Part 11

And therefore I beg my readers to put out of their minds once and for all the fancy that in any known part of these islands craters are to be still seen, such as exist in Etna, or Vesuvius, or other volcanoes now at work in the open air.

It is necessary to insist on this, because many people hearing that certain mountains are volcanic, conclude--and very naturally and harmlessly--that the circular lakes about their tops are true craters. I have been told, for instance, that that wonderful little blue Glas Llyn, under the highest cliff of Snowdon, is the old crater of the mountain; and I have heard people insist that a similar lake, of almost equal grandeur, in the south side of Cader Idris, is a crater likewise.

But the fact is not so. Any one acquainted with recent craters would see at once that Glas Llyn is not an ancient one; and I am not surprised to find the Government geologists declaring that the Llyn on Cader Idris is not one either. The fact is, that the crater, or rather the place where the crater has been, in ancient volcanoes of this kind, is probably now covered by one of the innumerable bosses of lava.

For, as an eruption ceases, the melted lava cools in the vents, and hardens; usually into lava infinitely harder than the ash-cone round it; and this, when the ash-cone is washed off, remains as the highest part of the hill, as in the Mont Dore and the Cantal in France, and in several extinct volcanoes in the Antilles. Of course the lava must have been poured out, and the ashes blown out from some vents or other, connected with the nether world of fire; probably from many successive vents. For in volcanoes, when one vent is choked, another is wont to open at some fresh point of least resistance among the overlying rocks. But where are these vents? Buried deep under successive eruptions, shifted probably from their places by successive upheavings and dislocations; and if we wanted to find them we should have to quarry the mountain range all over, a mile deep, before we hit upon here and there a tap-root of ancient lava, connecting the upper and the nether worlds. There are such tap- roots, probably, under each of our British mountain ranges. But Snowdon, certainly, does not owe its shape to the fact of one of these old fire vents being under it. It owes its shape simply to the accident of some of the beds toward the summit being especially hard, and thus able to stand the wear and tear of sea-wave, ice, and rain. Its lakes have been formed quite regardless of the lie of the rocks, though not regardless of their relative hardness. But what forces scooped them out--whether they were originally holes left in the ground by earthquakes, and deepened since by rain and rivers, or whether they were scooped out by ice, or by any other means, is a question on which the best geologists are yet undecided--decided only on this--that craters they are not.

As for the enormous changes which have taken place in the outline of the whole of the mountains, since first their strata were laid down at the bottom of the sea: I shall give facts enough, before this paper is done, to enable readers to judge of them for themselves.

The reader will now ask, naturally enough, how such a heap of beds as I have described can take the shape of mountains like Snowdon.

Look at any sea cliff in which the strata are twisted and set on slope. There are hundreds of such in these isles. The beds must have been at one time straight and horizontal. But it is equally clear that they have been folded by being squeezed laterally. At least, that is the simplest explanation, as may be proved by experiment. Take a number of pieces of cloth, or any such stuff; lay them on each other and then squeeze them together at each end. They will arrange themselves in folds, just as the beds of the cliff have done. And if, instead of cloth, you take some more brittle matter, you will find that, as you squeeze on, these folds will tend to snap at the points of greatest tension or stretching, which will be of course at the anticlinal and synclinal lines--in plain English, the tops and bottoms of the folds. Thus cracks will be formed; and if the pressure goes on, the ends of the layers will shift against each other in the line of those cracks, forming faults like those so common in rocks.

But again, suppose that instead of squeezing these broken and folded lines together any more, you took off the pressure right and left, and pressed them upwards from below, by a mimic earthquake. They would rise; and as they rose leave open space between them. Now if you could contrive to squeeze into them from below a paste, which would harden in the cracks and between the layers, and so keep them permanently apart, you would make them into a fair likeness of an average mountain range--a mess--if I may make use of a plain old word--of rocks which have, by alternate contraction and expansion, helped in the latter case by the injection of molten lava, been thrust about as they are in most mountain ranges.

That such a contraction and expansion goes on in the crust of the earth is evident; for here are the palpable effects of it. And the simplest general cause which I can give for it is this: That things expand as they are heated, and contract as they are cooled.

