Travels in North America in the Years 1841-2: With Geological Observations on the United States, Canada and Nova Scotia, Volumes 1-2

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Wiley and Putnam, 1845

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Pagina 27 - An examination of the geological structure of the district, as laid open in the ravine, shows that at every step in the process of excavation, the height of the precipice, the hardness of the materials at its base, and the quantity of fallen matter to be removed, must have varied. At some points it may have receded much faster than at present, but in general its progress was probably slower, because the cataract, when it began to recede, must have had nearly twice its present height, and therefore...
Pagina 146 - 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...
Pagina 114 - ... Dismal," and is no less than forty miles in length from north to south, and twenty-five miles in its greatest width from east to west, the northern half being situated in Virginia, the southern in North Carolina. I observed that the water was obviously in motion in several places, and the morass had somewhat the appearance of a broad inundated river-plain, covered with all kinds of aquatic trees and shrubs, the soil being as black as in a peatbog.
Pagina 115 - I learnt of this singular morass. It is one enormous quagmire, soft and muddy, except where the surface is rendered partially firm by a covering of vegetables and their matted roots ; yet, strange to say, instead of being lower than the level of the surrounding country, it is actually higher than nearly all the firm and dry land which encompasses it, and, to make the anomaly complete, in spite of its semi-fluid character, it is higher in the interior than towards its margin.
Pagina 146 - Parrsborough, and that the icy blocks, heaped on each other, and frozen together or ' packed,' at the foot of Cape Blomidon, were often fifteen feet thick, and were pushed along when the tide rose, over the sandstone ledges. He also stated that fragments of the
Pagina 131 - ... marshes. Thus at Beauly, I found upright stumps of trees of the pine, cedar and ilex, covered with live oysters and barnacles, and exposed at low tides; the deposit in which they were buried having been recently washed away from around them by the waves.

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