Jump to content

Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/560

From Wikisource
This page has been validated.
542
THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

summit of the Carboniferous formation. At the mouth of the Paria this is at the water's edge; at the mouth of the Colorado Chiquito it is 3,800 feet above the river. The fall of the river, in the same distance, is about 600 feet, so that the whole dip of the rock between the two points is about 3,200 feet. The distance, by river, is sixty-five miles; in a direct line, twenty miles less. So we have a dip of the formation of 3,200 feet in forty-five miles, or about seventy feet to a mile.

The slope of the country to the north is the same as the dip of the beds, for the country rises to the south as the beds rise to the south.

Stand on the Vermilion Cliffs, at the head of Marble Cañon, and look off down the river over a stretch of country that steadily rises in the distance until it reaches an altitude far above even the elevated point of observation, and then see meandering through it to the south the gorge in which the river runs, everywhere breaking down with a sharp brink, and in the perspective the summits of the walls appearing to approach until they are merged in a black line, and you can hardly resist the thought that the river burrows into, and is lost under, the great inclined plateau.

A POPULAR VERDICT.

THE life of Robert Knox, the celebrated Edinburgh anatomist, written by his friend and pupil Dr. Lansdale, is a work of much interest on account of the contributions to science made by that remarkable man; but there were some tragic features in his career which, taken in connection with the stupid and brutal "public opinion" of which he was made the victim, have an instructiveness of a quite different kind, yet of such importance that it is desirable they should not be forgotten. We can give here but a very imperfect sketch of the case, and would refer curious readers to Dr, Lansdale's book, from which we condense the following statement, making free use of the language of the author.

Robert Knox, who is numbered among the descendants of the sturdy Scotch reformer, was born in 1791. He was educated at the High-School of Edinburgh, which boasted of many great names, such as Brougham, Horner, and Cockburn, in the long roll of its illustrious alumni. But few of its students showed more brilliant parts than young Knox, who rose, apparently without effort, to the head of every class, and came out gold-medalist in 1810. He joined the medical classes of Edinburgh the same year, but pursued a broad course of literary, historical, and scientific studies, together with those bearing more immediately upon the medical profession. He early took a prom-