A century of science in America : $b with special reference to the American Journal of Science, 1818-1918
History
A century of science in America : $b with special reference to the American Journal of Science, 1818-1918
American journal of science; Science -- United States -- History
“Being fully persuaded of the gradual and systematic evolution of
topographical forms it is now desired ... to seek the causes of the
location of streams in their present courses; to go back if possible
to the early date when central Pennsylvania was first raised from the
sea, and trace the development of the several river systems then
implanted upon it from their ancient beginning to the present time.”
That such a task could have been undertaken a quarter of a century ago
and to-day considered a part of everyday field work shows how completely
the lost ground of a half century has been regained and how rapid the
advance in the knowledge of land sculpture since the canyons of the
Colorado Plateau were interpreted.
_Features Resulting from Glaciation._
_The Problem Stated._
Early in the nineteenth century when speculation regarding the interior
of the earth gave place in part to observations of the surface of the
earth, geologists were confronted with perhaps the most difficult
problem in the history of the science. As stated by the editor of the
Journal in 1821:[32]
“The almost universal existence of rolled pebbles, and boulders of
rock, not only on the margin of the oceans, seas, lakes, and rivers;
but their existence, often in enormous quantities, in situations quite
removed from large waters; inland,—in high banks, embedded in strata,
or scattered, occasionally, in profusion, on the face of almost every
region, and sometimes on the tops and declivities of mountains, as
well as in the vallies between them; their entire difference, in many
cases, from the rocks in the country where they lie—rounded masses and
pebbles of primitive rocks being deposited in secondary and alluvial
regions, and vice versa; these and a multitude of similar facts have
ever struck us as being among the most interesting of geological
occurrences, and as being very inadequately accounted for by existing
theories.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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