The Project Gutenberg EBook of Outlines of the Earth's History, by
Nathaniel Southgate Shaler

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Title: Outlines of the Earth's History
A Popular Study in Physiography

Author: Nathaniel Southgate Shaler

Release Date: June 12, 2006 [EBook #18562]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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[Illustration: _Dunes at Ipswich Light, Massachusetts. Note the
effect of bushes in arresting the movement of the wind-blown sand._]

OUTLINES OF THE
EARTH'S HISTORY

A POPULAR STUDY
IN PHYSIOGRAPHY

BY

NATHANIEL SOUTHGATE SHALER

PROFESSOR OF GEOLOGY IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY
DEAN OF LAWRENCE SCIENTIFIC SCHOOL

ILLUSTRATED WITH INDEX

NEW YORK AND LONDON
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY

1898, 1910

PREFACE.

The object of this book is to provide the beginner in the study of the
earth's history with a general account of those actions which can be
readily understood and which will afford him clear understandings as
to the nature of the processes which have made this and other
celestial spheres. It has been the writer's purpose to select those
series of facts which serve to show the continuous operations of
energy, so that the reader might be helped to a truer conception of
the nature of this sphere than he can obtain from ordinary text-books.

In the usual method of presenting the elements of the earth's history
the facts are set forth in a manner which leads the student to
conceive that history as in a way completed. The natural prepossession
to the effect that the visible universe represents something done,
rather than something endlessly doing, is thus re-enforced, with the
result that one may f