Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society Held at Philadelphia for Promoting Useful Knowledge, Volume 16

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American Philosophical Society, 1877 - Electronic journals

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Page 668 - That in clearing the ground, care be taken to leave one acre of trees for every five acres cleared, especially to preserve oak and mulberries for silk and shipping.
Page 251 - But is it, after all, so improbable that, when Central Europe was covered with ice thousands of feet thick ; when the glaciers of Great Britain ploughed into the sea, and when those of the Swiss mountains had ten times their present altitude ; when every lake in Northern Italy was filled with ice, and these frozen masses extended...
Page 26 - Both his judgment and affections bound him to it as a government supreme in its delegated powers, and supreme in the authority to expound and enforce them, proceeding from the people, designed for their welfare, accountable to them, possessing their confidence, representing their sovereignty, and no more to be restrained in the spirit of jealousy, within less than the fair dimensions of its authority, than to be extended beyond them in the spirit of usurpation. These were his constitutional principles,...
Page 242 - It is a sheet of snow ten or fifteen thousand feet in thickness, extending all over the northern and southern portions of the globe ; and must necessarily lead, in the end, in the formation of a northern and southern cap of ice, moving to the equator.
Page 300 - This is so manifest, that all the great inequalities of long period which occur in the solar system depend upon these ratios, and they are interwoven with all the most important irregularities of motion of the primary planets. Whence could this extraordinary coincidence have arisen but from the action of a single mind ? and what does it indicate but that the same Word which created the planet, is expressed in the plant...
Page 242 - Brazil, 403, 402.) These all are words of Agassiz, with no word of apprehension or sympathy for his fellow beings, for whose welfare the noble labors of his life were devoted. Agassiz gives further explanation of his views on the "Ice period in America," in the Atlantic Monthly for July, 1864. The ice moved over the continent as one continuous sheet overriding nearly all the inequalities of the surface, p. 88. Fragments of rocks from Lake Superior are found in New England, and northern rocks on the...
Page 270 - It is quite manifest that the thing most needed to produce the glaciers is an improved condenser ; we cannot afford to lose an iota of solar action ; we need, if anything, more vapour, but we need a condenser so powerful that this vapour, instead of falling in liquid showers to the earth, shall be so far reduced in temperature as to descend in snow. The problem, I think, is thus narrowed to the precise issue on which its solution depends.
Page 245 - We must believe that all the hills and valleys were once swathed in snow and ice ; that the whole of Scotland was at some distant date buried underneath one immense mer de glace, through which peered only the higher mountain-tops. This is no vague hypothesis, or speculation founded on uncertain data, no mere conjecture which the light of future discoveries may explode. The evidence is so clear and so overwhelmingly convincing that we cannot resist the inevitable conclusion.
Page 245 - This great sheet of land-ice levelled 'up the valleys of Britain, and stretched across our mountains and hills down to low latitudes in England. Being only one connected or confluent series of mighty glaciers, the ice crept ever downwards and...
Page 3 - England, and from whom he was the fifth by descent in right line. The family came to this country about that time and settled in Hull, Massachusetts.* The grandfather of Horace was Barnabas Binney, a shipmaster and merchant of Boston, and his father (born in 1751), named also Barnabas Binney, was a surgeon in the revolutionary army, attached to the Massachusetts line, whence he was transferred to the Pennsylvania line. After his transfer he settled permanently in...

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