Upheavals of strata and disruptions may be the work of
but a short time, or they may be more gradual. And as to the effect of
water, that depends on its volume and velocity; no certain rule can be
given. Our own direct experience shows that very great changes may take
place in a few hundred years.
"The estuaries," remarks Mr. Pattison,[1] "around our south-eastern
coast, which have been filled up in historical times, some within the
last seven hundred years to a height of thirty feet from their
sea-level, by the gradual accumulation of soil, now look like solid
earth in no way differing from the far older land adjoining. The
harbours out of which our Plantagenet kings sailed are now firm,
well-timbered land. The sea-channel through which the Romans sailed on
their course to the Thames, at Thanet, is now a puny fresh-water ditch,
with banks apparently as old as the hills. In Bede's days, in the ninth
century, it was a sea-channel three furlongs wide."
[Footnote 1: "Age and Origin of Man"--Present-Day Tract Series.]
Thus we are in complete uncertainty as to the date of the palaeolithic
man, or as to the time necessary to effect the changes in the surface of
the earth which intervened between it and the later stone ages. But
there is nothing which conflicts with the possibility that the whole may
have occurred within some 8,000 years.
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