Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 1 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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By Isolating
Facts, Travellers, Whose Labours Are In Every Other Respect
Valuable, Have Given Currency To Many False Ideas Of The Pretended
Contrasts Which Nature Offers In Africa, In New Holland, And On The
Ridge Of The Cordilleras.
The great geological phenomena are
subject to regular laws, as well as the forms of plants and
animals.
The ties which unite these phenomena, the relations which
exist between the varied forms of organized beings, are discovered
only when we have acquired the habit of viewing the globe as a
great whole; and when we consider in the same point of view the
composition of rocks, the causes which alter them, and the
productions of the soil, in the most distant regions.
Having treated of the volcanic substances of the isle of Teneriffe,
there now remains to be solved a question intimately connected with
the preceding investigation. Does the archipelago of the Canary
Islands contain any rocks of primitive or secondary formation; or
is there any production observed, that has not been modified by
fire? This interesting problem has been considered by the
naturalists of Lord Macartney's expedition, and by those who
accompanied captain Baudin in his voyage to the Austral regions.
Their opinions are in direct opposition to each other; and the
contradiction is the more striking, as the question does not refer
to one of those geological reveries which we are accustomed to call
systems, but to a positive fact.
Doctor Gillan imagined that he observed, between Laguna and the
port of Orotava, in very deep ravines, beds of primitive rocks.
This, however, is a mistake.
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