"Superincumbent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a vacuum is formed in the atmosphere, the sides of the cavity forcibly rush together both by the general pressure of the superincumbent air, and by the expansion of the elastic particles of it; and thus produce a vibration of the atmosphere to a considerable distance: this occurs, whether this vacuity of air be occasioned by the discharge of cannon, in which the air is displaced by the sudden evolution of heat, which as suddenly ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... sea and land over the earth's surface has not been uniformly the same, even as regards oceans and continents. Now, if this were the case, "it might well happen that strata which had subsided some miles nearer to the centre of the earth, and which had been pressed on by an enormous weight of superincumbent water, might have undergone far more metamorphic action than strata which have always remained nearer to the surface. The immense areas in some parts of the world, for instance in South America, of naked metamorphic rocks, which must have been heated under great pressure, have always seemed to ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... deeply seated beds have become liquefied, and the magma either forced outward through a longitudinal vent or brought to the surface by a process of progressive fusion as the heated complex rose through superincumbent strata dissipated by its entrance and contributing their substance to its contents. The present exposure of the vein has been produced by denudation, as the coarsely crystalline and dismembered condition ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 822 - Volume XXXII, Number 822. Issue Date October 3, 1891 • Various
... energies. That igneous matter has, during many periods, been protruded from below—that mountains have risen in succession from the sea, and injected their molten substance through cracks and fissures of superincumbent strata—are facts resting on indubitable evidence. Many masses of granite became the solid bottom of some portions of the sea before the secondary strata were laid gradually upon them. The granite of ...
— An Expository Outline of the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" • Anonymous
... It was fortunate for us that he happened to be on a sloping clayey bank where there was no fear of falling trees; a few yards farther on, where the shore was perpendicular and formed of crumbly earth, large portions of loose soil, with all their superincumbent mass of forest, were being washed away; the uproar thus occasioned adding to the ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... bald and abrupt hills, mounts, and ranges being thrown up in all directions; they resemble the billows of a tempestuous ocean suddenly solidified into stone, or as though a hundred thousand million Pelions had been upon as many million Ossas hurled, and as though the falling masses, with superincumbent weight, falling, flattened out the summits of ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... general is, that the most comfortable posture and the most hygienic one is to lie upon the side. The right side is to be preferred to the left because in this position, the heart being on the upper side, is not embarrassed in its free movement by the superincumbent lung tissue. Furthermore, this position facilitates the passage of digesting foods from the stomach. To maintain comfortably this side position, requires that the knees be at least moderately drawn up. This posture when asleep is practically identical with that of nearly ...
— The Biology, Physiology and Sociology of Reproduction - Also Sexual Hygiene with Special Reference to the Male • Winfield S. Hall
... outs, may be now read by those who have the patience. The problem may be suggested to casuists how far the iniquity of a lie should be measured by its immediate purpose, or how far it is aggravated by the enormous mass of superincumbent falsehoods which it inevitably brings in its train. We cannot condemn very seriously the affected coyness which tries to conceal a desire for publication under an apparent yielding to extortion; but we must certainly admit that the stomach of any other human being of whom ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... the enemy seemed to be satisfied that they had silenced the garrison. And it took the admiral a great deal of kicking and plunging to rescue himself from some superincumbent mass that was upon him, which seemed to him to be a ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... Padre, closely followed by his faithless mule. Luckily the little hollow which received the pair was of sand, that yielded to the superincumbent weight, half burying them without further injury. For some moments the poor man lay motionless, vainly endeavoring to collect his scattered senses. A hand irreverently laid upon his collar and a rough shake assisted to recall his consciousness. As the Padre staggered ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... through the flesh, the excited earth casts off the flesh altogether, and its bones come out from beneath. Mountains are the bones of the earth, their highest peaks are invariably those parts of its anatomy which in the plains lie buried under five and twenty thousand feet of solid thickness of superincumbent soil, and which spring up in the mountain ranges in vast pyramids or wedges, flinging their garment of earth away from them on each side. The masses of the lower hills are laid over and against their sides, like the masses of lateral masonry against the skeleton ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... from pier to pier, and a level preparation for carrying the real roof is made above them. After we have examined the structure of piers, therefore, we shall have to see how lintels or arches are thrown from pier to pier, and the whole prepared for the superincumbent roof; this arrangement being universal in all good architecture prepared for vertical pressures: and we shall then examine the condition of the great roof itself. And because the structure of the roof very often introduces certain ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... with a bed of slime which the river has deposited in its periodical inundations, and which rests on a foundation of sand, like that of the adjacent desert. The French savans who accompanied Bonaparte in his Egyptian expedition made several experiments to ascertain the thickness and depth of this superincumbent bed. They dug about two hundred pits, and carefully measured the thickness in the transversal section of the valley, where the deposit had been free from obstacles, and had not been materially increased ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... a luxuriant vegetation; the coal bed itself represents the slow accumulation, through long periods, of the leaves, seeds, fruits, stems, and fallen trunks of this vegetation, now hardened and compressed into a fraction of its original bulk by the pressure of the superincumbent rocks; and the strata of sand or shale above the coal-bed—the so-called "roof" of the coal—represent sediments quietly deposited as the land, after a long period of repose, commenced to sink beneath the sea. On this view, the rank and ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... shape of sand and mud. When the coal-forest area became slowly depressed, the waters must have spread over it, and have deposited their burden upon the surface of the bed of coal, in the form of layers, which are now converted into shale, or sandstone. Then followed a period of rest, in which the superincumbent shallow waters became completely filled up, and finally replaced, by fine mud, which settled down into a new under-clay, and furnished the soil for a fresh forest growth. This flourished, and heaped up its spores and wood into coal, until the stage of slow depression recommenced. And, in some localities, ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley |
