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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But besides the stones and gravel and mud carried down by a river, we must also consider the fate of the remains of plants and animals that are swept along by it, especially in flood-time. In any ordinary flood trees and shrubs, and the smaller animals like mice and moles and rabbits, are drowned by the flood. In greater floods birds and even large animals are drowned, and their remains are buried in the sediment. If they are quite covered over they may perhaps be preserved, and their bones may last for an indefinite period. If, further, the mud deposit hardens, these remains may be preserved so well and so long that they become the fossil records of creatures which lived before man emerged to dwell in the world and to become the arbiter of many of its destinies.

What we have said of rivers is true also of lakes. Rivers pour into lakes, bringing with them, especially in flood-time, enormous freights of gravel, sand, and mud, and mingled with them the remains of vegetation and of animal life. Hundreds of thousands of tons may be swept down by one storm. To the Lake of Lucerne, for example, the River Reuss, which comes down from the St. Gothard, brings seven million cubic feet of sediment every year with it. Since the time of the Romans the Rhone has so filled up part of the Lake of Geneva that the Roman harbour, Port Valais, is now nearly two miles from the edge of the lake. The ground between it and the Lake first became marsh. It is now farm land. And though these accumulations are most marked where the rivers drain into the lake, there are deposits always taking place from the hills all round the lake. Thus lake bottoms become most interesting and valuable receptacles of the life that has for ages lived by or near their shores. These deposits are in many ways peculiar. The snails that live in lake waters are distinct from the land snails of the adjoining shores. Their dead shells gather at the bottom of some lakes in such numbers as to form there a deposit of white crumbling marl, sometimes many yards in thickness. On the sites of lakes that have been gradually filled up, or artificially drained, this marl shows at once where the lake borders were, and, roughly, the period of the lake. In some lakes also are found concretions of iron-oxide, which are formed by the chemical action of the water on some of the rocks by the lake-side; and in several Swedish lakes this ironstone forms so fast that the lakes are regularly dredged for it.