Essay on the Theory of the Earth

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W. Blackwood, 1817 - 348 من الصفحات

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الصفحة 88 - Every organized being forms an entire system of its own, all the parts of which mutually correspond, and concur to produce a certain definite purpose by reciprocal reaction, or by combining to the same end. Hence none of these separate parts can change their forms, without a corresponding change in the other parts of the same animal ; and consequently each of these parts, taken separately, indicates all the other parts to which it has belonged. Thus...
الصفحة 15 - ... these first commotions, have uniformly acted at a less depth and less generally. Numberless living beings have been the victims of these catastrophes; some have been destroyed by sudden inundations, others have been laid dry in consequence of the bottom of the seas being instantaneously elevated. Their races even have become extinct, and have left no memorial of them except some small fragments which the naturalist can scarcely recognise.
الصفحة 273 - ... reddish-brown wool, which grew among the roots of the long hair. These afford an undeniable proof that this animal had belonged to a race of elephants inhabiting a cold region, with which we are now unacquainted, and by no means fitted to dwell in the torrid zone. It is also evident that this enormous animal must have been frozen up by the ice at the moment of its death.
الصفحة 9 - The traces of revolutions become still more apparent and decisive when we ascend a little higher, and approach nearer to the foot of the great chains of mountains.
الصفحة 216 - ... parts where it rises, a barrier against the invasion of these sands the shores of the river, on that side, would long since have ceased to be habitable. Nothing can be more melancholy...
الصفحة 8 - Essay. . nothing but horizontal strata composed of various substances, and containing almost all of them innumerable marine productions. Similar strata, with the same kind of productions, compose the hills even to a great height. Sometimes the shells are so numerous as to constitute the entire body of the stratum.
الصفحة 9 - The time is past for ignorance to assert that these remains of organized bodies are mere lusus naturae, — productions generated in the womb of the earth by its own creative powers. A nice and scrupulous comparison of their forms, of their contexture, and frequently even of their composition, cannot detect the slightest difference between these shells and the shells which still inhabit the sea. They have therefore once lived in the sea, and been deposited by it: the sea consequently must have rested...
الصفحة 272 - He next year observed the same object, which was then rather more disengaged from among the ice, but was still unable to conceive what it was. Towards the end of the following summer, 1801, he could distinctly see that it was the frozen carcase of an enormous animal, the entire flank of which and one of its tusks had become disengaged from the ice. In consequence of the ice beginning to melt earlier and to...
الصفحة 16 - Such are those primitive or primordial mountains which traverse our continents in various directions, rising above the clouds, separating the basins of the rivers from one another, serving by means of their eternal snows as reservoirs for feeding the springs, and forming in some measure the skeleton, or as it were the rough framework of the earth.

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