Now I am not learned enough--and were I, I have not time--to enter into the various theories which philosophers have put forward, to account for these grand phenomena.

The most remarkable, perhaps, and the most probable, is the theory of M. Elie de Beaumont, which is, in a few words, this:

That this earth, like all the planets, must have been once in a state of intense heat throughout, as its mass inside is probably now.

That it must be cooling, and giving off its heat into space.

That, therefore, as it cools, its crust must contract.

That, therefore, in contracting, wrinkles (for the loftiest mountain chains are nothing but tiny wrinkles, compared with the whole mass of the earth), wrinkles, I say, must form on its surface from time to time. And that the mountain chains are these wrinkles.

Be that as it may, we may safely say this. That wherever the internal heat of the earth tends (as in the case of volcanoes) towards a particular spot, that spot must expand, and swell up, bulging the rocks out, and probably cracking them, and inserting melting lava into those cracks from below. On the other hand, if the internal heat leaves that spot again, and it cools, then it must contract more or less, in falling inward toward the centre of the earth; and so the beds must be crumpled, and crushed, and shifted against each other still more, as those of our mountains have been.

But here may arise, in some of my readers' minds, a reasonable question--If these upheaved beds were once horizontal, should we not be likely to find them, in some places, horizontal still?

A reasonable question, and one which admits of a full answer.

They know, of course, that there has been a gradual, but steady, change in the animals of this planet; and that the relative age of beds can, on the strength of that known change, be determined generally by the fossils, usually shells, peculiar to them: so that if we find the same fashion of shells, and still more the same species of shells, in two beds in different quarters of the world, then we have a right to say--These beds were laid down at least about the same time. That is a general rule among all geologists, and not to be gainsaid.

Now I think I may say, that, granting that we can recognise a bed by its fossils, there are few or no beds which are found in one place upheaved, broken, and altered by heat, which are not found in some other place still horizontal, unbroken, unaltered, and more or less as they were at first.

From the most recent beds; from the upheaved coral-rocks of the West Indies, and the upheaved and faulted boulder clay and chalk of the Isle of Moen in Denmark--downwards through all the strata, down to that very ancient one in which the best slates are found, this rule, I believe, stands true.

It stands true, certainly, of the ancient Silurian rocks of Wales, Cumberland, Ireland, and Scotland.

For, throughout great tracts of Russia, and in parts of Norway and Sweden, Sir Roderick Murchison discovered our own Silurian beds, recognisable from their peculiar fossils. But in what state? Not contracted, upheaved, and hardened to slates and grits, as they are in Wales and elsewhere: but horizontal, unbroken, and still soft, because undisturbed by volcanic rooks and earthquakes. At the bottom of them all, near Petersburg, Sir Roderick found a shale of dried mud (to quote his own words), "so soft and incoherent that it is even used by sculptors for modelling, although it underlies the great mass of fossil-bearing Silurian rocks, and is, therefore, of the same age as the lower crystalline hard slates of North Wales. So entirely have most of these eldest rocks in Russia been exempted from the influence of change, throughout those enormous periods which have passed away since their accumulation."

Among the many discoveries which science owes to that illustrious veteran, I know none more valuable for its bearing on the whole question of the making of the earth-crust, than this one magnificent fact.

But what a contrast between these Scandinavian and Russian rocks and those of Britain! Never exceeding, in Scandinavia, a thousand feet in thickness, and lying usually horizontal, as they were first laid down, they are swelled in Britain to a thickness of thirty thousand feet, by intruded lavas and ashes; snapt, turned, set on end at every conceivable angle; shifted against each other to such an extent, that, to give a single instance, in the Vale of Gwynnant, under Snowdon, an immense wedge of porphyry has been thrust up, in what is now the bottom of the valley, between rocks far newer than it, on one side to a height of eight hundred, on the other to a height of eighteen hundred feet--half the present height of Snowdon. Nay, the very slate beds of Snowdonia have not forced their way up from under the mountain--without long and fearful struggles. They are set in places upright on end, then horizontal again, then sunk in an opposite direction, then curled like sea-waves, then set nearly upright once more, and faulted through and through, six times, I believe, in the distance of a mile or two; they carry here and there on their backs patches of newer beds, the rest of which has long vanished; and in their rise they have hurled back to the eastward, and set upright, what is now the whole western flank of Snowdon, a mass of rock which was then several times as thick as it is now.

