The lifted and subsided rocks of America; with their influences on the oceanic, atmospheric and land currents, and the distribution of races
George Catlin
Paperback
(RareBooksClub.com, April 21, 2013)
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1870 edition. Excerpt: ...them; and no man knows at what period, or in what district, the next shuddering of the earth, and the next raising or crumbling of a mountain chain, may take place; but time will be long enough, and the earth is large enough, for many of them. To contemplate the time, or near it, when the mountain chains have been thrown up, is therefore easy, and of little importance; but the process,--probably with an instant crash, louder than the peals of thunder, shaking the quivering earth to its centre, the rocky rent for a thousand miles or more is opened,--no eye sees but the eye of Him who commanded it. The chasm may be fifty feet in width, or it may be a hundred; it may be a thousand miles in length and fifty miles in depth. The rent is open!--it is in the granite crust alone, and the overlying stratified beds, unbroken, hold in smothered silence the catastrophe,--the grand display that is to come, of the rising heat (not lava) from the igneous mass of the globe, enchained between walls of rock with descending waters, swelling and groaning in their conflict, and struggling for vent, and lifting the superincumbent rocks into mountain piles and chains! In conflicting powers thus imprisoned (not by lifting and doubling up the solid crust of the earth), raising the superincumbent rocks for their escape, we will see the beginning and completion of a mountain chain,--the father of a family, the main or centre ridge, lifted up; and we will then see how the rest of the group rise into existence and take their positions by its side. In the gradual cooling and crystallising of the igneous mass of the globe there are certain laws of nature at work which cannot be contravened or disputed. Crystallisation, which is a slow and gradual process, cannot be...