Author: Ellsworth Huntington

Publisher:

Published: 2016-06-28

Total Pages: 382

ISBN-13: 9781332919079

Excerpt from The Climatic Factor as Illustrated in Arid America The lines of reasoning followed thus far are similar to those which I have employed in respect to various countries of Asia, and which were first set forth in a volume entitled Exploration in Turkestan, published by the Carnegie Institution of Washington in 1905, and have been amplified and revised in The Pulse of Asia and Palestine and its Trans formation, published ih 1907 and 1911, respectively. The conclusions derived from these lines of reasoning are open to the criticism that a preconceived theory may have led to the interpretation of phenomena according to that theory. Hence, before the conclusions here indicated deserve final acceptance, it is necessary to compare them with the results Obtained by the observations of other unprejudiced workers, or with the independent results of some new method in which the personal equation plays no part. Fortunately the work of Professor A. E. Douglass, of the University of Arizona, suggests a method by which old trees may be used as a mathematical measuring-rod in order to determine exactly what climatic events have occurred during the last or years. Accord ingly, considerable space will be devoted to setting forth the results of the measurement of the rate of growth of nearly 500 Sequoia trees among the Sierra Mountains in California. A large number of other measurements of trees by the United States Forest Service have been kindly put at the disposal of the Carnegie Institution of Washington by the Forester, Mr. Henry S. Graves, and a discussion of them is included in this volume. By purely mathematical methods, unaffected by any personal bias, it has been possible to obtain curves indicating the climatic pulsations of the last years. A comparison of these curves with the results obtained from other lines of evidence, both in America and Asia, shows that in spite of certain disagreements the general climatic history of both continents appears to have been characterized by similar pulsations having a periodicity of hundreds or thousands of years. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.