United States or Samoa ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Of this elevation within very recent times we have abundant evidence in the existence of raised coral-reefs and oceanic shell-beds at intervals all along the coast; rising in Peru to a level of no less than 3,000 feet above the ocean, as shown by Alexander Agassiz. Such elevations probably occurred at a time when the volcanoes of the Andes were much more active than at present.
Sir W. Parish has given me some of these shells, and M. d'Orbigny pronounces them to be: Buccinanops globulosum, d'Orbigny. Olivancillaria auricularia, d'Orbigny. Venus flexuosa, Lam. Mactra Isabellei, d'Orbigny. Ostrea pulchella, d'Orbigny. Voluta colocynthis. Voluta angulata. These shell-beds extend from one league to six leagues from the Plata, and must lie many feet above its level.
It was centuries later, too, before the cave men's posterity became degenerate enough or prosperous enough, or safe enough, to be polygamous, and, so far as the area of the Thames valley or even the entire "Paris basin," as it is called, was concerned, monogamy held its own very fairly, from the shell-beds of the earliest kitchen-middens to the time of the bronze ax and the dawn of what we now call civilization.
Guasco, gravel terraces of. Copiapo. PERU. Upraised shells of Cobija, Iquique, and Arica. Lima, shell-beds and sea-beach on San Lorenzo, human remains, fossil earthenware, earthquake debacle, recent subsidence. On the decay of upraised shells. General summary.
My attention was called to this circumstance by a native fisherman, whom I took to look at these shell-beds; and he ridiculed the notion of such small shells having been brought up for food; nor could some of the species have adhered when alive to other larger shells.
Word Of The Day