The Story of the Hills: A Book About Mountains for General Readers.Hutchinson, H. N. (Henry Neville)
Science
The Story of the Hills: A Book About Mountains for General Readers.
Hutchinson, H. N. (Henry Neville)
Mountains
On the other hand, the party who happened to be in districts where
granite, basalt, and such igneous rocks abounded were equally
impressed with the importance of the powerful agency of heat. To
them nearly every rock they met with seemed to show some signs of
its action. And since Pluto was the classical deity of the lower
regions, and the earth shows evidences in places of greater heat
below the surface, this party received the title of "Plutonists;"
and so the battle raged hotly for some time between the Neptunists,
with their claims for cold water, and the fiery Plutonists of the
rival school of Edinburgh, with their subterranean heat. Fire and
water are never likely to agree; and they did not do so in this case.
But now that the battle is over, and both sides are found to have
been partly right and partly wrong,--though the Neptunists have the
advantage,--we can afford to smile at the fierceness of the contest,
and wonder how it was that each side thought they were so entirely in
the right.
Let us now consider the aqueous rocks, and see if we can gain a clear
idea of the ways in which they were formed; and first, we will take
those of a purely sedimentary origin,--the sandstones, pebble-beds,
gravels, and clays. These, as the reader has already probably
guessed, have all been transported by means of streams and rivers,
and settled down quietly in seas at the mouths of rivers or in inland
lakes. There is no trace of the action of heat in the forming of
these rocks, though they often show signs of having suffered more or
less change from contact with highly heated igneous rocks of later
date which forcibly intruded themselves from below; and if the change
thus effected were considerable, we should call the rocks so altered
metamorphic. But we are now dealing with their original state and how
they were made; and of that there is no possible doubt whatever. So
for the time being we may call ourselves Neptunists.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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