144 



THE EDINBURGH JOURNAL OF NATURAL HISTORY. 



GEOLOGY. 



Depth of the Frozen Soil or Sibeuia. — In a paper on this subjwt. cominu- 

 nicated to the Geographical Society by Professor Baer of Petersburgh, the author 

 stated that it has long been ascertained that the soil of Siberia, over a great extent 

 of country, is never entirely free of ice, the summer heat producing only a partial 

 thaw at the surface. Gmelin the elder mentions that the ground at Yakut zk, in 

 Lat. 62h° N., Long. 130*^ E., was found to be frozen at a depth of 91 feet, and that 

 the people were compelled to desist in sinking a well. Many similar facts had been 

 collected by travellers, but thoy were not generally credited ; and even in 1825, Von 

 Buch rejected them as erroneous. Yet they have recently been corroborated by Er- 

 man and Humboldt. Within these few years, a merchant, of the name of Schargin, 

 having attempted to sink a well at Yakutzk, was about to abandon the pioject, when 

 Admiral Wran^el persuaded him to continue his operations. The whole stratum of 

 ice was at length peiforated, and, at the distance of 382 feet from the surface, the 

 soil was very loose, and the temperature i** Ream. (3\^ Fahr.) Near the sur- 

 face it was much lower, and bad increased as follows : — at some feet from the surface, 

 6" R. ; at 77 feet, 5^; at 119 feet, 4"; and at 217 feet, 2^*; at 305 feet, U^ ; at 

 350 feet, ^'* ; at 382 feet, h^. As the soil had become loose at 350 feet, and as the 

 aperture of the weil w^-s eight feet square, and the work carried on partly during the 

 winter, when the column of cold air must have lowered the temperature, it is proba- 

 ble that the spot at which the thermometer marked the freezing point was at that 

 depth. This va^^t thickness of frozen ground indicates that Siberia must have been 

 ifor a long period in the same physical condition as at present. Although the e.\tent 

 of this layer of ground ice is not determined, yet enough is known to show that it oc- 

 cupies a vast space. Humboldt found the sod frozen at the depth of six feet at Bos- 

 eolowsk, near the Ural, in 60^ K. Lat, Near Beresow, Erman found the tempera- 

 ture at a depth of 23 feet, still 4 1^.6, (^b^^ ¥.) ; but, in 1821, a body was disin- 

 terred which had been buried 92 years, and it showed no signs of decomposition, the 

 earth around having been frozen. It has long been known that, at Obdonk, in N. 

 Lat. BS**, the giound is always frozen. Near Tobolsk, no ice is found in the soil, 

 but, as we proceed eastward, the ground ice advances farther south. From the dis- 

 cussion which followed the reading of this paper, it seemed to be generally consid red 

 that the exiieriment at Yakutzk had not been made with sufficient care to authorize 

 the belief that the frost penetrates to so great a depth as 350 feet ; but that the state- 

 ments of Arago and Von Buch, and of individuals in this country, had been fully 

 borne out by AL Schargin's observations, and almost exactly in the same ratio as 

 hitherto found. Captain Back stated, that in the cold regions of North America, 

 even in the height of summer, he had never found the ground thawed more than four 

 feet below the surface ; but that experiments on the subject were wanting before cor- 

 rect information could be obtained. 



Raised Beaches at Coquijibo. — In a letter lately received from Mr Pentland, 

 Her Majesty's Consul- General in Bolivia, and dated Tacna, Peru, 3d September 

 1837, he says : — 1 had occasion to observe at Cnquimbo raised Beaches on a very large 

 scale, and attaining an elevation of 400 to 500 feet above the present sea-level. 

 They consist of beds of sea sand, alternating with others, exclusively formed of large 

 oysters, and in general capped by a mass of boulders and gravel, some of the former 

 weit'hin"" several tons, and covered with parasitic marine mollusca. It is this modern 

 marine deposit which forms the parallel roads spoken of by Captain Hall, and referred 

 to by Lyell, and has evidently been raised at a very modern period, many of the shells 

 preserving their brilliant colours. The vicinity of Coquimbo is composed of a tran- 

 sition granite, with masses of porphyry in veins, and both contain the rich metallic 

 veins of that celebrated metalliferous district. The Andes in this neighbourhood 

 are very high, and if the position of the peak seen from the port is accurately laid 

 down in the map (and which 1 had no time to verify), its elevation must exceed 

 20,000 feet, according to some zenith distances 1 took of it. The country around 

 the town from which I now write is an arid sandy desert, without a trace of vege- 

 tation. It is covered with loose sand of the new red sandstone series, through which 

 the quartziferous trachyte rises near Tacna, and continues to form a band at the base of 

 the Andes. — Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal. 



