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She was a middle-aged woman, much younger than her husband with an ironic half-dreamy eye, and a native intelligence much superior to her surroundings. She was suffering from a chronic abscess in the neck, which had strange periodic swellings and subsidences, all of which were endlessly interesting to its possessor. Mrs.
The writer, on examining these sunken lands, found that the subsidences had occurred where the old moats or abandoned channels of the great river had been filled in with a mixture of decaying timber and river silt. The same process of settling plentifully goes on wherever the rocks are still in an uncemented state. The result is often the production of changes which lead to the expulsion of gases.
He who should study the monuments of the natural world under the influence of a similar infatuation, must draw a no less exaggerated picture of the energy and violence of causes, and must experience the same insurmountable difficulty in reconciling the former and present state of nature, If we could behold in one view all the volcanic cones thrown up in Iceland, Italy, Sicily, and other parts of Europe, during the last five thousand years, and could see the lavas which have flowed during the same period; the dislocations, subsidences, and elevations caused during earthquakes; the lands added to various deltas, or devoured by the sea, together with the effects of devastation by floods, and imagine that all these events had happened in one year, we must form most exalted ideas of the activity of the agents, and the suddenness of the revolutions.
Hence we may conclude that similar changes may have been wrought on a larger scale in the earth's crust by partial and gradual subsidences, especially where the ground has been undermined throughout long periods of time; and we must be on our guard against inferring sudden violence, simply because the distortion of the beds is excessive.
It follows inevitably that, with a thin crust, nothing but small elevations and subsidences would have been possible; and that, conversely, a subsidence of seven miles implies a crust of great strength, or, in other words, of great thickness.
But in Villette there are none of these battlings and rendings, these Titanic upheavals and subsidences. Charlotte Brontë's imagination, and her sense of the real, are in process of fusion. There are few novels in which an imagination so supreme is wedded to so vivid a vision of actuality. It may be said that Charlotte Brontë never achieved positive actuality before. The Pensionnat de Demoiselles is almost as visibly and palpably actual as the Maison Vauquer in Père Goriot. It is a return to the method of experience with a vengeance. Charlotte's success, indeed, was so stunning that for all but sixty years Villette has passed for a roman
Such subsidences have been known within historic times. By the end of the Triassic a period of at least two million years the sea had reconquered a vast proportion of the territory wrested from it in the Permian revolution.
As this great geologic change slowly advanced through its long history of earthquakes, volcanic disturbances, minor upheavals and subsidences as the extent of the archipelago became greater and its smaller islands coalesced into larger ones, while its coast-line grew still longer and more varied, and the neighbouring sea more thickly inhabited by inferior forms of life; the lowest division of the vertebrata would begin to be represented.
We see, in innumerable points over wide areas, that the rate has been sufficient, either to bring up the reefs from various depths to the surface, or, as is more probable, to keep them at the surface, during progressive subsidences; and this is a much more important standard of comparison than any cycle of years.
In regard to the lines of movement in Moen, M. Puggaard believes, after an elaborate comparison of the cliffs with the interior of the island, that they took at least three distinct directions at as many successive eras, all of post-glacial date; the first line running from east-south-east to west-north-west, with lines of fracture at right angles to them; the second running from south-south-east to north-north-west, also with fractures in a transverse direction; and lastly, a sinking in a north and south direction, with other subsidences of contemporaneous date running at right angles or east and west.
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