The Geology and Scenery of Sutherland; By Henry M. Cadell (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated.1896 Excerpt: ... scattered heaps for memorials of the ruined city, he had fallen on what had been once the Assyrian Gallery of the British Museum, and had found, mingling with the antiquities of perished London, the greatly older and more venerable antiquities of Nineveh or Babylon. The land of the Oolite in this northern locality must have been covered by a soil which... must have not a little resembled that of the lower plains of Cromarty, Caithness, and Eastern Ross. And on this Palaeozoic platform, long exposed, as the Oolite Conglomerates abundantly testify, to denuding and disintegrating agencies--a platform beaten by the surf where it descended to the sea-level, and washed in the interior by rivers, with here a tall hill or abrupt precipice, and there a flat plain or sluggish morass--there grew vast forests of cone-bearing trees, tangled thickets of gigantic equisetaceae, numerous forms of cycas and zamia, and wide rolling seas of fern, amid whose open spaces club mosses of extinct tribes sent forth their long creeping stems, spiky and dry, and thickly mottled with pseudo-spore-bearing catkins." XV.--The Great Ice Age. After the broad seas of the Oolite had dried up, and the denudations of long succeeding ages had cut and carved the surface of the land into something of "Testimony of the Rocks," pp. 452, 453. its present form, the climate began to grow colder. Britain was then joined to the European continent, and the Forth, Tay, and Spey probably meandered away eastwards over the great plain now covered by the North Sea, and joining the Rhine, Elbe, and other rivers, rolled with them in one mighty stream into the Northern Ocean. As the climate deteriorated, the snow-clad mountains began to nourish glaciers, small at first, but always growing larger. Gradually they s...