The American Naturalist, 4. köide

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Essex Institute, 1871

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Page 361 - SKETCHES OF CREATION. Sketches of Creation: a Popular View of some of the Grand Conclusions of the Sciences in reference to the History of Matter and of Life. Together with a Statement of the Intimations of Science respecting the Primordial Condition and the Ultimate Destiny of the Earth and the Solar System. By ALEXANDER WINCHELL, LL.D., Professor of Geology, Zoology, and Botany in the University of Michigan, and Director of the State Geological Survey.
Page 575 - These are the gardens of the desert, these The unshorn fields, boundless and beautiful, For which the speech of England has no name — The prairies. I behold them for the first, And my heart swells, while the dilated sight Takes in the encircling vastness.
Page 419 - Every species has come into existence coincident both in time and space with a pre-existing closely allied species" connects together and renders intelligible a vast number of independent and hitherto unexplained facts.
Page 46 - ... Admitting to the full as highly probable, though not completely demonstrated, the applicability to living beings of the laws which have been ascertained with reference to dead matter, I feel constrained at the same time to admit the existence of a mysterious something lying beyond, a something sui generis, which I regard, not as balancing and. suspending the ordinary physical laws, but as working with them and through them to the attainment of a designed end. What this something which we call...
Page 80 - ... and I was convinced, at the period he predicted, of the old fellow's knowledge of his business. The first hare seized by the falcon was very strong, and the ground rough. While the bird kept the claws of one foot fastened in the back of its prey, the other was dragged along the ground till it had an opportunity to lay hold of a tuft of grass, by which it was enabled to stop the course of the hare, whose efforts to escape, I do think, would have torn the hawk asunder, if it had not been provided...
Page 124 - Bogle measured a fallen tree of Eucalyptus Amygdalina, in the deep recesses of Dandenong, and obtained for it the length of 420 feet, with proportions of width, indicated in a design of a monumental structure placed in the Exhibition ; while Mr. G-. Klein took the measurement of a eucalyptus on the Black Spur, ten miles distant from Healesville, 480 feet high ! Mr.
Page 421 - ... he had not yet acquired that wonderfully developed brain, the organ of the mind, which now, even in his lowest examples, raises him far above the highest brutes ; — at a period when he had the form but hardly the nature of man, when he neither possessed human speech, nor those sympathetic and moral feelings which in a greater or less degree everywhere now distinguish the race.
Page 359 - The valleys which furrow the flank of Chimborazo are in keeping with its colossal size. Narrower, but deeper than those of the Alps, the mind swoons and sinks in the effort to comprehend their grim majesty. The mountain appears to have been broken to pieces like so much thin crust, and the strata thrown on their vertical edges, revealing deep, dark chasms, that seem to lead to the confines of the lower world. The deepest valley in Europe, that of the Ordesa in the Pyrenees, is...
Page 58 - Hypsilophodon, from the character of its teeth, probably subsisted on hard vegetable food. He expressed a hope that Mr. Fox would allow a closer examination of his specimens to be made. He was unable to agree with Mr. Seeley's views. He was inclined to think that the progress of knowledge tended rather to break down the lines of demarcation between groups supposed to be distinct than to authorize the creation of fresh divisions.
Page 194 - ... 2d. Some of the valleys and channels which bear the marks of glacial action — evidently formed or modified by ice, and dating from the ice period or an earlier epoch — are excavated far below the present lakes and water-courses which occupy them. These valleys form a connected system of drainage, at a lower level than the present river system, and lower than could be produced without a continental elevation of several hundred feet.

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