The Parochial History of Cornwall, Volume 1 (of 4)
History
The Parochial History of Cornwall, Volume 1 (of 4)
Cornwall (England : County) -- History; Geology -- England -- Cornwall (County)
Mr. De la Beche has also been enabled to deduce several general laws
observed in the direction of cleavages, in the dip of strata, in the
heaves and slides of lodes, all of which will be detailed in an
eagerly expected volume, together with a discovery most unexpected.
The saxa metallifera of Cornwall had always been supposed referable to
a very remote period of geological epochs, far anterior to the age of
organic remains; till this opinion became shaken by the discovery of
shells, or of their impressions, in the hard schist rocks near
Tintagell: others were subsequently found more to the south and west;
till at last Mr. De la Beche has detected the remains of organized
life adjacent to a productive Copper Lode.
Two other eminent geologists, whom it would be equally idle and
presumptuous for me to praise, have established the fact of a
formation in the northern parts of Cornwall and Devon, not less
unexpected than the discovery just noticed.
Professor Sedgwick and Mr. Murchison having investigated the
deep-seated rocks in Wales, and in the adjacent districts, have
finally traced the carboniferous series under the Severn, and so far
west as the level ridge of land, extending from near Launceston to the
sea coast between St. Gennys and Botreaux Castle, along which plane
the escarpment manifests itself in a very conspicuous manner.
While these discoveries may be considered as in progress, a Cornish
gentleman, but one whose genius does honour to the nation, Mr. Robert
Weare Fox, has deduced from galvanic action on metals, on their
oxides, on their sulphurets, and on their saline solutions in water,
the only theory that has yet accounted for the various phenomena
observed in metallic lodes; and extending still further his
investigations to the recently discovered connection between electric
energies and terrestrial magnetism, Mr. Fox has been enabled to give
more than probable reasons for the extraordinary fact of some metals
usually selecting, in all parts of the world, lodes or fissures
running nearly east and west, and why other metals prefer rents at
right angles to the former; and in respect to the fissures themselves,
Mr. Fox has remarked appearances inducing him to believe that lodes of
considerable breadth have not been formed by any one great and sudden
rending of the earth; but that, in a manner similar to the rising or
to the sinking of land, by the gradual action of causes now well known
to exist, those clefts have been enlarged from time to time, and have
as frequently received additional deposits, easily discriminated from
each other.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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