The force which thus tortured them was probably exerted by the great mass of volcanic Quartz-porphyry, which rises from under them to the north-west, crossing the end of the lower lake of the Llanberris; and indeed the shifts and convulsions which have taken place between them and the Menai Straits are so vast that they can only be estimated by looking at them on the section which may be found at the end of Professor Ramsay's "Geological Survey of North Wales." But anyone who will study that section, and use (as with the map) a little imagination and common sense, will see that between the heat of that Porphyry, which must have been poured out as a fluid mass as hot, probably, as melted iron, and the pressure of it below, and of the Silurian beds above, the Cambrian mud-strata of Llanberris and Penrhyn quarries must have suffered enough to change them into something very different from mud, and, therefore, probably, into what they are now--namely, slate.

And now, at last, we have got to the slates on the roof, and may disport ourselves over them--like the cats.

Look at any piece of slate. All know that slate splits or cleaves freely, in one direction only, into flat layers. Now any one would suppose at first sight, and fairly enough, that the flat surface--the "plane of cleavage"--was also the plane of bedding. In simpler English we should say--The mud which has hardened into the slate was laid down horizontally; and therefore each slate is one of the little horizontal beds of it, perhaps just what was laid down in a single tide. We should have a right to do so, because that would be true of most sedimentary rocks. But it would not be true of slate. The plane of bedding in slate has nothing to do with the plane of cleavage. Or, more plainly, the mud of which the slate is made may have been deposited at the sea-bottom at any angle to the plane of cleavage. We may sometimes see the lines of the true bedding--the lines which were actually horizontal when the mud was laid down--in bits of slate, and find them sometimes perpendicular to, sometimes inclined to, and sometimes again coinciding with the plane of cleavage, which they have evidently acquired long after.

Nay, more. These parallel planes of cleavage, at each of which the slate splits freely, will run through a whole mountain at the same angle, though the beds through which they run may be tilted at different angles, and twisted into curves.

Now what has made this change in the rook? We do not exactly know. One thing is clear, that the particles of the now solid rock have actually moved on themselves. And this is proved by a very curious fact--which the reader, if he geologises about slate quarries much, may see with his own eyes. The fossils in the slate are often distorted into quaint shapes, pulled out long if they lie along the plane of cleavage, or squeezed together, or doubled down on both sides, if they lie across the plane. So that some force has been at work which could actually change the shape of hard shells, very slowly, no doubt, else it would have snapped and crumbled them.

If I am asked what that force was, I do not know. I should advise young geologists to read what Sir Henry de la Beche has said on it in his admirable "Geological Observer," pp. 706-725. He will find there, too, some remarks on that equally mysterious phenomena of jointing, which you may see in almost all the older rocks; it is common in limestones. All we can say is, that some force has gone on, or may be even now going on, in the more ancient rocks, which is similar to that which produces single crystals; and similar, too, to that which produced the jointed crystals of basalt, i.e. lava, at the Giant's Causeway, in Ireland, and Staffa, in the Hebrides. Two philosophers--Mr. Robert Were Fox and Mr. Robert Hunt--are of opinion that the force which has determined the cleavage of slates may be that of the electric currents, which (as is well known) run through the crust of the earth. Mr. Sharpe, I believe, attributes the cleavage to the mere mechanical pressure of enormous weights of rock, especially where crushed by earthquakes. Professor Rogers, again, points out that as these slates may have been highly heated, thermal electricity (i.e. electricity brought out by heat) may have acted on them.

One thing at least is clear. That the best slates are found among ancient lavas, and also in rocks which are faulted and tilted enormously, all which could not have happened without a proportionately enormous pressure, and therefore heat; and next, that the best slates are invariably found in the oldest beds--that is, in the beds which have had most time to endure the changes, whether mechanical or chemical, which have made the earth's surface what we see it now.

