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Show fl54 IMBEDDING OF TilE REMAINS OF MAN [Ch. XVI. way moss before alluded to, when the inundations in the north of England appear to have equa1led the re.ce~t flo~ds in Morayshire, a great number of houses and their mhabitants were swept away by the rivers Tyne, Can, Wear, Tees, and Greta; and no less than twenty-one bridges were destroyed in the courses of these rivers. At the village of Bywell the flood tore the dead bodies and coffins out of the churchyard, and bore them away, together with many of the living inhabitants. During the same tempest an immense number of cattle, horses, and sheep, were also transported to the sea, while the whole coast was covered with the wreck of ships. Four centuries before (in 1338), the same district had been visited by a similar continuance of heavy rains followed by disastrous floods, ancl it is not improbable that these catastrophes may recur periodically. As the population increases, and buildings an<! bridges are multiplied, we must expect that the loss of lives and property will rather augment*. If to the hundreds of human bodies committed to the deep in the way of ordinary burial, we add those of individuals lost by shipwreck, we shall find that, in the course of a single year, a great number of human remains are consigned to the subaqueous regions. We shall hereafter advert to a calculation by which it appears that more than five hundred British vessels alone, averaging each a burden of about one hundred and twenty tons, are wrecked, and sink to the bottom, annually. Of these tl1e crews for the most part escape, although it sometimes happens that all perish. In one great naval action several thousand individuals sometimes share a watery grave. Many of these corpses are instantly devoured by predaceous fish, sometimes before they reach the bottom ; still more frequently when they rise again to the surface and float in a state of putrefaction. Many decompose on the floor of the ocean where no sediment is thrown down upon them, but if they fall upon a reef where corals and shells are becoming a~gluti~ated into a solid rock, or subside where the delta of a river IS ad- * Scots Mag., vol. xxxiii. 1771. Ch. XVI.] AND IUS WOltKS, IN SUBAQUEOUS STRA'J.'A. 255 vancing, they may be preserved for an incalculable series of ages in these deposits. Often at the distance of a few hundred feet fmm a coral reef there are no soundings at the depth of many hundred fathoms Here if a ship strike and be wrecked, it may soon be covered by calcareous sand and fra()'ments of 1 d 1 d o cora ctac 1e by the breakers from the summit of a submar1'ne m t · d h' h oun am, an w Ic may roll down to its base. Wrecks are known to have been common for centuries near certain reefs, so that canoes, merchant vessels, and ships of war may have sunk and have .been enveloped in these situations in calcareous sand and b~ecc1a. Suppose a volcanic eruption to cover such remains with ashes and sand, and that over the t l' . · Utaceous strata resultmg fmm these ejections, a current of lava is afterwards pou. r.e d, the ships and human skeletons m1'ght th en remam· unmJ ured beneath the superincumbent rock, like the houses and works of art in the subterranean cities f c · o ampama. That cases may have ah·eady occurred wl1ere }1um an remam· s have been thus preserved in a fossil state beneath m asses more than a thousand feet in thickness, is by no means impr b bl l' • • • o a e, 10r m. some volcamc archipelagos a period of thirty or forty centuries might well suffice for such an accumulation of matter. We stated that at the distance of about forty miles from the base of th~ d~lta ~f the Ganges, there is a circular space about fifteen miles m diameter where soundin()'s of a th d o• ousan feet sometimes fail to reach the bottom. As during the flood ~ason. the quantity of mud and sand poured by the great rivers mt~ the Bay of Bengal, is so great that the sea only recovers Its transparency at the distance of sixty miles from t?e coast, this depression must be gradually shoaling, espeCially .as during the monsoons the sea, loaded with mud and ~and, I~ beaten back in that direction towards the delta. Now If a S~I~ or human body sink down to the bottom in such a , spot, It Is by no means improbable that it may become buried under a depth of three or four thousand feet of sediment in the same number of years. |