Let us put the work of a million years or
so in a sentence. The southern sea, which has been confined
almost to the limits of our Mediterranean by the Cretaceous
upheaval, gradually enlarges once more. It floods the north-west
of Africa almost as far as the equator; it covers most of Italy,
Turkey, Austria, and Southern Russia; it spreads over Asia Minor,
Persia, and Southern Asia, until it joins the Pacific; and it
sends a long arm across the Franco-British region, and up the
great valley which is now the German Ocean.
From earlier chapters we now expect to find a warmer climate, and
the record gives abundant proof of it. To this period belongs the
"London Clay," in whose thick and--to the unskilled
eye--insignificant bed the geologist reads the remarkable story
of what London was two or three million years ago. It tells us
that a sea, some 500 or 600 feet deep, then lay over that part of
England, and fragments of the life of the period are preserved in
its deposit. The sea lay at the mouth of a sub-tropical river on
whose banks grew palms, figs, ginkgoes, eucalyptuses, almonds,
and magnolias, with the more familiar oaks and pines and laurels.
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