Penny Blood: Serial Sensation and Working-Class Entertainment — page 102: 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. —— 85 localities nothing but a series of beds all dipping to the south- east at a high angle. Yet in spite of the extreme displacement there is no chaos. The different beds are not crushed into fragments nor disorganised, but preserve their relative positions as perfectly as when they were deposited. However vast the disturbing force must have been, we may well wonder at the gentleness and ease with which they have been lifted up or let down. As if to remind us how destructive the force might have been, we find here and there a few acres which have unmis- takably been subject to lateral thrusts in consequence of the sliding of a large mass down a steep incline, or some other local cause, and the strata have ‘gone into pi.’ This preservation of continuity would suggest to the investigator who might endeavor to apply mechanical principles to the problem, that the force which produced the movements was a minumum force—that is, a force having the smallest intensity which is capable of producing the movement. But this is demonstrably a system of forces acting upwards at the anticlinals and downwards at the synclinals. It is equally capable of de- monstration that of all possible modes in which a force could be applied to produce a fold, the horizontal or tangential ap- plication would require the greatest intensity. It is the latter force which the contractional hypothesis supplies. It is diffi- cult to admit that it could produce plications at all: the most probable result of it would be the annihilation of all traces of structure and stratification. This inference will be strengthened by recalling a well-known law of mechanics that tendencies to rupture (‘moments of rupture’) mcrease with the cubes of dimensions, while resistances to rupture (‘moments of resist- ance’) increase only with the squares. The masses under con- sideration are, collectively, of the extent of states and empires ; the individuals are mountain ranges and valley bottoms, and their coherence in the presence of the forces which are adequate to move them becomes by virtue of the foregoing law a vanish- ing quantity. Such masses, under the action of the supposed force, would be the merest rubble, and quite incapable of pre- serving their integrity. The action has been frequently illus- trated by subjecting a pile of paper to compression edgewise. commiclsoolkks (CO)