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Granting, however, that such an unbroken sequence of monuments may thus be elaborated in certain parts of the sea, and that the strata happen to be all of them well adapted to preserve the included fossils from decomposition, how many accidents must still concur before these submarine formations will be laid open to our investigation!
Would that the man had asked him to root up bushes with his hands for his horse to feed on; or to run to the far end of the plain for the fossils that lay there, or to gather the flowers that grew on the hills at the edge of the plain; he would have run and been back quickly but now! "I have never done anything," he said. "Then tell me of that nothing.
Fossils are solid bodies which, by some natural process, have come to be contained within other solid bodies, namely, the rocks in which they are embedded; and the fundamental problem of palaeontology, stated generally, is this: "Given a body endowed with a certain shape and produced in accordance with natural laws, to find in that body itself the evidence of the place and manner of its production."
The altitude of the Peuquenes Range, considering its not great antiquity, is very remarkable; many of the fossils were embedded at the height of 13,210 feet, and the same beds are prolonged up to at least from fourteen to fifteen thousand feet above the level of the sea. The valley of Tenuyan, separating the Peuquenes and Portillo lines, is, as estimated by Dr.
Their institutions are part of their history, whether as relics or fossils. Their abuses have really been uses: that is to say, they have been used up. If they have old engines of terror or torment, they may fall to pieces from mere rust, like an old coat of armour.
It is supposed by the Duke of Argyll that this formation was accumulated in a shallow lake or marsh in the neighbourhood of a volcano, which emitted showers of ashes and streams of lava. The tufaceous envelope of the fossils may have fallen into the lake from the air as volcanic dust, or have been washed down into it as mud from the adjoining land.
Now it is gravely asserted that Fallopius committed himself to misleading views, views which he knew to be misleading, because he thought that he was thereby serving the interest of the Church. What he said concerned fossils, then beginning to puzzle the scientific world of the day.
In one of the sections described by M. Studer in the highest of the Bernese Alps, namely in the Roththal, a valley bordering the line of perpetual snow on the northern side of the Jungfrau, there occurs a mass of gneiss 1000 feet thick, and 15,000 feet long, which I examined, not only resting upon, but also again covered by strata containing oolitic fossils.
Darwin has been so good as to send him several fossils, etc., with their names written upon them, and he is every day adding to his little stock of larning. There is a very sensible man here who has also made him presents of little things which he values much, and he begins to mess a great deal with gums, camphor, etc. He will at least never come under Dr. Darwin's definition of a fool.
"Well," said Jack, "I guess we've got off about all the mud we can for the present. We'd better be getting back. It's mighty fortunate that we came in time." "Yes, I was slipping into the stuff all the time," said the professor. "If I'd been alone on the island I might have never been seen again," he added in quite a matter-of-fact tone. "It's too bad I lost that bag of fossils, though.
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