dens of the palace, and in the curious wooden streets of the town. No delay occurred in returning, and we had a beautiful moonlight drive over the Inkerman heights back to Sebastopol.

We considered the next day whether we could not still see the Alma, and proceed to Eupatoria; but, happily, we gave it up, for, on this voyage, the weather turned out too rough to allow the steamer to touch there as usual.

One object still remained to be accomplished, and that was the Malakoff, and on this, our last day, we drove up to it. Its labyrinth of earthworks is very striking when contrasted with the single earth-ridge of the Redan; and the commanding position of the elevation told its own story why such labour had been bestowed upon its defences. Two of the tiers of loopholes remain in the ruined tower. In the cellar, or magazine below, a lame horse was sheltering itself from the glare of the midday sun. For the last time we looked down upon the ruined town, and round upon all the scenes connected with it.

Early the next morning we were up, and were on board the Odessa steamer by eight; but a gale sprang up, freshening as the day advanced, and the captain was too cautious to venture out to sea, and was confirmed in his resolution by the arrival of a merchantsteamer from Odessa at noon, which, besides having a boat washed over

board, was seriously injured in the storm. At night the gale increased to a hurricane. We landed and walked to the point of the harbour, where we could see the open sea. We could scarcely stand. Two vessels had been wrecked just outside the harbour. The sea was rolling in angrily; the sky was leaden; we ascended the broad steps of Prince Menschikoff's grounds, and, sheltering ourselves behind the monument in the garden, we watched the fury of the storm, and discussed the probabilities of the morning. "This reminds me," said Colonel H, "of the fearful 14th of November, 1854. It did not blow harder then than now. However, wild as the Black Sea storms are, they do not last."

The hurricane went down as the sun rose next day, and by twelve the sea had so far calmed that we were able to embark. We had a somewhat rough passage to Odessa. The dim outline of the Alma we passed on the seventh anniversary of the battle. We reached Odessa by dawn on the 19th of September, and, through the kind exertions of the Consul, who represented to the Governor that urgent private affairs required us to depart without the necessary three days' notice, we obtained a permit to leave Russia in time to embark that same day for Constantinople.

M. S.

"WHAT do you mean by a raised beach?” "How and when was it formed? Does "it belong, like your other geological "changes, to some pre-adamite age with "which we mortals have nothing to do, "or is it really in any way connected "with the history of man?"

These questions were put to me the other day by a non-geological friend,

who wished for some information as to certain recent researches in the later physical changes of Britain.

In the first place, then, no one who has been in the habit of spending an occasional week at different parts of our British coast, can have failed to see a raised beach. He must have noticed a comparatively level terrace stretching

along the sea-margin, with a height of twenty or thirty feet above high-water mark, and a breadth varying from only a few yards to several miles. This is what geologists call a "raised beach." If you trace it back from the sea, you will find that sometimes its level surface is lost along the foot of the undulating ground that slopes upward into the interior; that sometimes it terminates against a sinuous line of inconspicuous inland cliff, just as the present sea-beach often ends off at the base of a low winding bluff; and, that along the more rocky parts of the coast line, the raised beach often runs back till it abuts against a face of irregular crag, worn into clefts and caves and isolated stacks, exactly as in the same neighbourhood the existing beach may be crowned with a similar mural front of scarred and wasted rocks. Again, the seaward edge of this level terrace is sometimes cut away by the waves, so as to rise steeply from high-water mark in a line of low cliff, while in other places, when the tide perhaps does not reach it, it sinks gently down into the present shore. Such are the general features of a raised beach. It will be seen at once that they possess not a few economical advantages. The level surface of the terrace, covered as it is with a light but dry soil, is duly appreciated by the farmer, and skirts the sea as a bright belt of green fields and gardens. Even in the wilder parts of the islands, where the ground has not been brought under the plough, the same terrace is conspicuous from the freshness of its verdure contrasting well with the deep blue of the sea and the sombre grey of the mountains that rise behind. Few pieces of maritime scenery are thus more impressive than where this lovely strip of green runs along the base of the hills that rise, dark and lonely, from the fiords of Mull and Skye, and the western shores of Ross, Inverness, and Argyle.

But the raised beach has other advantages than those which are claimed by agriculture. Its level surface affords an admirable site for the erection of towns and villages, which can spread

to an almost indefinite extent. Such a feature, of course, early attracted the notice of the islanders, and hence some of our oldest maritime towns stand on the raised beach. Where a broad river enters the sea, and the terrace, leaving the shore, extends up each side of the estuary, man finds a collection of physical advantages that seem almost designed for the growth of a large commercial city. The banks of the stream, skirted by this level platform, are built over with quays and docks, harbours, warehouses, and streets. The town, increasing with the rise of its commerce, pushes outward on the same platform, which stretches along the sea-margin for miles, both to the right and the left of the river mouth. The streets and squares creep steadily onward, ever preceded by a host of villas and cottages and gardens, like a cloud of skirmishers that ere long are enveloped and lost in the advancing army. And then, in the course of generations, arises a city of merchant princes, to which, day by day, come vessels from all quarters of the heaven, laden with the riches of every clime. Examples of these features will readily suggest themselves to every reader. The lower parts of London, for example, that run along the margin of the Thames, including, of course, the docks and quays, are built upon a portion of the raised beach. The same has been the site of the great commercial works along the Mersey, which have made Liverpool a mart for the world. And in Glasgow, also, the Broomielaw, and warehouses skirting the Clyde, extend along the same level terrace.

