One of the
principal results of these analyses has been to lessen the importance
attributed until then to heat alone, and to show in more than one case
the intervention of thermal sources and of other emanations from below,
to which the eruptive rocks have simply opened up tracks.
It is not only upon subjects relating to the history of rocks that
Delesse has touched. Witness his work on the infiltration of water, as
well as his volume relating to the materials of construction, published
on the occasion of the Exhibition of 1855. The nature of the deposits
which operate continually at the bottom of the sea offers points of
interest which well repay the labor of the geologist. He finds there,
indeed, a precious field to be compared with stratified deposits; for
in spite of the enormous depth to which they form a part of continents,
they are of analogous origin. Delesse laboriously studied the products
of the innumerable soundings taken in most of the seas. He arranged the
results in a work which has become classical with the beautiful atlas of
submarine drawings which accompany it. Though he never slackened in his
own especial work, he made much of the work of others. The "Revue des
Progres de la Geologie," with which he enriched the "Annales des Mines"
for twenty years, would have been sufficient to engross the time of a
less active scientific man, and one less ready to grasp the opening of a
discovery.
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