moment suppose that the ocean-waters ever rose so high?

Stay a moment. Look again at yonder white chalk cliff, and observe a
little way below the top a singular band of shingles, squeezed into
the cliff, as it were, with chalk below and earth above.

That is believed to be an old sea-beach. Once upon a time the waters
of the sea are supposed to have washed those shingles, as now they
wash the shore near which we stand, and all the white cliff must have
lain then beneath the ocean.

Geologists were for a long while sorely puzzled to account for these
old sea-beaches, found high up in the cliffs around our land in many
different places.

They had at first a theory that the sea must once, in far back ages,
have been a great deal higher than it is now. But this explanation
only brought about fresh difficulties. It is quite impossible that the
level of the sea should be higher in one part of the world than in
another. If the sea around England were then one or two hundred feet
higher than it is now, it must have been one or two hundred feet
higher in every part of the world where the ocean-waters have free
flow. One is rather puzzled to know where all the water could have
come from, for such a tremendous additional amount. Besides, in some
places remains of sea-animals are found in mountain heights, as much
as two or three thousand feet above the sea-level--as, for instance,
in Corsica. This very much increases the difficulty of the above
explanation.

So another theory was started instead, and this is now generally