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Updated: May 24, 2025
The area affected by the dykes of undoubted Tertiary age Geikie estimates at no less than 40,000 square miles a territory greater than either Scotland or Ireland, and equal to more than a third of the total land-surface of the British Isles; and he regards them as posterior "to the rest of the geological structures of the regions which they traverse."
Everywhere beyond the burning of the billows the land-surface is tapestried with verdure and tufted with cocoas; they still show the traditional clump which gave the name recorded by Camoens.
The rise of the land and formation of mountains used to be ascribed mainly to the cooling and shrinking of the globe of the earth. They are due probably to the alteration of pressure on the crust in combination with the instability of the interior. The floors of the seas would sink still lower under their colossal burdens, and this would cause some draining of the land-surface.
For her there is not Europe and Asia but one continent, and she is the whole inside of it. This enormous country, which comprises one-sixth of the land-surface of the globe, is at present thinly populated; it has roughly 20 persons to the square mile as against 618 to the square mile in England and Wales.
Let us dwell for a moment more closely on one phase of this record of the conquest of distance. The crucial feature in that struggle was the conquest of the sea. The sea-surface of the world is far greater than its land-surface, and the sea, once subdued, is a far easier and more natural means of transport and communication.
The seats were crowded with people. White ribbons of roads gave access from the neighboring countryside for land-surface vehicles, and there were stages for the accommodation of air-craft.
At that time Sweden was not only a military power of the first magnitude but also one of the largest states of Europe, possessing about twice as much area as present-day Sweden. Her area embraced a land-surface 7000 square miles larger than the modern German Empire. All the islands and the greater part of the coast of the Baltic belonged to her.
It might be regarded as not a mere accident that the great pyramid stands at the centre of the arc of shore-line along which lie the outlets of the Nile; or it might be regarded as not a mere coincidence that the great pyramid stands at the central point of all the habitable land-surface of the globe; or, again, any one of the other relations above mentioned might be regarded as something more than a mere coincidence.
Changes in the distribution of land and water and in the nature of the land-surface, the coming of powerful carnivores, and other agencies which we have seen, have had their share in the onward impulsion of life, but the most drastic agency seems to have been the supervention of cold. The higher types of both animals and plants appear plainly in response to a lowering of temperature.
In like manner, in various parts of Great Britain we sink vertical shafts through marine deposits of great thickness, and come upon coal which was formed by the growth of plants on an ancient land-surface sometimes hundreds of square miles in extent.
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