Travels in North America: With Geological Observations on the United States, Canada, and Nova Scotia, Volume 2

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J. Murray, 1845 - 5 pagina's

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Pagina 33 - The same conformity of organization is not less obvious in the osteological structure of these people, as seen in the squared or rounded, head, the flattened or vertical occiput, the high cheek bones, the ponderous maxillae, the large quadrangular orbits, and the low, receding forehead.
Pagina 127 - He also stated that fragments of the " black stone" which fell from the summit of the cliff, » a pile of which, d, fig. 16, lay at its base, were often frozen into the ice, and moved along with it. I then examined these fallen blocks of amygdaloid scattered round me, and observed in them numerous geodes coated with quartz crystals. I have no doubt that the hardness of these gravers, firmly fixed in masses of ice, which, although only fifteen feet thick, are often of considerable horizontal extent,...
Pagina 186 - This lake-like scenery continues for about fifteen miles, during which the fall of the river scarcely exceeds as many feet, but on reaching the rapids, it descends over a limestone bed about 50 feet in less than a mile, and is then thrown down about 165 feet perpendicularly at the Falls.
Pagina 125 - ... being N. 35° E., or corresponding to that of the shore at this point. After walking about a quarter of a mile, I found another set of similar furrows, having the same general direction within five degrees ; and I made up my mind that if these grooves could not be referred to the modern instrumentality of ice, it would throw no small doubt on the glacial hypothesis.
Pagina 22 - I was truly astonished, now that I had entered the hydrographical basin of the Ohio, at beholding the richness of the seams of coal, which appear everywhere on the flanks of the hills and at the bottom of the valleys, and which are accessible in a degree I never witnessed elsewhere. The time has not yet arrived, the soil being still densely covered with the primeval forest, and manufacturing industry...
Pagina 35 - European nation, appears to me a baseless hypothesis, however true it may be that the aboriginal Americans had derived some hints from foreign sources If, then, a large continent can be inhabited by hundreds of tribes, all belonging to the same race, and nearly all remaining for centuries in a state of apparently hopeless barbarism, while two or three of them make a start in their social condition, and in the arts and sciences; if these same nations, when brought into contact with Europeans, relapse...
Pagina 25 - Horizontal galleries may be driven everywhere at very slight expense, and so worked as to drain themselves, while the cars, laden with coal and attached to each other, glide down on a railway, so as to deliver their burden into barges moored to the river's bank.
Pagina 49 - Secondly, a gradual submergence then took place, bringing down each part of the land successively to the level of the waters, and then to a moderate depth below them. Large islands and bergs of floating ice came from the north, which, as they grounded on the coast and on shoals, pushed along all loose materials of sand and pebbles, broke off...
Pagina 126 - I found another set of similar furrows, having the same general direction within five degrees ; and I made up my mind that, if these grooves could not be referred to the modern instrumentality of ice, it would throw no small doubt on the glacial hypothesis. When I asked my guide — a peasant of the neighborhood — whether he had ever seen much ice on the spot where we stood, the heat was so excessive (for we were in the latitude of the south of France, 45° north), that I seemed to be putting a...
Pagina 125 - ... passage of sand and gravel, washed over it from the talus of fallen fragments, which lies at the foot of the cliff on the beach above. The slow but constant undermining of the perpendicular cliff forming this promontory, round which the powerful currents caused by the tide sweep backwards and forwards with prodigious velocity, must satisfy every geologist that the denudation by which the ledge in question has been exposed to view is of modern date. Whether the rocks forming the cliff extended...

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