Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 September 2014
The sea is unquestionably the most powerful dynamic agent on the surface of the globe, and its effects are deeply imprinted on the external crust of our planet; but among the sedimentary deposits which are attributed to its action, and among the effects which it has wrought on the surface features of the earth, the attention of geologists has, till within quite recent times, been principally directed to the phenomena which take place in the immediate vicinity of the land. It is incontestable that the action of the sea along coasts and in shallow water has played the largest part in the formation and accumulation of those marine sediments which, so far as we can observe, form the principal strata of the solid crust of the globe; and it has been from an attentive study of the phenomena which take place along the shores of modern seas that we have been able to reconstruct in some degree the conditions under which the marine deposits of ancient times were laid down.
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