Penny Blood: Serial Sensation and Working-Class Entertainment — page 103: what you’re looking at

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

86 HYPOTHESIS OF SOLIDITY FAILS. [CH. VIL. A closer analogy would be presented if the paper were reduced to ashes or charcoal before applying the pressure. A better, though far from an adequate one, may be found in the chaos produced in the Arctic regions when a great ice-floe is driven upon a rocky coast’.” The former part of this quotation gives a very graphic description of the phenomena which we have to explain. But the objection is not perhaps of great force. In the first place, it is difficult to understand how the extreme flexure, with folds so closely pressed together as to present a mere series of beds dipping all in one direction, can be produced by any conceivable “system of forces acting upwards at the anticlinals and down- wards at the synclinals.” Nor yet does it seem necessary that a horizontal compressing force should reduce the strata to the “merest rubble.” Such a force would accumulate until the beds yielded along some line. But when that had happened the movement would not become any the more rapid. The com- pression would be capable of attaining great intensity, but need not be impulsive, and would quickly cease when satisfied. Some very interesting experiments upon the effect of com- pression upon layers of clay have been made by Professor A. Favre, of Geneva, the results of which closely imitate the con- tortions seen in real mountains. Some of them are figured in “Nature’.” The original quasi stratification of the clay experi- mented on is nowhere obliterated. It has not “gone into ‘pi.’” 1 Theories of the Earth’s Physical Evolution, ‘Penn Monthly,” 1876, p. 876. See also ‘ Geol. Mag.” Dec. 11. Vol. 111. p. 327. 2 “ Nature,” Vol. xix. p. 105. See also chap. x. commiclsoolkks aaa *