The American Eclectic Volume 3 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1842 Excerpt: ...day to the epoch in which they live. Or would it have been more answerable to the purpose to place man on the circumscribed islands of the Oolitic seas, instead of those rude reptiles, which infested its shores? Or should those clumsy Pachydermata, which wallowed in the morasses of the tertiary period, have swum about in the warm seas of the Gray wacke? Our design is to give, in brief delineations, a characteristic of the earlier epochs of the Earth's history, so as in the shortest, simplest way, to reach that which shall more immediately occupy our attention. I cannot here descend into particulars in characterizing the formations made known to us by geology, but only indicate, in prominent features, the chief points of the history of the general structure of the earth. A strict geological view, therefore, will not be expected. I here account as one formation the first periods of animated life dovm to the termination of the stone-coal time, in which unquestionably three periods can be distinguished, during which fish appeared as the highest development of animated life. So I call the whole series of strata, from the Lower New Red Sandstone (Rothliegenden) to the shelly limestone (Muschelkalk) and Saliferous marls (Keuper), the series of the Trias forms, a second great epoch; the Oolite period with all its subdivisions, a third; the chalk a fourth grand epoch; then again three periods, in which the ugly brood of reptiles gains the upper hand and stands forth the first of created beings; and filially the tertiary period and the subsequent epoch of the so-called diluvial forms, throughout which theMammifera were gradually developed into their present structures, and prepared for the creation of man, with his contemporary forms of nature. As to the original sta...