The Pulaski citizen. [volume] (Pulaski, Tenn.) 1866-current, 1875-08-19
WHAT ARE WE COMING TOP

Proof That the Crust Of the Earth Is Changing Its
Shape IN Mysterious Munner.
Capt. James Riley's Hartford brig,
Commerce, was wrecked on the African
coast of Morocco in the year 1915, and
Capt. Riley and some of his ompan-
ions were captured by Arabs and driven
on foot across a large section of the
Great Desert of Sahara. Captain
Riley, amid all his sufferings in the
interior of the desert, could not fail to
notice and be deeply impressed by the
remarkable Typographical features pre-
scented at certain distances, somewhat
widely separated, and all indicating
Enthusiastically that the desert itself
once formed the bottom of the sea.
In Riley's Narrative" book that
was received with some incredulity at
the time, but which is sustained in its
more important statements by later
revelations, these Typographical phe-
nomena of the desert are described as
consisting of far-sweeping lines of low
terraces, presenting exactly the appear
ance that one wOuld expect to find In q
well-preseryed ancient sea beach. So
real was the appearance, that the oh
server could not resist the conviction
that these receding terraces were, IL
fact, what were in former ages lines of
shore which marked the successive
limits of an ancient sea.
In other words it was seemingly evil
dent that the "Great Desert" a region
a thousand miles wide and more than
two thousand miles long, had arisen
like the NEUROLOGICAL Venus from the
waves, not in beauty like the Grecian
Aphrodite, but in all the horrors of a
naked burning plain, its inhospitable
bosom presenting only hard and stony
surfaces, alternating with drifting sands
Its higher terraces, of course, were the
first to be lifted out of the sea then, in
due order, and at unknown intervals,
came the others until the existing line
was reached, and even that seems to be
slowly changing.
In fact, constant change seems to
be going on in the elevation of nearly
all parts of the earth's slrface-some
regions rising, others very unmistak-
ably sinking. In the latter class, very
certainly, appears the greater part of
our Atlantic coast, from Cape Cod, to
Florida. The Connecticut shore, from
Connecticut river to New York, as it
existed before the revolutionary war,
in now covered by the waters of Long
Island Sound nearly two rods out from
the present shore.
Tue coast of New Jersey has also re
ceded-the sea is now coming up to
places that were three rods from the
water in 1910. It is said by some geol-
ogists that the greater part of the
islands known as the West Indies are
really but the higher portions of vast
sunken region that once formed a part
of the American ointment. Nearer
home, the region around the great
lakes is also said to be slowly sinking,
while Southern Indiana, Kentucky and
the surrounding states are rising.
1t is found that the great lake once
had southern outlet. Now they dis
charge their surplus water, not through
the Mississippi into the Gulf, but
the Niagara river, Lake Ontario, and
the st. Lawrence into the chill seas of
TIE north. The great channel known as
Niagara river seems to have been
formed as recently as forty or fifty
thousand years ago, and the outlet of
all the lakes above Lake Ontario t
have been simultaneously changed from
the Southern to the Northern gulf
from the Gulf Of Mexico to the Gulf of
st. Lawrsnce-by northern depressions
AZ d southern upheavals.
These changes are governed by no
known law of relationship. California, !