Items related to Lessons in general knowledge
Synopsis
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.1856 Excerpt: ... LESSON 18.--MOUNTAIN CHAINS. THE surface of the great globe, the earth on which man dwells, is not smooth. It is wrinkled like the skin of a shrivelled apple. The wrinkling of an apple is caused by its skin being made to adapt itself to a smaller body than it at first inclosed. The bulk of the apple gets less as it shrivels, in consequence of some of its juice being evaporated into the air. The skin, that just fits a plump full apple, is too large for a wasted and smaller one, and so it gets crushed up into wrinkles and folds. Now there is a very high degree of likelihood that the wrinkles of the earth are caused in somewhat the same way: not in consequence of the drying of the earth, but in consequence of its being otherwise shrunk into a smaller bulk, and of its outer surface being crushed in and folded up, to make it still adapt itself to the new condition of things. But the surface of the earth that has been wrinkled was never a soft skin; it was from the first more of the nature of a shell, than of a skin; and consequently the wrinkles have been cracked and broken in all sorts of ways, as they have been raised, instead of being merely doubled up. The wrinkles of the earth, and the shrivellings that have resulted from the shrinking of its interior, are the mountains and valleys, that make its surface everywhere so diversified and beautiful to look upon. These mountains and valleys are often of enormous size in themselves; and yet they are no more than wrinkles when viewed in relation to the vast globe on which they are placed. Twenty-seven hundred masses of the height of Mont Blanc, the loftiest European mountain, might be piled one upon another before the entire breadth of the earth's great globe was made up. A seam of lead, an inch and a half high, on...
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