They spell the telluric records aright in
their own peculiar language. The assaults of the Typhons and Joetuns
upon the celestial dynasty, and their attempts to scale the fiery
citadels of the gods by making ladders of mountains, indicate clearly
enough the different revolutions read by geology in the various strata
and rocky layers piled upon the primitive granite of the globe, the
bursting through of eruptions from the central fire, extruding and
uplifting mountains, and the subsidence of the ocean from one
ripple-marked sea-beach to another lower down. In those dim geologic
epochs, where annals are written on Mica Slate, Clay Slate, and
Silurian Systems, on Old Red Sandstones and New, on Primary and
Secondary Rocks and Tertiary Chalk-beds, there were topsy-turvyings
amongst the hills and gambollings and skippings of mountains, to which
the piling of Pelion upon Ossa was a mere cobblestone feat. Alps and
Apennines then played at leap-frog. Vast basaltic masses were
oftentimes extruded into the astonished air from the very heart and
core of the world. In truth, the old mythic cosmogonies of the ancient
East, South, and North are not a whit too grotesque in their
descriptions of the embryo earth, when it lay weltering in a sort of
uterine film, assuming form and regular lineaments.
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