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They have been more or less dislocated in this process, and are greatly metamorphized by the intense heat to which they must have been exposed. Indeed, all the oldest stratified rocks have been baked by the prolonged action of heat. It may be asked how the materials for those first stratified deposits were provided.
At Chillesford, between Woodbridge and Aldborough in Suffolk, and Aldeby, near Beccles, in the same county, there occur stratified deposits, apparently older than any of the preceding drifts of Yorkshire, Norfolk, and Suffolk. They are composed at Chillesford of yellow sands and clays, with much mica, forming horizontal beds about twenty feet thick. Messrs.
When looking at this appearance near the bottom of the rock, it, at first, presented me with the figure of regular stratification; but, upon examining the whole mass of rock, I found, that it was only towards the bottom that this stratified appearance took place; and that, at the top of the rock, the most beautiful and regular figure was to be observed; but a figure the most opposite to that of stratification.
The considerable amount of vertical movement in opposite directions, which was suggested in the last chapter, as affording the most probable explanation of the position of some of the stratified and fossiliferous drifts of Scotland, formed since the commencement of the glacial period, will appear less startling if it can be shown that independent observations lead us to infer that a geographical revolution of still greater magnitude accompanied the successive phases of glaciation through which the Welsh mountains have passed.
Only at one spot on this western side, on a lofty pinnacle not far from the Cumbre, I saw strata apparently belonging to the gypseous formation, and conformably capping a pile of stratified porphyries.
The system of disintegration consequent upon such conditions would be enormous. The matters worn off, being carried into the neighbouring depths, and there deposited, became the components of the earliest stratified rocks, the first series of which is the Gneiss and Mica Slate System, or series, examples of which are exposed to view in the Highlands of Scotland and in the West of England.
I should perhaps have mistaken several of these stratified rocks for submarine lavas, like some of those described at the Puente del Inca, had I not examined, a few leagues eastward of this point, a fine series of analogous but less metamorphosed, sedimentary beds belonging to the gypseous formation, and probably derived from a volcanic source.
We feel as if there had been a fashion in sunsets; or as if dawn was always grey in the Stone Age or brown in the Bronze Age. But there is another parable written in those long lines of many-coloured clay and stone. Palestine is in every sense a stratified country. It is not only true in the natural sense, as here where the clay has fallen away and left visible the very ribs of the hills.
Then there was the Christian Church springing from the ruins of the destroyed pagan edifice, as, for example, San Clemente, beneath which centuries of contrary beliefs are stratified: a very ancient edifice of the time of the kings or the republic, then another of the days of the empire identified as a temple of Mithras, and next a basilica of the primitive faith.
They contain no pebbles, or sand, or scoriae, or angular pieces of imbedded stone, and no traces of organic bodies, and they are often as crystalline as granite, yet are divided into beds, corresponding in form and arrangement to those of sedimentary formations, and are therefore said to be stratified.
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