FullReads

Moreover, if he be an experienced man, he is well aware that first guesses, first hypotheses, are not always the right ones; and if he be a modest man, he will consider the fact that many thousands of thoughtful men in all ages, and many thousands still, would say, that the glen can only be a few thousand, or possibly a few hundred, years old. And he will feel bound to consider their opinion; as far as it is, like his own, drawn from facts, but no further.

So he casts about for all other methods by which the glen may have been produced, to see if any one of them will account for it in a shorter time.

1. Was it made by an earthquake? No; for the strata on both sides are identical, at the same level, and in the same plane.

2. Or by a mighty current? If so, the flood must have run in at the upper end, before it ran out at the lower. But nothing has run in at the upper end. All round above are the undisturbed gravel- beds of the horizontal moor, without channel or depression.

3. Or by water draining off a vast flat as it was upheaved out of the sea? That is a likely guess. The valley at its upper end spreads out like the fingers of a hand, as the gullies in tide-muds do.

But that hypothesis will not stand. There is no vast unbroken flat behind the glen. Right and left of it are other similar glens, parted from it by long narrow ridges: these also must be explained on the same hypothesis; but they cannot. For there could not have been surface-drainage to make them all, or a tenth of them. There are no other possible hypotheses; and so he must fall back on the original theory–the rain, the springs, the brook; they have done it all, even as they are doing it this day.

But is not that still a hasty assumption? May not their denuding power have been far greater in old times than now?

Why should it? Because there was more rain then than now? That he must put out of court; there is no evidence of it whatsoever.

Because the land was more friable originally? Well, there is a great deal to be said for that. The experience of every countryman tells him that bare or fallow land is more easily washed away than land under vegetation. And no doubt, when these gravels and sands rose from the sea, they were barren for hundreds of years. He has some measure of the time required, because he can tell roughly how long it takes for sands and shingles left by the sea to become covered with vegetation. But he must allow that the friability of the land must have been originally much greater than now, for hundreds of years.

But again, does that fact really cut off any great space of time from his hundreds of thousands of years? For when the land first rose from the sea, that glen was not there. Some slight bay or bend in the shore determined its site. That stream was not there. It was split up into a million little springs, oozing side by side from the shore, and having each a very minute denuding power, which kept continually increasing by combination as the glen ate its way inwards, and the rainfall drained by all these little springs was collected into the one central stream. So that when the ground being bare was most liable to be denuded, the water was least able to do it; and as the denuding power of the water increased, the land, being covered with vegetation, became more and more able to resist it. All this he has seen, going on at the present day in the similar gullies worn in the soft strata of the South Hampshire coast; especially round Bournemouth.