And now, have I, or have I not, fulfilled the promise which I made--
rashly, I dare say some of you thought--in my first paper? Have I,
or have I not, made you prove to yourself, by your own common sense,
that the lowlands of Britain were underneath the sea in the days in
which these pebbles and boulders were laid down over your plains?
Nay, have we not proved more? Have we not found that that old sea
was an icy sea? Have we not wandered on, step by step, into a whole
true fairyland of wonders? to a time when all England, Scotland, and
Ireland were as Greenland is now? when mud streams have rushed down
from under glaciers on to a cold sea-bottom, when "ice, mast high,
came floating by, as green as emerald?" when Snowdon was sunk for at
least fourteen hundred feet of its height? when (as I could prove to
you, had I time) the peaks of the highest Cumberland and Scotch
mountains alone stood out, as islets in a frozen sea?
We want to get an answer to one strange question, and we have found a
group of questions stranger still, and got them answered too. But so
it is always in science. We know not what we shall discover. But
this, at least, we know, that it will be far more wonderful than we
had dreamed. The scientific explorer is always like Saul of old, who
set out simply to find his father's asses, and found them--and a
kingdom besides.
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