31 JAN 2015 by ideonexus
Aristotle Was About Quantity, Not Quality, of Thought
I don't doubt that Aristotle thought more in actual footage during his life than any other person ever thought in the same elapsed time of sixty-two years. I do say, however, that any prize he deserves for so doing should be for quantity, not quality, as a great deal of it was spinach. He would sit around and think like one possessed, or he would walk around and think, since he was a Peripatetic, as they called it in those days. And then he would announce that Swallows spend the winter under ...06 JAN 2012 by ideonexus
The Appalachian Mountains as the "Wreck of the World"
The great Appalachian Mountains, which run from York River back of these Colonies to the Bay of Mexico, show in many Places near the highest Parts of them, Strata of Sea Shells, in some Places the Marks of them are in the solid Rocks. 'Tis certainly the Wreck of a World we live on!
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Such changes in the superficial parts of the globe seemed to me unlikely to happen, if the earth were solid to the centre. I therefore imagined, that the internal parts might be a fluid more dense, and of g...July 1747, Ben Franklin wrote to Jared Eliot, a Connecticut clergyman about the Appalachian mountains, where he found sea shells mixed in with the dirt and concluded that the mountains were the Earth after a cataclysm.