Observations and Reflections on Geology: Intended to Serve as an Introduction to the Catalogue of His Collection of Extraneous Fossils

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Taylor & Francis, 1859 - Fossils - 4 pages
 

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Page lvii - This leads me to remark that, in page 3, you have used the term " many thousand centuries," which brings us almost to the yo/jues of the Hindoos. Now, although I have no quarrel with any opinions relating to the antiquity of the globe, yet there are a description of persons very numerous and very respectable in every point but their pardonable superstitions, who will dislike any mention of a specific period that ascends...
Page x - Forty days' water overflowing the dry land could not have brought such quantities of sea-productions on its surface; nor can we suppose thence, taking all possible circumstances into consideration, that it remained long on the whole surface of the earth; therefore there was no time for their being fossilized; they could only have been left, and exposed on the surface. But it would appear that the sea has more than once made its incursions on the same place; for the mixture of land- and sea-productions...
Page lvii - This leads me to remark that in page 3 you have used the term, ' many thousand centuries/ -which brings us almost to the yogucs of the Hindoos. Now, although I have no quarrel with any opinions relating to the antiquity of the globe, yet there are a description of persons very numerous and very respectable, in every point but their pardonable superstitions, who will dislike any mention of a specific period that ascends beyond 6,000 years. I would, therefore, with submission, qualify the expression...
Page lii - The hill is about 100 feet high above the level of the plain along which it passes. . . . "1st. the upper part, on which the vegetable earth rests, is a bed (A) sixty or eighty feet thick, of a kind of tufa . . . "2nd. A stratum of rolled pebbled (B) . . . This stratum is about three feet thick in one place, and tapers from right to left to the thickness of a few inches, on an extent of thirty or forty yards. "3rd. Another stratum of tufa (C) . . . This stratum is eight or ten feet thick. "4th. A...
Page xv - Probably the whole flat tract of the River Thames, between its lateral hills, was an arm of the sea ; and as the German Ocean became shallower, it was gradually reduced to a river ; and the composition of this tract of land, for an immense depth, would show it...
Page i - But it is to be understood that this investigation has nothing to do with the original formation of the earth itself...
Page liii - We found the bones . . . in the first stratum of gravel (B), between the two beds of tufa. . . . There is the greatest reason to suppose that the place where they were found has never been moved since the tufa came there; that is, that the bones and the stones of the stratum were placed there by the same cause, and previous to the formation of the upper bed of tufa...
Page xvi - ... of such risings beyond the general surface or basis were longer washed by it than the top, consequently more of the gravel was washed away, till at last they became...
Page xvi - But the most striking circumstance of the sea having once covered this tract, and afterwards having left it gradually, is the peculiar shape of the remains of those elevations of gravel ; for it would appear that as...
Page l - The hide was entire ; the body appeared of its natural bulk, but in such a state that only the head and feet could be carried away ; one of the latter was sent to Yakutsk, and the remainder to Irkutsk.

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