Principles of Geology: Being an Attempt to Explain the Former Changes of the Earth's Surface, by Reference to Causes Now in Operation, Bind 2

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J. Murray, 1832 - 511 sider

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Side 125 - In bigness to surpass earth's giant sons, Now less than smallest dwarfs in narrow room Throng numberless...
Side 218 - Earth, sand, gravel, stones, and other transported matter which has been washed away and thrown down by rivers, floods, or other causes, upon land not permanently submerged beneath the waters of lakes or seas.
Side 124 - ... life, in the creation of which nature has been so prodigal. A scanty number of minute individuals, only to be detected by careful research, and often not...
Side 202 - Thus, in Mar forest, in Aberdeenshire, large trunks of Scotch fir, which had fallen from age and decay, were soon immured in peat, formed partly out of their perishing leaves and branches, and in part from the growth of other plants. We also learn, that the overthrow of a forest by a storm, about the middle of the seventeenth century, gave rise to a peat moss near Lochbroom, in Ross-shire, where^ in less than half a century after the fall of the trees, the inhabitants dug peat.* Dr.
Side 46 - If, therefore, the relative fecundity or hardiness of hybrids be in the least degree inferior, they cannot maintain their footing for many generations, even if they were ever produced beyond one generation in a wild state. In the universal struggle for existence, the right of the strongest eventually prevails; and the strength and durability of a race depends mainly on its prolificness, in which hybrids are acknowledged to be deficient.
Side 111 - Were the whole of mankind now cut off, with the exception of one family, inhabiting the old or new continent, or Australia, or even some coral islet of the Pacific, we...
Side 256 - Gharee; its breadth from north to south is conjectured to be in some parts sixteen miles, and its greatest ascertained height above the original level of the delta is ten feet, an elevation which appears to the eye to be very uniform throughout.
Side 14 - We must suppose that when the author of nature creates an animal or a plant, all the possible circumstances in which its descendants are destined to live are foreseen, and that an organization is conferred upon it which will enable the species to perpetuate itself, and survive under all the varying circumstances to which it must be inevitably exposed.
Side 53 - If you examine the brain of the mammalia, says M. Serres, at an early stage of uterine life, you perceive the cerebral hemispheres consolidated, as in fish, in two vesicles, isolated one from the other ; at a later period, you see them affect the configuration of the cerebral hemispheres of reptiles ; still later again, they present you with the forms of those of birds ; finally, they acquire, at the era of birth, and sometimes later, the permanent forms which the adult mammalia present.
Side 208 - They are not horns which have been shed ; for portions of the skull are found attached, proving that the whole animal perished. Bones of the ox, hog, horse, sheep, and other herbivorous animals, also occur ; and in Ireland, and the Isle of Man, skeletons of a gigantic elk ; but no remains have been met with belonging to those extinct quadrupeds of which the living congeners inhabit warmer latitudes , such as the elephant, rhinoceros, hippopotamus, hyena, and tiger, though these are so common in superficial...

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