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They appear to have been erupted while the sedimentary strata were in a horizontal position, and to have suffered the same dislocations which those strata have subsequently undergone. In the volcanic tuffs of this age are found not only fragments of limestone, shale, flinty slate, and sandstone, but also pieces of coal.
There would be no machines for manufacturing or for agriculture, not even a spade to dig a garden. Everybody would be out of work. If you wish to see how it would seem, try for an hour to use nothing that is of iron or has been made by using iron. Where did rocks come from? Some were deposited in water, like limestone and like the shale and sandstone that lie over the strata of coal.
The old landmarks of a nation, whether monuments built by the hand of man or archives carefully preserved by him, tell us of its growth, just as the strata of the mountain tell of its progress to the geologist; and as every successive layer has some relation both to its predecessor and its successor, so the traditions of each generation have a perceptible influence upon the moral development of the generation following.
I could only account for all this by extending my theory, and supposing that the highly rarefied atmosphere around might perhaps not be, as I had taken for granted, chemically insufficient for the purposes of life, and that a person born in such a medium might, possibly, be unaware of any inconvenience attending its inhalation, while, upon removal to the denser strata near the earth, he might endure tortures of a similar nature to those I had so lately experienced.
At any rate, continuous land joined Asia Minor with the Balkan peninsula; and its surface bore deep fresh-water lakes, apparently disconnected with the Ponto-Aralian sea. This state of things lasted long enough to allow of the formation of the thick lacustrine strata to which I have referred.
With respect to the terrestrial productions which lived during the Secondary and Palaeozoic periods, it is superfluous to state that our evidence from fossil remains is fragmentary in an extreme degree. For instance, not a land shell is known belonging to either of these vast periods, with one exception discovered by Sir C. Lyell in the carboniferous strata of North America.
Had each species inhabited a very limited space, it could never, when imbedded in strata, have enabled the geologist to identify deposits at distant points; or had they each lasted but for a brief period, they could have thrown no light on the connection of rocks placed far from each other in the chronological, or, as it is often termed, vertical series.
But in regard to the division which we have now under consideration, whether we study it in the basins of London, Hampshire, or Paris, we recognise as a general rule the same mineral character, the beds consisting over a large area of mottled clays and sand, with lignite, and with some strata of well-rolled flint pebbles, derived from the chalk, varying in size, but occasionally several inches in diameter.
The "poor" are divided into four classes or strata, marked A, B, C, D. At the bottom comes A, a body of some 11,000, or 1¼ per cent, of hopeless, helpless city savages, who can only be said by courtesy to belong to the "working-classes" "Their life is the life of savages, with vicissitudes of extreme hardship and occasional excess.
Water, on reaching these overheated strata, explodes into volumes of steam, and if there is no free vent to the surface, it is apt to rend the very mountain asunder in its efforts to escape. Such is supposed to have been the case in the eruption of Krakatoa, and was probably the case also in the recent case of Mt. Pelee.
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