Since then this strange platform, which indents our islands, presents so many points of importance to us as a commercial and agricultural people, it may be well to ask, with my friend, how such a platform came to exist? No one, I think, who sees it, even for the first time, can fail to perceive that it is truly what its geological name indicates it to be -an old sea-beach worn out of the coast, when the relative height of sea and land was different from that which

face sloping with an almost imperceptible inclination towards the present beach, the sinuous cliff which so often bounds its inland margin, the caves and clefts, and creeks, into which that cliff is so frequently worn-these are features which the observer sets down at once as the products of the action of the sea, and he concludes with reason that, as the tides never rise now nearly so far as the surface of the platform, far less advance inland to the base of the old caves and cliffs, there must have been a change of level, the sea being either lower, or the land higher, than it was when the older beach was thrown up, and the inland caves were worn and hollowed by the restless surge.

If the mere outward aspect of the terrace be enough to assure us that it has been the work of the sea, we obtain a clue as to how and when this work was carried on, by considering the nature of the materials of which the terrace is composed. Let the reader imagine himself at some part of the coast where the structure of the terrace has been laid bare along a line of low cliff exposed, at high tides, to the wash of the breakers. At the bottom of this cliff, and forming perhaps the floor of the present beach, we may chance to see a surface of hard rock, limestone, sandstone, granite, or porphyry, the origin of which has evidently nothing whatever to do with either the present or the former beach, but which must have been just as hard and ancientlooking a rock, and must have offered as much resistance to the waves, when they piled up the old beach, as it does to the waves that are piling up the new

one.

Further along the coast we may see the same rocks rising up into huge cliffs, that are worn by the breakers into creeks and caves, and isolated crags. And, away inland, it may be several miles, at the further side of the level terrace, we may see another line of cliffs as wasted and worn as those of the shore, but now silent and at rest-their sides not dark with sea-weed, but feathered with fern and brier, and their caverns

of the otter and the screaming sea-mew. And thus we see that the ocean is now only carrying on at other points the same work of demolition which marked its limits in ancient times. The hard rock, which forms the existing beach, must therefore run inland under the terrace and join the old cliffs where these sink below the surface. Let us now see what the waves have laid down upon the almost rectangular incision which they have thus cut along the margin of our islands. Standing again at the base of the low cliff along which the materials that compose the terrace are being laid bare by the tides, we find that this terrace consists of nothing but successive layers of sand, silt, and gravel, often full of shells; in short, that its compartments resemble exactly the deposits which are at this moment thrown down by the waves on the present beach. The flat surface which so arrests the eye, skirting the shore as it does, with a belt of gardens and fields, villas and towns, is really the surface of an old beach which is made up of sand, and gravel, and shells, like any beach of the present day. So that not only in its general appearance, but still more in the nature and arrangement of its materials, this flat maritime platform affords decisive evidence that sea and land have had at one time, in Britain, a different relation to each other from that in which they stand to-day.

The surface of the terrace varies from twenty to thirty feet above highwater mark. Let us take it at an average height of twenty-five feet. This, then, represents the difference between the present and the former levels. It is plain that, to account for such a difference, we must have recourse to some other explanation than a mere variation in the form of the coastline, caused by the wearing effects of the sea, whereby the waves now no longer have access to cliffs and crags, among which they had previously toiled for ages. The general uniformity and persistence of the terrace round so large a part of the British Isles, shows that it

ful cause. Either, therefore, the sea must have receded, or the land must have risen to the extent of at least twenty-five feet since the sands and gravels of the terrace were deposited.

1

That such changes of level are due to the upheaval of the land, rather than to the recession of the sea, will be evident, if we reflect that the sea-level over the whole globe must, on the whole, remain uniform; so that the waters of the ocean cannot retire from the shores of our land, without also receding from the shores of every other part of the earth. Undoubtedly there must have been, in times past, and there may be going on even now, depressions of various portions of the bed of the sea, and such downward movements tend, of course, to lower the sea-level over the whole globe. But even the greatest depression which we can suppose probable would produce, perhaps, a scarcely appreciable change, since its effect would have to be distributed equally over every ocean, and sea, and firth, and estuary, and bay, from pole to pole. Besides, traces of the recession would be more or less visible in every country, and these would retain a uniform level above the previous tidemark. The old beach would never appear ten feet above the tides at one place, and twenty feet at another. Hence, as a matter of theory, geologists hold that, where the sea seems either to encroach upon or retire from its shores, the change lies, not with the sea, but with the land. The ocean, which we take to be the emblem of all that is fickle and unstable, is thus, in reality, constant and unchanging; while the solid earth and the everlasting hills, which form our types of stability and rest, have risen above the ocean level, and sunk below it, many times in the past history of our planet, and are, in not a few places, rising or sinking even now. The coast of Sweden is a well-known example of the progress of these movements. The southern part of that peninsula is, at this moment, undergoing a slow submergence beneath the waters of the Baltic. Further north this downward

