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The face of the earth is no longer a sponge, but a dust-heap, and the floods which the waters of the sky pour over it hurry swiftly along its slopes, carrying in suspension vast quantities of earthy particles which increase the abrading power and mechanical force of the current, and, augmented by the sand and gravel of falling banks, fill the beds of the streams, divert them into new channels, and obstruct their outlets.
As the Mississippi when more than 150 feet deep can keep open its channel and even carry down gravel and sand to its delta, the surface velocity being not more than two or three miles an hour, so a gigantic current, like the Gulf Stream, equal in volume to many hundred Mississippis, and having in parts a surface velocity of more than three miles, may act as a propelling and abrading power at still greater depths.
Hence, when the ocean-bed was here and there raised to the surface when its strata of sediment with their contained organic fragments were torn up and long washed about by the breakers before being re-deposited when the re-deposits were again and again subject to this violent abrading action by subsequent small elevations, as they would mostly be; what few fragile organic remains they contained, would be in nearly all cases destroyed.
Though we find the stratified rocks of these periods cropping out here and there, where some violent disturbance or the abrading action of water has torn asunder or worn away the overlying strata, yet we never find them consecutively over any extensive region; and it is not till the Cretaceous and earlier Tertiary periods that we find again a regular succession of deposits around the shores of the continent, marking its present outlines.
I ordered my obedient mind to travel back to Stickenham, whilst I felt more than half-inclined to make my body take the same course the next morning. Not that my courage had failed me; but I actually felt a disgust at all that I had heard and seen. How different are the sharp, abrading corners that meet us at every turn in our passage through real life from the sunny dreams of our imagination!
She paused near a sword, extended one arm, and sustaining herself on a single hand she bent the elbow until she kissed the floor; then she stiffened the muscles, raising herself back to her first position, and throughout this whole maneuvre the cutting edge grazed her breast without even abrading the skin. When the girl finished her act the guests applauded vigorously.
Besides the blocks thus carried down on the top of the glacier, many fall through fissures in the ice to the bottom, where some of them become firmly frozen into the mass, and are pushed along the base of the glacier, abrading, polishing, and grooving the rocky floor below, as a diamond cuts glass, or as emery-powder polishes steel.
Quest's guest: there would probably be the abrading of both the son and the caregiver. She wondered whether this was about her son at all. Perhaps it was an inquest probing into her personal life to which she alone would be excoriated. It was a rather enticing thought to be under the spotlight as the pillory of ignorant people.
But he was on strange territory and found little of his accustomed food; the chafing and abrading contact of bushes and twigs irritated his sore spots, preventing investigation and rapid progress, and at the end of three hours, still hungry, and exasperated by his torment into a reckless, fighting mood, he picked up stones and returned savagely to battle again with the enemy.
Fundamental Rocks, polished, grooved, and scratched. Abrading and striating Action of Glaciers. Moraines, Erratic Blocks, and "Roches Moutonnees." Alpine Blocks on the Jura. Continental Ice of Greenland. Ancient Centres of the Dispersion of Erratics. Transportation of Drift by floating Icebergs. Bed of the Sea furrowed and polished by the running aground of floating Ice- islands.
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