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Ice or Water; Another Appeal to Induction From the Scholastic Methods of Modern Geology
Ice or Water Another Appeal to Induction From the Scholastic Methods of Modern Geology Author:Sir Henry Hoyle Howorth General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1905 Original Publisher: Longmans, Green Subjects: Glacial epoch Geology Science / Earth Sciences / General Science / Earth Sciences / Geology Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. ... more »When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: CHAPTER XI. THE BIOLOGICAL EVIDENCE ABOUT THE SO-CALLED ICE AGE AND THE QUESTION OF INTERGLACIAL PERIODS. " We might expect that as we come close upon living nature the characters of our old records would grow legible and clear; but just when we begin to enter on the history of the physical changes going on before our eyes, and in which we ourselves bear a part, our chronicle seems to fail us -- a leaf has been torn out from nature's book, and the succession of events is almost hidden from our eyes." -- Sedgwick. When Croll formulated the theory by which he made his great ice age extend over a whole cycle of years, from 240,000 B. c. to 80,000 B. c., he urged that such an age necessarily included several minor periods involving alternations of climate, and hence he introduced the notion of interglacial periods. The notion does not seem to have occurred to geologists before, but a considerable number of them now followed the lead of Croll, and interglacial periods became a favourite expression with them, and especially with the champions of a glacial age who belonged to the Geological Survey; and, what is rather curious, a notion which was originally started in order to support the astronomical theory of an ice age, and which would hardly have occurred to geological students unless pressed by the necessity of supporting that prime postulate of so many so-called uni- formitarian geologists, has, with some writers, apparently survived the astronomical theory and i...« less