Large pair of Fossil Horns found in Essex. — Though the geological feature 

 of the county of Essex may not be of that highly interesting character exhibited by 

 the mining districts of England; and though the facts respecting the physical history 

 of our planet are not developed in such quick succession here as they are found to be 

 in some other loeahties, owing in a great measure to the mineral properties of our 

 tertiary beds not being of that quality to warrant extensive excavations ; still as the 

 constant action of the sea upon the blue-clay cliffs of our coast washes those cliffs 

 down, and brings to our notice the fossils which they have so long concealed, or if, by 

 any of our artificial removals of soil, those relics are, brought to light, the facts are as 

 worthy of being recorded, as if the organic remains were of still higher antiquity. I 

 am induced to make these observations by my having just received from a friend the 

 two bony portions (commonly called the core, or slug of the horn) of the interior of a 

 pair of very large horns of the Ox, lately discovered at Clacton, on the Essex coast, 

 about ten miles south of Walton. They were found in a mass of drift sand, overlying 

 the London clay, and in consequence of the cliffs slipping down, they were disentomb- 

 ed, Riany portions of the skull were found with them, and the os frontis was at- 

 tached to them. By measurement, I find them to be three feet long on the outer 

 curve, from the base to their tips ; they are curved about eight inches, and are 

 eighteen inches in circumference at the base. The diameter of each horn at the 

 base is six inches in one direction, and five inches in the other. They lutve not the 

 fluted character so conspicuous in the horn which I found three years ago at Copford, 

 but they have the punctures so common to the bony portions of horns in general. In 

 both instances the remains of the Elephant were found associated wiih those of the Ox. 

 At Capford, a vertebra and the cuneiform bone of the right fore-foot of the former was 

 discovered, subsequently to those of the Ox above mentioned. And with the horns 

 recently discovered at Clacton was found a perfect Elepha'it's tooth, eleven inches in 

 lens^th, and three inches wide upon the grinding surface, and eight inches in depth. 

 — John Browrif in Magazine of Natural History. 



MISCELLANEOUS. 



DESCRIPTION OF THE FRITH OF CROMARTY, AND EEMARKS ON ESTUARIES. 

 fConti/nied from pJ.ge 9(i.) 

 The term Estuary is generally, although not in popular language, applied to that 

 part of a river which the tide ascends. It has also hern defined a space traversed by 

 a river, and into which the tide enters. By geological writers and others, it is fre- 

 quently employed to designate a basin, partially or entirely filled with sea-water, more 

 or less mixed with fresh- water, and in which are deposited quantities of sand and mud 

 carried into it by a river or rivers during floods. Indeed, this latter seems to be the 

 general acceptation of the term. The words frith and estuary are to a certain excent 

 synonymous, for all the inlets in Scotland called friths, viz. the Solway Frith, the 

 Frith of Clyde, the Frith of Forth, the Frith of Tay, the Beauly Frith, and the Crom- 

 arty and Dornoch Friths, are in some part of their extent estuaries, that is, receive 

 large rivers, which deposit in them mud and sand. Most of them, in fact, are actually 

 named after their principal rivers, and have thus evidently been considered as either 

 formed or greatly influenced by them. It is therefore clear that the ' Frith' of Tay 

 is tiius but another word for the estuary of that river. Why the general principle of 

 popular nomenclature should thus have been deviated from in a few cases is not appa- 

 rent. What, agreeably to it, ought to have been named the Ness Frith or Beauly 

 Frith, has been named the Moray Frith, probably because of its great extent, and of 

 its being bounded on one side by that province ; while the Cromarty and Dornocli 

 Friths have taken their names from the towns so called. In the parts of Scotland 

 where the Gaelic language has prevailed, the inlets are named lochs, a term which is 

 also applied to bodies of fresh water. But very few of these sea-lochs receive rivers 

 of considerable size, and almost all of them are named from circumstances having no 

 connection with their streams. 



