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 218 - England was the perception that only those works that have a practical tendency awake attention and command respect, while the purely scientific, which possess far greater merit, are almost unknown. And yet the latter are the proper and true source from which the others flow. Practice alone can never lead to the discovery of a truth or a principle. In Germany it is quite the contrary. Here, in the eyes of scientific men, no value, or at least but a trifling one, is placed on the practical results....
Pagina 42 - By pursuing still further the same investigations, we learn that there are luminous clouds, scarcely distinguishable by the naked eye, but resolvable by the telescope into clusters of stars which are so much more remote, that the interval between our sun and Sirius may be but a fraction of this larger distance. To regions of space of this higher order, in point of magnitude, we may probably compare such an interval of time as that which divides the human epoch from the origin of the coralline limestone...
Pagina 108 - The water is transparent, though tinged of a pale brown color, like that of our peat-mosses, and contains abundance of fish. This sheet of water is usually even with its banks, on which a thick and tall forest grows. There is no beach, for the bank sinks perpendicularly, so that if the waters are lowered several feet, it makes no alteration in the breadth of the. lake. Much timber has been cut down and carried out from the swamp by means of canals, which are perfectly straight for long distances,...
Pagina 107 - When these are most powerful, the large cedar and many other deciduous trees are in full leaf. The black soil formed beneath this shade, to which the mosses and the leaves make annual additions, does not perfectly resemble the peat of Europe, most of the plants being so decayed as to leave little more than soft black mud, without any traces of organization.
Pagina 104 - 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 79 - L, and to map, PI. III., and^ to the observations made at p. 93 and 95., Vol. II., will enable the reader to understand the details exhibited in this view. The numbers on the right-hand margin from 1 to 6 correspond with those referring to similar colours in the map of the Niagara district, PI. III. Vol. I. p. 30., in which the usual position of North and South have been reversed, that it might correspond with the bird's-eye view. In the latter, Lake Erie is seen in the distance, or to the South,...
Pagina 15 - ... and denuding operations. 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 232 - 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 in its infancy, when the full value of this inexhaustible supply of cheap fuel can be appreciated...
Pagina 121 - ... 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.
Pagina 57 - One of the first peculiarities that must strike a foreigner in the United States, is the deference paid universally to the sex, without regard to rank or station.

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