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Vestige of the Natural History of Creation
Vestige of the Natural History of Creation Author:Robert Chambers 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: greater at greater depths; so that the entire mass of a cool globe should be of a gravity infinitely exceeding four and a half times the weight of water. The onl... more »y alternative supposition is, that the central materials are greatly expanded or diffused by some means; and by what means could they be so expanded but by heat! Indeed, the existence of this central heat, a residuum of that which kept all matter in a vaporiform chaos at first, is amongst the most solid discoveries of modern science, and the support which it gives to Herschel's explanation of the formation of worlds is most important. We shall hereafter see what appear to be traces of an operation of this heat upon the surface of the earth in very remote times; an effect, however, which has long passed entirely away. The central heat has, for ages, reached a fixed point, at which it will probably remain for ever, as the non-conducting quality of the cool crust absolutely pre- Tentg it from suffering any diminution. THE EARTH FORMED—ERA OF THE PRIMARY ROCKS. Although the earth has not been actually penetrated to a greater depth than three thousand feet, the nature of its substance can, in many instances, be inferred for the depth of many miles by other means of observation. We see a mountain composed of a particular substance, with strata, or beds of other rock, lying against its sloped sides: we, of course, infer that the substance of the mountain dips away under the strata which we see lying against it. Suppose 'ttat-we walk away from the mountain across the turned up edges of the stratified rocks, and that for many miles we contrnue to pass over other stratified rocks, all disposed in the same way, till by and bye we come to a place where we begin to cross the opposite edges of the same beds; after which we pass ov...« less