And if anyone should
object that the last upheaval may have been effected suddenly by a
few tremendous earthquakes, we must answer--We have no proof of it.
Earthquakes upheave lands now only by slight and intermittent upward
pulses; nay, some lands we know to rise without any earthquake
pulses, but by simple, slow, upward swelling of a few feet in a
century; and we have no reason, and therefore no right, to suppose
that Snowdonia was upheaved by any means or at any rate which we do
not witness now; and therefore we are bound to allow, not only that
there was a past "age of ice," but that that age was one of
altogether enormous duration.
But meanwhile some of you, I presume, will be ready to cry--Stop! It
may be our own weakness; but you are really going on too fast and too
far for our small imaginations. Have you not played with us, as well
as argued with us, till you have inveigled us step by step into a
conclusion which we cannot and will not believe? That all this land
should have been sunk beneath an icy sea? That Britain should have
been as Greenland is now? We can't believe it, and we won't.
If you say so, like stout common-sense Britons, who have a wholesome
dread of being taken in with fine words and wild speculations, I
assure you I shall not laugh at you even in private.
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