Classics of modern science : $b (Copernicus to Pasteur)
History
Classics of modern science : $b (Copernicus to Pasteur)
Science; Science -- History
It would be easy to multiply instances of similar unconformability
in formations of other ages; but a few more will suffice. The
carboniferous rocks before alluded to as horizontal on the borders
of Wales are vertical in the Mendip hills in Somersetshire, where
the overlying beds of the New Red Sandstone are horizontal. Again,
in the Wolds of Yorkshire the last-mentioned sandstone supports on
its curved and inclined beds the horizontal Chalk. The Chalk again is
vertical on the flanks of the Pyrenees, and the tertiary strata repose
unconformably upon it.
As almost every country supplies illustrations of the same phenomena,
they who advocate the doctrine of alternate periods of disorder and
repose may appeal to the facts above described, as proving that every
district has been by turns convulsed by earthquakes and then respited
for ages from convulsions. But so it might with equal truth be affirmed
that every part of Europe has been visited alternately by winter and
summer, although it has always been winter and always summer in some
part of the planet, and neither of these seasons has ever reigned
simultaneously over the entire globe. They have been always shifting
from place to place; but the vicissitudes which recur thus annually
in a single spot are never allowed to interfere with the invariable
uniformity of seasons throughout the whole planet.
So, in regard to subterranean movements, the theory of the perpetual
uniformity of the force which they exert on the earth’s crust is quite
consistent with the admission of their alternate development and
suspension for long and indefinite periods within limited geographical
areas.
If, for reasons before stated, we assume a continual extinction of
species and appearance of others on the globe, it will then follow
that the fossils of strata formed at two distant periods on the same
spot will differ even more certainly than the mineral composition of
those strata. For rocks of the same kind have sometimes been reproduced
in the same district after a long interval of time; whereas all the
evidence derived from fossil remains is in favour of the opinion that
species which have once died out have never been reproduced. The
submergence, then, of land must be often attended by the commencement
of a new class of sedimentary deposits, characterized by a new set of
fossil animals and plants, while the reconversion of the bed of the sea
into land may arrest at once and for an indefinite time the formation
of geological monuments. Should the land again sink, strata will again
be formed; but one or many entire revolutions in animal or vegetable
life may have been completed in the interval.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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