The Canadian Record of Science, Volume 2

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Natural History Society., 1887

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Page 274 - Atlantic continents, it is easy to perceive that no amount of refrigeration could produce a continental glacier, because there could not be sufficient evaporation and precipitation to afford the necessary snow in the interior. The case of Greenland is often referred to, but this is the case of a high mass of cold land with sea, mostly open, on both sides of it, giving, therefore, the conditions most favorable to precipitation of snow.
Page 32 - Swiss, Dutch, and even Greeks— push aside our English youth and take the places of profit which belong to them by national inheritance? How is it that in our Colonies, like those in South Africa, German enterprise is pushing aside English incapacity? How is it that we find whole branches of manufactures, when they depend on scientific knowledge, passing away from this country, in which they originated, in order to engraft themselves abroad, although their decaying roots remain at home? The answer...
Page 270 - ... of Baffin's Bay and the North Atlantic might be closed. At the same time the interior plain of America might be depressed, so that, as we know to have been the case in the Cretaceous period, the warm waters of the Mexican Gulf would circulate as far north as the basins of the present great American lakes. In these circumstances there would be an immense diminution of the sources of floating ice, and a correspondingly vast increase in the surface of warm water. The effects would be to enable a...
Page 229 - The meteoroids which have given us any one of these star-showers constitute a group, each individual of which moves in a path which is like that of the corresponding comet. The bodies are, however, now too far from one another to influence appreciably each other's motions. 5. The ordinary shooting stars in their appearance and phenomena do not differ essentially from the individuals in star- showers.
Page 272 - A very similar distribution of land and water in the Cretaceous age gave a warm and equable climate in those portions of North America not submerged, and coincided with the appearance of the multitude of broad-leaved trees of modern types introduced in the early and middle Cretaceous, and which prepared the way for the mammalian life of the Eocene. We may take a still later instance from the second continental period of the later Pleistocene or early modern, when there would seem to have been a partial...
Page 272 - The effect of such conditions on the climates of the northern hemisphere must have been prodigious, and their investigation is rendered all the more interesting because it would seem that this continental period of the post-glacial age was that in which man made his first acquaintance with the coasts of the Atlantic, and possibly made his way across its waters.
Page 29 - I wish to illustrate is this evident truth, that not by the mere increment in number of facts learned, not by the mere multiplication of discoverers, teachers and students of those facts, but by the elevation of our aims, by the enlargement of our views, by the refinement of our methods, by the ennoblement of our personalities, and by these alone can we rightly discover whether or not our association is fulfilling its destiny by advancing science in America.
Page 53 - In this way are obtained considerable masses of nearly pure fused aluminium and others of a crystalline compound of the metal with carbon. When, however, a portion of granulated copper is placed with the corundum, an alloy of the two metals is obtained, which is probably formed in the overlying stratum, but at the close of the operation is found in fused masses below.
Page 211 - ... fusion which arises from the action of heat on moist substances, and which may either be regarded as a fusion or as a species of solution at a very high temperature. This we learn from the phenomena of volcanic action, and from the composition of the volcanic and plutonic rocks, as well as from such chemical experiments as those of Daubree, and of Tilden and Shenstone.
Page 268 - The land, ou the other hand, cools or warms rapidly, and can transmit its influence to a distance only by the winds, and the influence so transmitted is rather in the nature of a disturbing than of an equalizing cause. It follows that any change in the distribution of land and water must affect climate, more especially if it changes the character or course of the ocean...

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