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Updated: June 26, 2025
The conversion of this and other parts of Great Britain into an archipelago was followed by a re-elevation of land and a second continental period. After all these changes the final separation of Ireland from Great Britain took place, and this event has been supposed to have preceded the opening of the straits of Dover.
Great areas of land repeatedly passed beneath the waters, instead of a re-elevation of the land, however, we may suppose that the shallow water was gradually filled with silt and debris from the land, and a fresh forest grew over it. * The civic authorities of Glasgow have wisely exposed and protected this instructive piece of Coal-forest in one of their parks.
Such a curious phenomenon as this can only be understood by supposing that, subsequent to the separation of Java, Borneo became almost entirely submerged, and on its re-elevation was for a time connected with the Malay peninsula and Sumatra, but not with Java or Siam.
I described, in the "Philosophical Transactions" for 1835, the section there laid open in digging a level in 1819, which showed that a subsidence followed by a re-elevation of land, each movement amounting to more than 60 feet, had occurred since the time when a rude hut had been built on the ancient shore.
The re-elevation must have amounted to nearly as many feet, as the site of the ancient forest, originally sub-aerial, has been brought up again to within a few feet of high-water mark. Throughout the whole of this succession of geographical changes, the flora and invertebrate fauna of Europe appear to have undergone no important revolution in their specific characters.
The second advance of the glaciers may have coincided in date with the re-elevation of the Alps, as well as of the Scotch and Welsh mountains; and lastly, the final retreat of the Swiss and Italian glaciers may have taken place when Man and the extinct mammalia were colonising the north-west of Europe and beginning to inhabit areas which had formed the bed of the glacial sea during the era of chief submergence.
After reflecting on what has been said in the thirteenth chapter of the submergence and re-elevation of the British Isles and the adjoining parts of Europe, and the rising and sinking of the Alps and the basins of some of the great rivers flowing from that chain, since the commencement of the glacial period, a geologist will not be disposed to object to the theory above adverted to, on the score of its demanding too much conversion of land into sea, or almost any amount of geographical change in Pleistocene times.
But we must suppose that the amount of depression and re-elevation in the central region was considerably in excess of that experienced in the lower countries, or those nearer the sea, and that the rate of subsidence in the latter was never so considerable as to cause submergence, or the admission of the sea into the interior of the continent by the valleys of the principal rivers.
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