UIHistories Project: A History of the University of Illinois by Kalev Leetaru
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Repository: UIHistories Project: Board of Trustees Minutes - 1871 [PAGE 152]

Caption: Board of Trustees Minutes - 1871
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144 for what it may seem to each one to be worth. I found myself necessitated to give some general view of the whole subject, in order to get any one of its parts into its true relations, and to lift our minds, if possible, out of those miserable ruts of mere authority, which, if apposite to anything on earth, surely has no place in any mere physical inquiry. Telling you what I think, may possibly aid you in finding the same great laws and facts in nature I fain would describe ; but if not, my words are of no more consequence to you than the chirping of a grasshopper. Were the whole solid body of the earth made up of one homogeneous material, and were its surface covered on all sides to an equal depth with water, there can be scarce a doubt that all the currents, both of the ocean and of the air, the distribution of heat and cold, of sunshine and rain, at the same latitudes and in the same seasons of the year, would be as uniform as the return of the seasons, or as the rising and setting of the sun, or its advance from one tropic to the other—though probably the varied position of the moon, or of the other planets, would add another item of a more or less disturbing force. All, or nearly all, our present irregularities in our ocean currents and air currents, and dependent changes of heat and cold, or drought or rainfall, are due therefore to the irregularities of the earth's structure and surface, more than to all other causes combined. The solid parts of the earth are composed of a great multitude of heterogeneous or diverse materials, differing very widely in specific density and gravity in their capacity of holding or attracting water, heat, electricity, etc., while only parts of it are covered with water of very unequal depth, and other parts spread out in plains, or piled up into mountains of very unequal hight. The continents land-lock and interrupt the regular ocean flow and throw immense floods of warm water toward the poles, wholly revolutionizing the distribution of heat and cold, under the varying law of these currents, while the icebergs of the nothern seas, are perpetually carting millions of tons of solid rocks, sand and earth, from the nothern pole toward the equator, in some cases, as in the banks of Newfoundland, building up whole new continents of land under our present seas. Such is also the present shape of our continents that nearly all the immense debris and wash from the action of water or frost, in our Northern Hemisphere, by the course of our rivers toward the south, or the action of glaciers and icebergs at the mouth of those flowing to the north, combined with the existing course of our present winds and ocean currents—all this debris is at last borne from north to south, or piled