File:Wonders of earth, sea and sky 72.jpg

Identifier: youngfolkslibrar11aldr (find matches)
Title: Young folks library
Year: 1902 (1900s)
Authors: Aldrich, Thomas Bailey, 1836-1907
Subjects: Children's literature
Publisher: Boston, CT : Hall and Locke
Contributing Library: Internet Archive
Digitizing Sponsor: Internet Archive

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h was in a state of igneous fusion, when no oceanbathed it and no atmosphere surrounded it, when nowind blew over it and no rain fell upon it, but an in-tense heat held all its materials in solution. In thosedays the rocks which are now the very bones and sin-ews of our mother Earth — her granites, her porphyries,her basalts, her syenites — were melted into a liquidmass. As I am writing for the unscientific reader, whomay not be familiar with the facts through which theseinferences have been reached, I will answer here a ques-tion which, were we talking together, he might natu-rally ask in a somewhat sceptical tone. How doyou know that this state of things ever existed, and,supposing that the solid materials of which our earthconsists were ever in a liquid condition, what righthave you to infer that this condition was caused by theaction of heat upon them? I answer. Because it isacting upon them still; because the earth we tread isbut a thin crust floating on a hquid sea of molten
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A Voi,CANO. America the Old World 47 materials; because the agencies that were at work thenare at work now, and the present is the logical sequenceof the past. From artesian wells, from mines, fromgeysers, from hot springs, a mass of facts has been col-lected, proving incontestably the heated condition ofall substances at a certain depth below the earths sur-face ; and if we need more positive evidence, we have itin the fiery eruptions that even now bear fearful testi-mony to the molten ocean seething within the globeand forcing its wayout from time totime. The modernprogress of Geol-ogy has led us bysuccessive and per-fectly connectedsteps back to atime when what isnow only an occa-sional and rare phe-nomenon was thenormal conditionof our earth; when the internal fires were enclosed byan envelope so thin that it opposed but little resist-ance to their frequent outbreak^ and they constantlyforced themselves through this crust, pouring outmelted materials that subsequently cooled and c

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