earth--His belief in volcanic cataclysms in raising and forming
the continents--His famous paper before the Royal Society of
Edinburgh, 1781---His conclusions that all strata of
the earth have their origin at the bottom of the sea---His
deduction that heated and expanded matter caused the elevation
of land above the sea-level--Indifference at first shown this
remarkable paper--Neptunists versus Plutonists--
Scrope's classical work on volcanoes--Final acceptance of
Hutton's explanation of the origin of granites--Lyell and
uniformitarianism--Observations on the gradual elevation
of the coast-lines of Sweden and Patagonia--Observations
on the enormous amount of land erosion constantly taking place,
--Agassiz and the glacial theory--Perraudin the chamois-
hunter, and his explanation of perched bowlders--De Charpentier's
acceptance of Perraudin's explanation--Agassiz's
paper on his Alpine studies--His conclusion that the Alps
were once covered with an ice-sheet--Final acceptance of
the glacial theory--The geological ages--The work
of Murchison and Sedgwick--Formation of the American
continents--Past, present, and future.

CHAPTER V. THE NEW SCIENCE OF METEOROLOGY

Biot's investigations of meteors--The observations of
Brandes and Benzenberg on the velocity of falling stars--
Professor Olmstead's observations on the meteoric shower of 1833-
-Confirmation of Chladni's hypothesis of 1794--The
aurora borealis--Franklin's suggestion that it is of electrical
origin--Its close association with terrestrial
magnetism--Evaporation, cloud-formation, and dew--Dalton's