The contemporaneous occurrence of these different floods from the Alpine valleys, can alone, on this hypothesis, explain why this aqueous flood was so generally and so highly accumulated in the great valleys between the Alps and the Jura, as to reach the height of most of the sandstone mountains, and to a great elevation in the Jura, where many blocks are found deposited. But if the contemporaneous occurrence of these floods is proved by the facts already enumerated, to what cause are we to refer this simultaneous bursting of floods of water from so many Alpine valleys? We observe, on the north-western side of the chain of the Alps, numerous openings, which, by their structure, seem to point out the action of violent floods. Let us suppose the numerous valleys, in the districts already described, closed at their present entrances, or openings, as would seem from their structure to have been formerly the case; the consequence of this arrangement would be the filling of the Alpine valleys with water, to the height of the lowest passes among the mountains, and thus an enormous accumulation of water would take place. This great body of water, if let loose at once, by the bursting of the lower extremities of the valleys, would form a flood which would sweep across the sandstone mountains, between the Alps and the Jura range, and even ascend high on the Jura itself. This flood of water, moving, probably, at the rate of 200 feet in a second, and loaded with debris of rocks, would carry masses, even these having a magnitude of 50,000 cubical feet, some thousand feet high, on the Jura range[378]. Geologists maintain, that the blocks or boulders met with in other countries, and arranged as those in Switzerland, have been deposited where we now find them, by the bursting of lakes; while those found on the shores of the Baltic, are conjectured to have been transported by a great rush of water caused by the sudden elevation of the land of Scandinavia. Another opinion has its advocates, which maintains that these boulders have been spread over different countries by the waters of the _deluge_. NOTE F, p. 26. ON THE ALLUVIAL LAND OF THE DANISH ISLANDS IN THE BALTIC, AND ON THE COAST OF SLESWIGH. In this section, Cuvier gives a clear and distinct account of several kinds of alluvial formations. M. De Luc, in the first volume of his Geological Travels, describes the alluvial formations that cover and bound many of the islands in the Baltic, and upon the coast of Denmark, and gives so interesting an account of the modes followed by the inhabitants, in preserving these alluvial deposites, that we feel pleasure in communicating it to our readers.