But what period was that, and what sunny clime was this, when the ocean poured its waves over what are now our oolitic building-stones, and when the coral insect built its continuous reefs in this our England, just as it is now distributing its labours over so vast an expanse of sea in the tropics and the southern hemisphere?[90] We cannot but recal the poetic and vivid language of Hugh Miller: “Oh, that hoarse voice of Ocean, never silent since time first began!—where has it not been uttered? There is stillness amid the calm of the arid and rainless deserts, where no spring rises and no streamlet flows, and the long caravan plies its weary march amid the blinding glare of the sand; and the red unshaded rays of the fierce sun. But, once and again, and yet again, has the roar of Ocean been there. It is his sands that the winds heap up, and it is the skeleton remains of his vassals,—shells, and fish, and the stony coral,—that the rocks underneath enclose. There is silence on the tall mountain peak, with its glittering mantle of snow, where the panting lungs labour to inhale the thin bleak air, where no insect murmurs and no bird flies, and where the eye wanders over multitudinous hill-tops that lie far beneath, and vast dark forests that sweep on to the distant horizon, and along long hollow valleys, where the great rivers begin. And yet, once and again, and yet again, has the roar of Ocean been there. The effigies of his more ancient denizens we find sculptured on the crags, where they jut from beneath the ice into the mist wreath, and his later beaches, stage beyond stage, terrace the descending slopes. Where has the great destroyer not been,—the devourer of continents—the blue foaming dragon, whose vocation it is to eat up the whole land? His ice-floes have alike furrowed the flat steppes of Siberia, and the rocky flanks of Schehallion; and his nummulites and fish lie embedded in the great stones of the Pyramids, hewn in the times of the old Pharaohs, and in the rocky folds of Lebanon still untouched by the tool. So long as Ocean exists, there must be disintegration, dilapidation, change; and should the time ever arrive when the elevatory agencies, motionless and chill, shall sleep within their profound depths, to awaken no more, and should the sea still continue to impel its currents and to roll its waves, every continent and island would at length disappear, and again, as of old, ‘when the fountains of the great deep were broken up,’ ‘A shoreless ocean tumble round the globe.’”[91]