Volume 2

Principles of geology : being an inquiry how far the former changes of the earth's surface are referable to causes now in operation. / By Charles Lyell ...

  • Lyell, Charles, Sir, 1797-1875.
Date:
1834
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Principles of geology : being an inquiry how far the former changes of the earth's surface are referable to causes now in operation. / By Charles Lyell ... Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

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    lias lost, year after year, an acre at a time. The island Alsen suffers in like manner. The peninsula Zingst was converted into an island in 1625. There is a tradition that the isle of llugen was originally torn by a storm from the main land of Pomerania; and it is known, in later times, to have lost ground, as in the year 1625, when a tract of land was carried away. Some of these islands consist of ancient alluvial accumulations, containing blocks of granite, which are also spread over the neighbouring main land. The Marsh Islands are mere banks, like the lands formed of the “ warp” in the Humber, protected by dikes. Some of them, after having been inhabited with security for more than ten centuries, have been suddenly over- whelmed. In this manner, in 1216, no less than ten thousand of the inhabitants of the Eyderstede and Ditmarsch perished; and on the 11th of October, 1634, the islands and the whole coast as far as Jutland suffered by a dreadful deluge. Cimbrian deluge.—I have before enumerated the ravages of the ocean on the western shores of Sleswick, and there are memorials of a series of like catastrophes on the eastern coast of that peninsula; so that we can scarcely doubt that a large opening will, at some future period, connect the Baltic with the North Sea. Jutland was the Cimbrica Chersonesus of the ancients, and was then evidently the theatre of similar calamities; for Florus says, “ Cimbri, Theutoni, atque Tigurini, ab extremis Galliae profugi, cum terras eorum inun- dasset Oceanus, novas sedes toto orbe quaerebant.” * Some have wished to connect this “ Cimbrian deluge” with the bursting of the isthmus between England and * Lib. iii. cap. 3.