Notes Upon the Errors of Geology Illustrated by Reference to Facts Observed in Ireland

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. 1864. Excerpt: ... Those sands might have been produced by the same means as sand for the sediment of a bed of rock, or a thousand beds of rock, with this difference, that the sand for a bed was thrown up into a sea and spread about on the bottom of it, while the sand of the desert, from a similar fissure, was thrown up by steam into the open air, and accumulated in masses on the plains, making those vast deserts of sand we know in India, Africa, Australia, etc. Granite appears to be the origin and the source of all the sandstones, shales, grits, and slates, old and new. In a chemical view it is capable of modification and change, and yields many of the substances in the composition of the sedimentary rocks. In this view I find I am borne out by an able chemist, who has made himself eminent by his attention to chemistry as applied to geology. He has made over five hundred analyses of rocks for this purpose, and it may be seen by those analyses how far one substance appears to have been capable of change into another, and what a close resemblance there is in the chemical constituents of sandstones and grits, and their accompanying shales or slates, of clay slate and mica slate. A quotation from every one of those analyses would be too much to insert here, but I refer to the work in which they may be found, and from that work I copy the following paragraphs, which may interest the reader:--From Elements of Chemical and Physical Geology. By Gustav Bischof, M.D. Printed by the Cavendish Society. Vol. iii'. P. 409.--" Granite rocks usually consist of three elements--quartz, felspar, and mica. They are generally coarse-grained. Felspar and quartz are the chief constituents and those that are more largely developed. Sometimes one and sometimes the other preponderates, both in size...