Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

It is more probable, in almost every country of Europe, that there will be frost sometime in January, than that the weather will continue open through out that whole month; though this probability varies according to the different climates, and approaches to a certainty in the more northern kingdoms.

Nor burns the sharp cold of the northern blast.

Heat also insinuates itself at great distances, as also does cold; insomuch that by the inhabitants of Canada the masses of ice that break loose and float about the northern ocean and are borne through the Atlantic toward that coast are perceived at a great distance by the cold they give out. Perfumes also (though in these there appears to be always a certain corporeal discharge) act at remarkable distances, as those find who sail along the coasts of Florida or some parts of Spain, where there are whole woods of lemon and orange and like odoriferous trees, or thickets of rosemary, marjoram, and the like. Lastly, the radiations of light and impressions of sound operate at vast distances.

Asa Gray's 'Manual of the Flora of the Northern United States,' 260 naturalised plants are enumerated, and these belong to 162 genera.

In treatises on many kinds of cultivated plants, certain varieties are said to withstand certain climates better than others: this is very strikingly shown in works on fruit trees published in the United States, in which certain varieties are habitually recommended for the northern, and others for the southern States; and as most of these varieties are of recent origin, they cannot owe their constitutional differences to habit.

So it is with the nests of birds, which vary partly in dependence on the situations chosen, and on the nature and temperature of the country inhabited, but often from causes wholly unknown to us: Audubon has given several remarkable cases of differences in nests of the same species in the northern and southern United States.

Yet it is an admirable lesson to stand on the North Downs and to look at the distant South Downs; for, remembering that at no great distance to the west the northern and southern escarpments meet and close, one can safely picture to oneself the great dome of rocks which must have covered up the Weald within so limited a period as since the latter part of the Chalk formation.

The distance from the northern to the southern Downs is about 22 miles, and the thickness of the several formations is on an average about 1100 feet, as I am informed by Professor Ramsay.

For we know that Europe in ancient times was peopled by numerous marsupials; and I have shown in the publications above alluded to, that in America the law of distribution of terrestrial mammals was formerly different from what it now is. North America formerly partook strongly of the present character of the southern half of the continent; and the southern half was formerly more closely allied, than it is at present, to the northern half.

In a similar manner we know from Falconer and Cautley's discoveries, that northern India was formerly more closely related in its mammals to Africa than it is at the present time. Analogous facts could be given in relation to the distribution of marine animals.