placed by one of an opposite kind. The rest of Sweden, towards the north, is actually rising, and the rate has been ascertained to be as much as from three to four feet in a century. Beds of marine shells occur even two hundred feet above the present tide-mark, and extend along the coast for many miles. Further north, the upward movement appears to become gradually feebler, and we know that the coasts of Greenland are actually sinking, and at so rapid a rate that the settlers have had, more than once, to remove inland the poles on which they used to place their boats.

It is unnecessary to enter here into the question of the cause of these movements. They are, of course, merely the external signs of vast agencies that are at work within the crust of the earth. That these agencies have been in operation. beneath the area occupied by the British isles is abundantly evident in the lines of elevated shore-deposits which skirt our coasts, and which represent the extent to which the upheaving movements have been carried within a comparatively recent geological period.

Now, when did this upheaval take place? Must it be assigned, like so many other changes of which the geologist tells, to some unknown and indefinite period that long preceded the advent of man? Or is there any evidence to show that it has been effected since the first aborigines paddled their canoes among the creeks and estuaries of Britain? Let me answer, in one word, that, with regard to the Northern half of the island, the upheaval has undoubtedly been completed since man set foot on these shores, nay, that there are good grounds for believing it to be of later date than the Roman invasion. A present I cannot determine to what extent the central and southern parts of England participated in the change. Possibly they may have remained at rest, and the raised beaches which fringe their coast-line may belong to an older era. But that Scotland, and probably also the Northern counties of England, have been upraised within the human

The evidence on which this conclusion rests is of the simplest kind. The deposits of the raised beach, consisting of sand, clay, and beds of shells, are clearly such as could only be formed under high-water mark; and, as they are now greatly above the reach of the highest tides, we infer, as a necessary deduction, that the land has risen above the sea. If now we find associated with the shells various implements of human workmanship, arranged in such a way as to preclude the supposition that they could by any chance have been buried there artificially, or have fallen into the shell-beds through cracks of the ground, we are forced to the conclusion not only that the land has been elevated, but that this elevation has been effected since the appearance of man. And this is exactly the state of the case in Scotland.

The three great estuaries of the Clyde, the Forth, and the Tay, are each skirted by strips of flat ground, the surface of which may be on an average about fiveand-twenty feet above the limit of high tide. These level flats are sometimes only a few yards broad; but, in some places they expand into broad plains, which are known as carses, and are famed as the most fertile tracts in the country. As the reader may have conjectured, they are really parts of the old raised beach; the sea once alternately ebbed and flowed across their levél surface, and deposited there those layers of mud and silt upon which the present fertility of the soil depends. Moreover, in the clay which now composes this carse-land, sea-shells abound; every ditch or deep drain in certain localities lays them open in thousands, showing how complete was the ascendancy of the sea over those plains, where in one district the farmer now ploughs his fields, and the merchant builds his villa, and where in another direction stretch the streets and squares of a busy city. But, in addition to these marine remains, there occur in the upraised deposits of all the three estuaries traces of the presence of man-canoes, flint-hatchets, harpoons, anchors, and

but naturally deposited and covered over with layers of silt and sand, and even with beds of shells. Hence we cannot for a moment hesitate to accept the conclusion that man must have witnessed the last upward movement by which the island attained its present level.

The elevated silt of the Clyde at Glasgow has been especially rich in these relics of our aboriginal ancestors. No fewer than eighteen canoes are recorded as having been at various times disinterred in that neighbourhood. Some of these were actually found below the streets of the town, in the process of digging out foundations for buildings or constructing sewers and drains. For the most part they were of rude workmanship, consisting each of one solid oak stem, hollowed out roughly either with fire or by means of some stone implement. Others, however, evinced the use of metal tools, and showed no small amount of ingenuity and mechanical skill. Probably they did not all belong to one period; the more primitive ones being the work of the earlier inhabitants, while the more elaborate were executed by later and somewhat more civilized generations. They were imbedded in the clay in such a way as to indicate that they had sunk in water, and had been slowly enveloped in the mud that gathered over the bed of the river. One of them was stuck in the clay in a nearly vertical position, with the prow uppermost, as if it had been out in a storm, and, capsizing, had gone to the bottom. They lay at various depths from the surface-some being at the level of low water, while others were situated considerably above the limits of the highest recorded tide or river-flood. And in every instance they were overlaid by the common alluvium of the river-a well-stratified clay, not formed by any sudden rush of water carrying mud along with it, but by the slow deposit of the river. It is plain that, at the present relative levels of the estuary and its banks, this alluvium could not have been laid down where we find it.