interposed between the foot of the Andes and the Pacific, more than equal in area to all Great Britain, was elevated from two to seven feet over its former level, and rocks laid bare in the sea, which the pilots and fishermen of the coast had never before seen. On the Indian coast the sea _seemed_ to be rising at nearly the same time when it _appeared_ to be falling on the American one; and on the latter such was the actual impression entertained by the people. It is stated by Sir Charles Lyell, in his "Elements," that he was informed by Mr. Cruickshanks, an English botanist who resided in Chili at the time, "that it was the general belief of the fishermen and inhabitants, _not_ that the land had risen, but that the ocean had permanently retreated." But if it had retreated from the Chilian shore, how could it have risen on the Indian one? In like manner the sea appears to be receding from the north-eastern shores of Sweden at the rate of nearly four vertical feet in the century; while it seems to be advancing on the western coasts of Greenland at apparently a rate more considerable, though there the ratio of its rise has not been marked with equal care. It seems to be rising on even the Swedish province of Scania; while all the time, however, the actual motion,--upwards in one region, downwards in another,--is in the solid earth,--not in the unstable water, which merely serves as a sort of hydrostatic _level_, to indicate this fact of subsidence or elevation in the land. And of course all the reasoning, founded on mere appearances, that would reverse the process by assigning permanency to the level of the land, and fluctuation to that of the sea, would lead to inevitable error.