The International Monthly (V. 3)
by Frederick Albert Richardson (9780217331586)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: MOUNTAIN STRUCTURE AND ITS ORIGIN JAMES GEIKIE, Edinburgh. ]HE origin of mountains as of other land forms can be ascertained only in one way, ?by studying their structure or architecture. Without investigation of that kind we are left to vague surmise, as, indeed, was the case with many eminent men in the infancy of geological science. Not until the study of rocks and of rock arrangements had fairly commenced was the first step taken to work out the h1story of mountains; and just as the knowledge of rocks and geological structure has increased, so has the conception of the origin of mountains, and of land features generally, grown and widened. At one time it was the prevalent belief that mountains were primitive, or, in other words, original protuberances of the earth's crust. This was the doctrine maintained by Leibnitz in 1749, and upheld by Buffbn in 1790. Long before, however, Steno, a Dane, at one time professor of anatomy at Padua, published a remarkable treatise (1669) in which he showed that there was an obvious connection between disruptions of the crust and the existing inequalities of the earth's surface. He certainly did not suppose that mountains were primitive, and similar views were entertained in later times by Lazzaro Moro in Italy (1740) and by John Michell in England (1760). According to these observers earthquakes and volcanic action must be invoked to explainthe phenomena. But the old belief in the primitive origin of mountains died hard, ? many writers of the eighteenth century still maintaining that view, while at the same time admitting that some mountains owed their existence to volcanic action. Before the century closed, however, the truth had dawned on James Hutton, a Scottish geologist, whose sagacious observations and original conceptions we...

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