John Strong Newberry

“ But in the middle and later Tertiary epochs—the Miocene and Pliocene—all the northern portion of the continent stood higher above the sea than now, for we find there no marine deposits of that age; and the immense numbers of fiords, or submerged valleys which fringe the coast, are, as Dana long since pointed out, the results of subaërial erosion and proofs of elevation. A genial climate then prevailed to the Arctic Sea, and all the continent was covered with a more luxuriant flora, and inhabited by a more varied fauna, than can now be found anywhere on its surface. ”

“ The greater elevation of the land (in the Ice period) is simply assumed as an hypothesis to account for the cold. The facts of geology, however, are fast establishing the opposite conclusion, viz., that when the country was covered with ice, the land stood in relation to the sea at a lower level than at present, and that the continental periods or times, when the land stood in relation to the sea at a higher level than now, were the warm inter-glacial periods, when the country was free of snow and ice, and a mild and equable condition of climate prevailed. ”

“ At the beginning of the Silurian age the sea rose over its shores, covering most of the land-surface, but leaving the Canadian highlands, the Adirondacks, the Blue Ridge, with its New York spur, unsubmerged. Then during all the thousands of years in which the Trenton limestone group was accumulating by organic agencies, the slow growth and deposition after death of the hard parts of animals, and the other thousands of years in which the Hudson River and Utica shales were formed in a shallowing sea, this old land was exposed to wear from rain and wind, sun and frost. ”

“ A number of facts indicate that the coast of New Jersey and Long Island is gradually sinking. From the marshes of New Jersey are taken the trunks of trees which could not have grown there except when it was drier ground, and on the shore stumps are seen, now under water, of trees which must have grown on land. So, too, the sea throws up in storms portions of turfy soil, once covered only by the air, and similar soil has been reached below the sea-level in pits dug through drifted sand along its margin. ”

“ Continental surfaces are known to be productive of extremes of temperature, while the climate of sea areas is comparatively equable; and the general character of the climate of land and water surfaces is further and locally affected by the configuration and altitude of the land, by the breadth and depth of the oceanic basins, and especially by the ocean-currents. The sea forms the great evaporating surface, and the source from which is derived the enormous quantity of water transported by the system of atmospheric circulation. ”

“ The city is set on an island, of which the shore on every side is swept by tide-water. On the west it is bounded by the Hudson—river we call it, but really an arm of the sea—in which the ebb and flow of the tide are perceptible as far as Troy, one hundred and fifty miles from its mouth. On the east the island is encircled by tideways called Spuyten Duyvel Creek, Harlem River, and East River, the latter a deep channel which connects New York Harbor with Long Island Sound, and thus affords an important artery of internal commerce, and another outlet to the ocean. ”

“ Here we are far removed from the theatre of most active evaporation, and where the climate is very cold, and yet the precipitation is sufficient, with the average temperature, to form continental glaciers of equal dimensions with any indicated by the records of the past, and, so far as we can judge, no other condition is necessary for the extension of the glaciers of Greenland southward to Labrador, the Canadian highlands, and the hills of New England, than a depression of temperature sufficient to congeal and retain the moisture which now flows away nearly as fast as it falls. ”

“ On the west, however, this lake country was bordered by a chain of volcanoes, which had from time to time their paroxysms of activity, deluging the lowlands with lava-floods, or discharging into the atmosphere clouds of ashes which, borne far eastward by the prevailing winds, were the agents of more widespread and scarcely less complete devastation. In the end the elevation of the Rocky Mountains, and the erosion of the cañons of the Columbia, Klamath, Sacramento, and Colorado, converted the greater part of the rich Tertiary plain into the only real deserts that now exist on the continent. ”

“ In common with most of the geologists of the present day, he supposes that the granites and schists are sedimentary rocks which, having locally accumulated to great thickness, have sunk by their own weight into the yielding crust of the earth to a point where they have suffered more or less aqueo-igneous softening, and then, in his view, under varying intensities of radial and tangential pressure, they have been converted into corrugated schists or massive granite, according to the less or greater energy of the forces acting upon them. ”

