two broken lines of smaller masses running south from it on each
side of the continent, inclosing a vast interior sea between them.
To end with, we have the finished continent of eight million or more
square miles, of an average height of two thousand feet above the
sea, built up or developed from and around these granite centres
very much as the body is built up and around the bones, and of such
prodigious weight that some of our later geologists seek to account
for the continental submarine shelf that surrounds the continent on
the theory that the land has slowly crept out into the sea under the
pressure of its own weight. And all this,--to say nothing of the
vast amount of rock, in some places a mile or two in thickness, that
has been eroded from the land surfaces of the globe in later
geological time, and now lies buried in the seas and lakes,--we are
told, is the contribution of those detached portions of Archaean
rock that first rose above the primordial seas. It is a greater
miracle than that of the loaves and the fishes. We have vastly more
to end with than we had to begin with. The more the rocks have been
destroyed, the more they have increased; the more the waters have
devoured them, the more they have multiplied and waxed strong.

Either the geologists have greatly underestimated the amount of
Archaean rock above the waters at the start, or else there are
factors in the problem that have not been taken into the account.
Lyell seems to have appreciated the difficulties of the problem,
and, to account for the forty thousand feet of sediment deposited in
Palaeozoic times in the region of the Appalachians, he presupposes a
neighboring continent to the east, probably formed of Laurentian
rocks, where now rolls the Atlantic. But if such a continent once
existed, would not some vestige of it still remain? The fact that no
trace of it as been found, it seems to me, invalidates Lyell's