the last fifty centuries, this would give an elevation of 125 feet in that period. In other words, it would follow that the shores, and a considerable area of the former bed of the North Sea, had been uplifted vertically to that amount, and converted into land in the course of the last 5000 years. A mean rate of continuous vertical elevation of two and a half feet in a century would, I conceive, be a high average; yet, even if this be assumed, it would require 24,000 years for parts of the sea-coast of Norway, where the post-tertiary marine strata occur, to attain the height of 600 feet.

1. For a detailed account of these sections, see Mr. Horner's paper in the Philosophical Transactions for 1855–1858.
2. Horner, Philosophical Transactions, 1858.
3. Description de l'Egypte (Histoire Naturelle, tom. ii. p. 494).
4. Smithsonian Contributions, vol. i., 1847.
5. Lyell's Travels in North America, vol. ii. p. 29.
6. Vol. i. p. 200.
7. Meigs, Trans. Amer. Phil. Soc., 1828, p. 285.
8. Dowler, cited by Dr. W. Usher, in Nott and Gliddon's Types of Mankind, p. 352.
9. Agassiz, in Nott and Gliddon, ibid. p. 352.
10. Principles of Geology, Index, 'Serapis.'
11. R. Chambers, 'Sea Margins;' 1848, and papers by Mr. Smith of Jordan Hill, Mem. Wern. Soc. vol. viii., and by Mr. C. Maclaren.
12. G. Buchanan, Brit. Ass. Rep. 1855, p. 80; also Glasgow, Past and Present, 1856.
13. Geikie, Geol. Quart. Journ. vol. xviii., p. 224.
14. Geikie, Geol. Quart. Journ. vol. xviii., p. 222. 1862.
15. Geikie, Edinb. New Phil. Journ. for July 1861.
16. Bald, Edinburgh Philosophical Journal, i. p. 393; and Memoirs, Wernerian Society, iii. p. 327.
17. Edinburgh Philosophical Journal, xi. pp. 220, 415.
18. Memoirs, Wernerian Society, v. p. 440.
19. Proceedings of Geological Society, 1833, vol. ii. p. 280.
20. Britannia, p. 157. 1860.
21. Principles of Geology.
22. Principles, 9th ed. ch. xxx.