“ The subsequent history of New York has fully demonstrated the advantages of its position, since a population of more than 2,000,000 has gathered immediately around its harbor, and it has become not only the business metropolis of a great nation, but the second in importance of the markets of the world. ”

“ That great changes of level did take place in this region is evident from the facts, first, that on the area over which the Triassic beds were deposited, extending from the Colorado to the Mississippi, mechanical and shallow water deposits alone prevail. No limestones occur here in the Trias, but it is made up of great sheets of cross-stratified and tide-swept sand of brilliant colors, chiefly bright red—due to the complete oxidation of their iron from aeration, and the absence of organic matter—with here and there heavy beds of gypsum, and formerly of salt ”

“ This theory affords so simple an explanation of the problem of the Ice period, that it at first strongly commends itself to those who are most cautious and logical in their modes of thought and investigation. Modern science is eminently conservative, and one of the first lessons learned by the investigator of this age is, to exhaust all known causes of phenomena before appealing to the unknown. ”

“ Of the magnitude of its forest growth we have evidence not only in the abundant remains of trunk and leaf and fruit imbedded in the old lake sediments, but in the scattered remnants of its former grandeur seen in the gigantic conifers of California, and in the cypress, magnolias, sweet gums and sycamores, which are the pride of our Eastern forests. This fertile land also sustained a fauna corresponding in richness and interest to its flora ”

“ The natural advantages of this route are such as to give New York and her connections with the interior a positive and inalienable superiority over all competing ports and lines of traffic—a superiority which, though it may be temporarily abrogated by municipal misgovernment, or be diverted from public to private profit by individual or corporate rapacity, will ultimately and always assert itself, and give to this city a continuance of the prosperity that has attended her past career. ”

“ Erosion is so slow—on an average 3,000 years being required to remove a foot of surface—that solidification by cooling must keep pace with it; 2. Volcanoes are generally not situated in areas of erosion, but along coast-lines and on islands; and, 3. They are conspicuously associated with lines of fracture and elevation.
A simple explanation of the phenomena of vulcanism is suggested by the writer, and that is—the relief of pressure by slight arching of the crust of the earth along lines of elevation, while the pressure is maximum under the unbroken areas on either side. ”

“ In the advent of the Ice period not only were all kinds of animals and plants exterminated or driven southward, and thus what had been a paradise was converted into a howling wilderness, but even the topography of the country was greatly modified. The ice-sheet moving from the north ground down or rounded over all projecting rock-masses, and filled up valleys with the débris, producing great abrasion in some places, and accumulations in others, until the whole face of the country was changed. ”

“ To some persons, the most interesting fact in regard to the Trias yet remains to be mentioned, and this is that from the quarries sunk in its sandstone-beds—of which the most important are at Bellville, New Jersey, and Portland, Connecticut—has been taken the brown-stone to which we owe the architectural beauty and monotony of the best portions of our city. Copper is also frequently found impregnating the Triassic rocks, but it has generally proved only a snare to those who have attempted to work it, the deposit being small and unreliable. ”

“ The trough between the New York axis and the Blue Ridge was occupied by water, and in this trough the Triassic shales and sandstones were deposited. A similar trough east of New York, where now is the valley of the Connecticut, was also a lagoon or estuary in which similar sediments accumulated, but not so quietly as the strata composing the older formations in the same region were laid down. It is evident that Nature's forces were in great activity during the period under consideration, for we find the greatest diversity in the product of these forces. ”

“ After the deposition of the great and conformable series of Palæozoic rocks in the central basin, the Archæan continent, which formed the western limit of these older deposits, and which had continued dry land to the close of the Carboniferous age, was sunk under the waves of the Pacific, and thus remained during the Triassic and Jurassic ages—long enough for the deposition of about 20,000 feet of sediments, of which considerably more than half belong to the Trias. ”

