Читать книгу The Romance of Modern Geology. Describing in simple but exact language the making of the earth with some account of prehistoric animal life онлайн

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Therefore we should expect to find, if we digged down in the earth, or in any portion of the earth which had undergone these changes, some traces of them. For example, if at one time the sea covered England for thousands or hundreds of thousands of years, depositing the remains of millions of animals on the sea's bottom during that period, we should expect to find some traces of these remains—perhaps in the form of chalk, seeing that the bones and shells of fishes dwelling in the sea contain a good deal of lime. Or again, if a forest covered England and grew and decayed there, not merely for a period like that which has elapsed since the Romans first set foot in Britain, but for a hundred times as long, we should expect to find some sort of vegetable deposit, hardened most probably by other layers above it. Do we? Well, coal is a vegetable deposit. If there was a time when ice covered the land we should expect to find traces of that; if a time when the land was desert; or when it was a lake—each and every one of these periods ought to leave some remains, some epitaph of itself. So they do.