Geological excursions round the Isle of Wight, and along the adjacent coast of Dorsetshire

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Henry G. Bohn, 1847 - 428 pages
 

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Page 153 - ... the sun, which, from about noon till his setting, in summer illuminates them more and more, gives a brilliancy to some of these nearly as resplendent as the bright lights on real silk.
Page x - ... feeling of admiration must we consider those grand monuments of nature, which mark the revolutions of the globe : continents broken into islands ; one land produced, another destroyed ; the bottom of the ocean become a fertile soil ; whole races of animals extinct...
Page x - ... as it were, of a former animated world, new generations rising, and order and harmony established, and a system of life and beauty produced, as it were, out of chaos and death; proving the infinite power, wisdom, and goodness of the Great cause of all being!
Page 396 - Arabian story, being converted into stone, yet still remaining in the places they occupied when alive ! Some of the trunks were surrounded by a conical mound of calcareous earth, which had evidently when in the state of mud accumulated around the stems and roots.
Page 157 - Bracklesham beds. The variety of the vertical layers is endless, and may be compared to the vivid stripes of a parti-coloured tulip. On cutting down pieces of the cliff it is astonishing to see the extreme brightness of the colours and the delicacy and thinness of the several layers of white and red sands, shale and white sand, yellow clay and white and red sand, and indeed almost every imaginable combination of these materials.
Page 150 - These offer a series of points, of a sort of scolloped form, and which are often quite sharp and spiry. Deep rugged chasms divide the strata in many places, and not a vestige of vegetation appears in any part, — all is wild ruin. The tints of these cliffs are so bright, and so varied, that they have not the appearance of any thing natural.
Page 199 - German nieder fels, or under cliff) are five in number, but only three are conspicuously visible. Originally, they formed a portion of the western point of the island, and their present isolated condition is owing to the decomposition and wearing away of the rock in the direction of the joints or fissures with which the strata are traversed. " Their angular or wedgeshaped form has resulted from the highly inclined northward dip of the beds of which they are composed.
Page 197 - a succession of mural precipices of chalk, from 400 to upwards of 6OO ft. in height. The face of these cliffs, when seen from the sea at a short distance, has a remarkable appearance, from the rows of flints which score the surface of the white rock with fine dark parallel lines, running in an oblique direction from the top to the bottom of the section.
Page 221 - Near this place, after recent slips of the cliff, and the removal of the fallen debris by ; the waves, the uppermost of the Wealden deposits and the lowermost of the green-sand may be seen in juxtaposition ; in other words, the line of demarcation between the accumulated sediments of a mighty river — some primeval Nile or Ganges, teeming with the spoils of the land and the...
Page 150 - ... bold broken outline ; and the wedge-like needle rocks, rising out of the blue waters, continue the cliff in idea, beyond its present boundary, and give an awful impression of the stormy ages which have gradually devoured its enormous mass. The pearly hue of the chalk is beyond description by words, probably out of the power even of the pencil...

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