“ The evidences of a Glacial period in South America are as conclusive as on our own continent; but it is difficult to conceive how barriers could, at that time, have been thrown across the great open oceans—the South Atlantic and South Pacific—in such a way as to confine the tropical currents to the central portions of these oceans.
We are, perhaps, not justified in saying that such barriers never did exist, but it will be conceded that the difficulties which oppose their erection there are much greater than in the northern hemisphere ”

“ The local climate of continents is also largely influenced by the winds which blow over them; for these determine, to a considerable degree, the temperature and the annual rainfall; hence the volume and excavating power of rivers, etc. The higher portions of continents, as mountain-chains and plateaux, are colder than the lowlands, and hence become condensers of moisture—places where snow accumulates and glaciers are formed. ”

“ King seems hardly warranted by the facts he reports. It is certainly true that there could be no formation of ice or glaciers, however low the temperature, without precipitated moisture, and in many places the extension of glaciers is limited not by temperature, but by lack of moisture; but, to find standards of comparison with the widespread glaciers of the Ice period, we must go to the Arctic and Antarctic Continents. ”

“ A striking illustration of the influence of topography on climate is shown by the high mountains of the tropics, where perpetual snow and glaciers are coexistent with extreme tropical conditions, not only on the same parallel, but within a narrow area. ”

“ There is certainly great force in the reasoning used by Mr. Walling to show that there must be rising as well as sinking areas, and a subterranean flow of matter from one to the other to compensate for the transfer of eroded material on the surface; but it seems doubtful whether the traction produced by the adhesion of the solid strata above to the moving mass below could produce slaty cleavage and other phenomena, which we have been accustomed to attribute to the lateral thrust produced by the crushing down of the rigid crust on a shrinking nucleus. ”

“ The great advantage which New York enjoys for trade with the interior consists in its accessibility from the basin of the Great Lakes where the most rapid accumulation of population and wealth of the last half-century has taken place, and where the business of the country is destined to concentrate in the future. ”

“ In any discussion of the phenomena and causes of the Ice period we are, up to the present time, somewhat limited and embarrassed for want of a wider range of observation. The facts are not yet all in. Nearly all the detailed and careful observations made on the glacial phenomena of the northern hemisphere have been limited to the eastern half of North America and the western part of the European Continent. Here the traces left by the glaciers are really stupendous in their magnitude and extent ”

“ The subsidence which resulted in the formation of New York Harbor and its connections seems also to have affected all the coast, and the influx of the sea-water filled the valleys of the rivers which drained the Atlantic slope south of New York, and gave it the fringed and irregular outline which constitutes its most striking characteristic. ”

“ At the close of the Cretaceous age the animal life, both sea and land, was again revolutionized, but by causes which we cannot yet fully understand, as the physical conditions remain nearly the same, and the flora suffered little change. ”

“ King's volume certainly throws a flood of light on the complicated and hitherto somewhat chaotic geology of our Western Territories, and it can not fail to afford important aid in the proper orientation of both observers and observations in all the great region west of the Mississippi. ”

“ If it is true that the Glacial epoch was one of elevation at the north—an elevation of the land much greater than the present—the change to the depressed condition of the Champlain epoch, when the sea stood from 1,500 to 1,800 feet higher on the coast of Greenland than it now does, must have been comparatively sudden ”

“ Gate channel is 170 feet, and there are many places in the East River where the depth is over 100 feet. The greatest depth of water in New York Harbor and the Hudson River is about sixty feet, but this does not represent the true depth of the channels, since they have been very much silted up, and their rock-bottoms are probably 200 or 300 feet below the water-surface. If they could be cleared of clay, sand, and gravel, they would be seen to be narrow gorges cut in solid rock as deep as that of Niagara, and resembling some of the canons of the Western rivers. ”