bold and naked cliffs: in many places the cliffs are high; thus, south of
the Santa Cruz, they are between eight and nine hundred feet in height,
with their horizontal strata abruptly cut off, showing the immense mass of
matter which has been removed. Nearly this whole line of coast consists of
a series of greater or lesser curves, the horns of which, and likewise
certain straight projecting portions, are formed of hard rocks; hence the
concave parts are evidently the effect and the measure of the denuding
action on the softer strata. At the foot of all the cliffs, the sea shoals
very gradually far outwards; and the bottom, for a space of some miles,
everywhere consists of gravel. I carefully examined the bed of the sea off
the Santa Cruz, and found that its inclination was exactly the same, both
in amount and in its peculiar curvature, with that of the 355 feet plain at
this same place. If, therefore, the coast, with the bed of the adjoining
sea, were now suddenly elevated one or two hundred feet, an inland line of
cliffs, that is an escarpment, would be formed, with a gravel-capped plain
at its foot gently sloping to the sea, and having an inclination like that
of the existing 355 feet plain. From the denuding tendency of the sea, this
newly formed plain would in time be eaten back into a cliff: and
repetitions of this elevatory and denuding process would produce a series
of gravel-capped sloping terraces, rising one above another, like those
fronting the shores of Patagonia.

The chief difficulty (for there are other inconsiderable ones) on this
view, is the fact,--as far as I can trust two continuous lines of soundings
carefully taken between Santa Cruz and the Falkland Islands, and several
scattered observations on this and other coasts,--that the pebbles at the
bottom of the sea QUICKLY and REGULARLY decrease in size with the
increasing depth and distance from the shore, whereas in the gravel on the
sloping plains, no such decrease in size was perceptible.