He is a person of
ingenuity and information. Unfortunately, he has too much imagination.
However, if he escapes safely, he will give us new, curious, and useful
information. I had a letter from him, dated last March, when he was
about to leave St. Petersburg on his way to Kamtschatka.
With respect to the inclination of the strata of rocks, I had observed
them between the Blue Ridge and North Mountains in Virginia, to be
parallel with the pole of the earth. I observed the same thing in most
instances in the Alps, between Cette and Turin: but in returning along
the precipices of the Apennines, where they hang over the Mediterranean,
their direction was totally different and various: and you mention, that
in our western country, they are horizontal. This variety proves they
have not been formed by subsidence, as some writers of theories of the
earth have pretended; for then they should always have been in circular
strata, and concentric. It proves, too, that they have not been formed
by the rotation of the earth on its axis, as might have been suspected,
had all these strata been parallel with that axis.
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