Of the larger rivers of Scotland there are vei-y few that have an estuary of the most 

 simple kind, or, in other words, which open directly into the sea, without the interven- 

 tion of a basin common to the river and the ocean. Such, however, are the Dee, the 

 Don, and the Ythan, in Aberdeenshire, of which the estuary or tide-way is not two 

 miles in length. Were rivers generally of this kind, there could be no disputes con- 

 cerning their estuaries. The highest tide mark might then be considered as the upper, 

 and the boundary of the lowest tide as the lower limit. 



As an example of the second kind of estuary mentioned above, or that formed by a 

 space traversed by a river, and into which the tide eiiters, may be mentioned thy 

 basin of Montrose, which is about eight miles in circumference , and is left dry at low- 

 water excepting the channel of the South Esk, by which it is traversed. There can 

 be no dispute as to the propriety of considering this basin an estuary. 



The estuaries of the Forth, the Tay, the Clyde, and the Beauly, are of the third 

 or most common kind, being basins, from a great part of which the sea never recedes. 

 They vary in extent, some being longer and broader, and their channels are more or 

 less deep, according to the original nature of the ground, or the force of the currents 

 by which it is traversed. But no rule can possibly be laid down for the determination 

 of an estuary of this kind, which is neither a liver, nor yet the sea, but a compound 

 of both. The medium level of the sea at high and low water, which has been pro- 

 posed for determining the limit by which a river is separated from the sea, is obvious- 

 ly a merely arbitrary character, which may answer for defining the mouth of the river 

 properly so called, but which can separate it from the sea only when no basin intei- 

 venes, when the sea itself is in fact the basm, into which the river pours its waters. 

 On the contrary, when there exists an intermediate basin or estuary, common to the 

 sea and the river, the line in question may form a boundary between the nver properly 

 so called and the estuarj , but it can have no reference to the lower limit of ttie latter, 

 which must be determined by other means. 



(^To be continued.) 



LITERARY NOTICES. 



U'orks preparing for Publication. (Longman and Co.) — The Rev. L. Vernon 

 Hari:ouit (son of the Archbishop of York) has in the press a work on the " Doctruie 

 of the Deluge." His object is to vindicate the Scriptural History of the Deluge from 

 the doubts which have been recently thrown upon it by geological speculations. This 

 the author has endeavoured to accomplish by showing, upon the testimony of a long 

 list of ancient and modern authors, that since the era of that catastrophe a set of re- 

 ligionists never ceased to exist, whose opinions and usages were founded upon a vene- 



rrtlon of the Ark as the preserver of their race. In 2 vols. 8vo Mr Westwood's 



'■ Popular Introduction to the Modern ClassiBcition of Insects," which has been so 

 lon<' announced for publication, is at length in the press, and will be published in 

 Monthly Parts; the first will appear on the 1st of June. The author has for eight 

 years been employed upon it, collecting materials, from the Continental as well as 

 British Rluseums. It will be illustrated with many thousand figures engraved on 

 wood. The author has paid very minute attention to the Natural History of the 

 Transformations of Insects, and confidently hopes thst there will be found much new 

 and interesting matter in his work. It is intended to form a sequel to the popular 

 work of Messrs Kirbv and Spence. 1 vol. 8vo. 



" Essays in NaturalHistory. By Charles Waterton, Esq. V.'ith a view of Walton 

 Hall, and an Autobiography of the Authol. I vol. fcap. 8vo. 



The second volume of iMr MacGillivray's History of British Birds, including the 

 Cantatores, lieptatores, Scannores, Volitatores, 2.ad. Excursore^, being all the remain- 

 ing land birds, the Raptores excepted, will be published in autumn. 



EDI^BURGu: Published for the PaopRiETOR, at the Office, No. 13, Hill Street. 

 London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 66, CornhiU. Glasgow and the West of 

 Scotland: .loHN Smith and Son; and John MacLeod. Dublin: George 

 Young. Paris: J. B. Balliere, Kuede I'Ecole de Medccine, No. 13 bis. 



THE EDINBURGH PRINTING COMPANY. 



