Search -
Facts and Observations Towards Forming a New Theory of the Earth
Facts and Observations Towards Forming a New Theory of the Earth Author:William Knight Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: to much of the evidence which the science affords. Dr HutTON calls in the aid of heat, from the impossibility of finding any other solvent adequate to the eff... more »ects produced ; from the non.ex- istence of water in those rocks which beat marks of fire ; and from the irruptive power often visible in veins and dykes where the regular strata have been broken, dismembered, or changed, in Consequence of the introduction of streams of liquid matter supposed to arise from below. He connects this principle with another, the gradual disintegration of the land, by causes which we see daily operating. The prolonged action of air and water, of rivers and currents, wears away the land gradually, and spreads it over the bottom of the ocean. There the central heat, acting upon it, consolidates the mass; hardens fine gravel into sandstone, clay into clay-slate, calcareous particles into limestones and marbles. As this change goes on under the incumbent pressure of the ocean, the results differ, in many cases, from those which would arise if the same heat acted in the ain Sir JamesJames Hall has shewn, in a course of admirably conducted experiments, how limestone and marble melt under pressure, by being enabled to retain their carbonic acid; and how, under similar pressure, vegetable and animal substances assume bituminous and coaly aspects.—In some spots, the action of the heat has been expended in evaporating the waters of the sea", leaving its rock-salt crowded with organic remains. But its chief agency is exerted in gradually elevating the strata, by the propulsion from below, of immense fused masses of granitic rocks. These, by their heat, soften, but do not melt completely, the superincumbent strata; they often project into their fissures part of their substance ; and they impart to them e...« less