Southern Europe and
Southern Asia have risen, and shaken the last masses of the Chalk
ocean from their faces; the whole western fringe of America has
similarly emerged from the sea that had flooded it. In many
parts, as in England (at that time a part of the Continent),
there is so great a gap between the latest Cretaceous and the
earliest Tertiary strata that these newly elevated lands must
evidently have stood out of the waters for a prolonged period. On
their cooler plains the tragedy of the extinction of the great
reptiles comes to an end. The cyeads and ginkgoes have shrunk
into thin survivors of the luxuriant Mesozoic groves. The oak and
beech and other deciduous trees spread slowly over the successive
lands, amid the glare and thunder of the numerous volcanoes which
the disturbance of the crust has brought into play. New forms of
birds fly from tree to tree, or linger by the waters; and strange
patriarchal types of mammals begin to move among the bones of the
stricken reptiles.
But the seas and the rains and rivers are acting with renewed
vigour on the elevated lands, and the Eocene period closes in a
fresh age of levelling.
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