Repository: UIHistories Project: Board of Trustees Minutes - 1871 [PAGE 154]

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146 that is, that while they thus dip under the sea, they in fact rise toward the equator, and become warmer, and relatively to the ocean lower, at one and the same time. Coincident with this, other parts of the earth are relatively rising, or moving toward the poles, and growing colder, at one and the same time; while all well know that all parts of the earth show that they have sometime been beneath the seas, and probably many times ; and all the regions of the equator and lower latitudes bear still the marks of polar glacier or avalanche furrows made while they were under or near the poles; and all parts of the frigid zone are filled with the remains of tropical animals and vegetable life, that were produced when nearer the equator, and buried there under, the incessant earthquakes, land-slides and other catastrophes necessarily perpetual in those regions, from the simple cause above indicated, and there preserved, buried perhaps for ages, till again disemboweled in their changed position by the action of polar frosts and the nevv sweep of polar waters and seas. These evidences of the action of the seas, over even the highest parts of the continents, are so universal and so obvious to all common-sense observers, that no writer on cosmogony, sacred or profane, ha& been fool enough to wholly pyerlook them, or to pass them by without hi6 own account of a flood, ox some other catastrophe adequate, in his view, to account for the facts so self-evident and open, to all. But now we also find the great sea itself is giving up its secrets, if not its dead, and disclosing the fact that the same stratas of coal, chalk, limestone, sandstone, etc., that we jGLnd on the continents, are now in process of Ibrmation beneath its depths, preparatory to future upheavals, or changes in position. So far as I am aware, the constantly recurring fact of volcanos, earthquakes, and violent convulsions near the equator, and formerly along the lines converging to the poles, as indi : cated by the extinct volcanic mountain ranges of America, and the still active ones on the other side of the earth, through the Japan Islands, at the present day, and other facts which it would require volumes to recapitulate, all concur in supporting this very simple, but still potent theory ; so that we have after all really no need to fill good old mother earth with water, or fire, or wind, as if we would throw her into a fit of the cholic, or alternate fits of fever and ague; or explode it into vapor or gas, in order to rationally account for her very sober, and steady, and uniform, and perpetual work, done before our own eyes, as much, and as fast, and as silently and effectually as in any age before so far as we can know. All the facts go to show that there have been numerous submergals or dipping in and out of the waters, of the very