Another startling fact the section of Snowdonia, and I believe of most mountain chains in these islands, would prove--namely, that the contour of the earth's surface, as we see it now, depends very little, certainly in mountains composed of these elder rocks upon the lie of the strata, or beds, but has been carved out by great forces, long after those beds were not only laid down and hardened, but faulted and tilted on end. Snowdon itself is so remarkable an instance of this fact that, as it is a mountain which every one in these happy days of excursion-trains and steamers either has seen or can see, I must say a few more words about it.

Any one who saw that noble peak leaping high into the air, dominating all the country round, at least upon three sides, and was told that its summit consisted of beds much newer, not much older, than the slate-beds fifteen hundred feet down on its north-western flank--any one, I say, would have the right at first sight, on hearing of earthquake faults and upheavals, to say--The peak of Snowdon has been upheaved to its present height above and out of the lower lands around. But when he came to examine sections, he would find his reasonable guess utterly wrong. Snowdon is no swelling up of the earth's crust. The beds do not, as they would in that case, slope up to it. They slope up from it, to the north-west in one direction, and the south-south-west in the other; and Snowdon is a mere insignificant boss, left hanging on one slope of what was once an enormous trough, or valley, of strata far older than itself. By restoring these strata, in the direction of the angles, in which they crop out, and vanish at the surface, it is found that to the north- west--the direction of the Menai Straits--they must once have risen to a height of at least six or seven thousand feet; and more, by restoring them, specially the ash-bed of Snowdon, towards the south- east--which can be done by the guidance of certain patches of it left on other hills--it is found that south of Ffestiniog, where the Cambrian rocks rise again to the surface, the south side of the trough must have sloped upwards to a height of from fifteen to twenty thousand feet, whether at the bottom of the sea, or in the upper air, we cannot tell. But the fact is certain, that off the surface of Wales, south of Ffestiniog a mass of solid rock as high as the Andes has been worn down and carried bodily away; and that a few miles south again, the peak of Arran Mowddy, which is now not two thousand feet high, was once--either under the sea or above it--nearer ten thousand feet.

If I am asked whither is all that enormous mass of rock--millions of tons--gone? Where is it now? I know not. But if I dared to hazard a guess, I should say it went to make the New Red sandstones of England.

The New Red sandstones must have come from somewhere. The most likely region for them to have come from is from North Wales, where, as we know, vast masses of gritty rock have been ground off, such as would make fine sandstones if they had the chance. So that many a grain of sand in Chester walls was probably once blasted out of the bowels of the earth into the old Silurian sea, and after a few hundreds of thousands of years' repose in a Snowdonian ash-bed, was sent eastward to build the good old city and many a good town more.

And the red marl--the great deposit of red marl which covers a wide region of England--why should not it have come from the same quarter? Why should it not be simply the remains of the Snowdon Slate? Mud the slate was, and into mud it has returned. Why not? Some of the richest red marl land I know, is, as I have said, actually being made now, out of the black slates of Ilfracombe, wherever they are weathered by rain and air. The chemical composition is the same. The difference in colour between black slate and red marl is caused simply by the oxidation of the iron in the slate.

And if my readers want a probable cause why the sandstones lie undermost, and the red marl uppermost--can they not find one for themselves? I do not say that it is the cause, but it is at least a causa vera, one which would fully explain the fact, though it may be explicable in other ways. Think, then, or shall I think for my readers?

Then do they not see that when the Welsh mountains were ground down, the Silurian strata, being uppermost, would be ground down first, and would go to make the lower strata of the great New Red Sandstone Lowland; and that being sandy, they would make the sandstones? But wherever they were ground through, the Lower Cambrian slates would be laid bare; and their remains, being washed away by the sea the last, would be washed on to the top of the remains of the Silurians; and so (as in most cases) the remains of the older rock, when redeposited by water, would lie on the remains of the younger rock. And do they not see that (if what I just said is true) these slates would grind up into red marl, such as is seen over the west and south of Cheshire and Staffordshire and far away into Nottinghamshire? The red marl must almost certainly have been black slate somewhere, somewhen. Why should it not have been such in Snowdon? And why should not the slates in the roof be the remnants of the very beds which are now the marl in the fields?