Penny Blood: Serial Sensation and Working-Class Entertainment — page 100: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

cu. vi.] HYPOTHESIS OF SOLIDITY FAILS. 83 would have been so distributed as to have formed continents and their back-bone mountain ranges? Unless the material of which the crust was composed was extremely unhomogeneous, and unhomogeneous in strips corresponding to the axes of elevation, and unless these strips changed their positions and directions at different periods, it 1s impossible that such com- pression can have produced the present distribution of the elevated ranges; much less different distributions at different epochs. What 7s required to explain the phenomena 1s a liquid, or at least a plastic substratum for the crust to rest on, which will allow it to undergo a certain amount of lateral shift towards the ranges. Neither is it easy to explain the sinking of areas in pro- portion to their becoming overloaded with sediment, whether beneath the ocean or sub-aerially, upon any other supposition. But if such a liquid substratum be granted, many of the facts are more easily explained. In that case the semi-rigid crust would assume a position of rest upon this substratum, which, within certain limits depending upon its rigidity, would be one of hydrostatic equilibrium. That 1s to say, the distribution of load might be made somewhat different from what it is without disturbing the equilibrium, but it could not be made very different. For instance, if the present configuration of the Himalayan region be one of approximate equilibrium, which it clearly is, if much sediment is brought off the mountains and spread over the plains, the mountains become after a while too light and the plains too heavy, and accordingly the moun- tains rise and the plains sink to restore the contour. This appears to be what has happened. The pressures under which any portion of the crust would be in equilibrium will be (1) the tangential stress, (2) its - own weight, and (3) the upward pressure of the substratum. If any one of these is changed beyond a certain amount the equi- librium will be destroyed and a movement of the crust will ensue. : Here are three forces involved, each of which is due to a different proximate cause: the tangential pressure producing compression of the crust (from whatever arising); the distribution 6—2 GONG oOo SS (CO)