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Updated: June 26, 2025
Just a mass of rubbish, powder, dust " "But but how " "The concussion of the ax! That must have done it! The violent sound-waves the air in commotion!" "But, Allan, it can't be! Surely there must be something left?" "You see?" He pointed at the shelves. She stood and peered, with him, at the sad havoc wrought there. Then she stretched out a tentative finger and stirred a little of the detritus.
Farther on I came across a bank of crumbling shells, and it was borne in upon me that the sea-sand itself might well be only the detritus of the organic life of preceding eras, a vast monument or pyramid of immemorial age, built up by countless generations of molluscs who have labored at the architecture of the shores like good workmen of God.
Its investigations show that the Earth has been continually becoming more heterogeneous in virtue of the multiplication of the strata which form its crust; further, that it has been becoming more heterogeneous in respect of the composition of these strata, the latter of which, being made from the detritus of the older ones, are many of them rendered highly complex by the mixture of materials they contain; and that this heterogeneity has been vastly increased by the action of the Earth's still molten nucleus upon its envelope, whence have resulted not only a great variety of igneous rocks, but the tilting up of sedimentary strata at all angles, the formation of faults and metallic veins, the production of endless dislocations and irregularities.
"Bastian will take care of the rest," she said, gleefully, walking on ahead through the long grass of the abandoned fort. "Be a bit of detritus, too, and enjoy the few half-hours," she added, coaxingly, over her shoulder.
At last we discovered some by looking close to the mountain, for at the distance even of a few hundred yards, the streamlets were buried and entirely lost in the friable calcareous stone and loose detritus. I do not think Nature ever made a more solitary, desolate pile of rock; it well deserves its name of Hurtado, or separated.
These, so conspicuous in the lofty Himalayan valleys, are not less so in those of the Swiss Alps: witness that broad valley in which Grindelwald village is situated, and which is covered to an immense depth with angular detritus, moulded into hills and valleys; also the whole broad open Upper Rhone valley, above the village of Munster, and below that of Obergestelen.
As gravel and mud and silt the detritus has been carried to the still waters of the lower levels, to be laid down and later solidified into sandstone and slate and shale. All over the continents these things are going on, and indefatigable forces are at work that slowly but surely shear from the surface almost immeasurable quantities of earth and rock to be transported far away.
We are thus readily led to the conclusion that on the floors of the deeper seas there is constantly descending, in the form of a very slow shower, a mass of mineral detritus. Where organic life belonging to the species which secrete hard shells or skeletons is absent, this accumulation, proceeding with exceeding slowness, gradually accumulates layers, which take on a shaly character.
M. Boule, from whom we borrow these details, cannot restrain his astonishment at the practical knowledge shown by these prehistoric miners. He tells us that they sometimes left the flint standing as pillars at pretty short intervals, or they propped up the galleries with even more resistant material, cementing them with clay or with calcareous earth taken from the detritus.
The north-western apex, raised about fifty feet above the present level of the waters, shows a little bay of pure sand, the detritus of its rocks, with a flood-mark fifteen feet high, whilst the opposite side bears a few wind-wrung trees. The materials are gneiss and schist, banded with quartz Tuckey's great masses of slate. This is the "Terrapin" of the Nzadi.
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