Penny Blood: Serial Sensation and Working-Class Entertainment — page 106: what you’re looking at

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

CH. vi11.] FLUID SUBSTRATUM. 89 dissipation. At still higher temperature the water subetance becomes itself dissociated into oxygen and hydrogen. But it does not follow that the dissolved substances will be precipi- tated. The magma may be all the more complete the higher the temperature, because, though the bonds of affinity have fallen away, the prison-walls prevent the elements from escap- ing. But of all the known regions of the Universe the most unsafe to reason about is that which is under our feet.” * * * * * * * # «# “There is a suggestion as to shrinkage by escape of water, the objections to which so far as they are stated in the paper” — viz. those in the second paragraph on the last page—“I do not think of great moment, considering the slowness of diffusion through a thickness equal to that of the earth’s crust’.” This suggestion of the escape of water was subsequently repeated in a paper upon “Mr Mallet’s Theory of volcanic energy, in the Phil. Mag. for October, 1875: and upon receiving a copy of it, Mr Scrope wrote: “There is one of the points you put forward which never struck me before, but which now appears to me most valuable; namely, that the enormous amount of steam that has escaped from the interior in early times, as well as down to the present, has been, and is, the cause of those subsidences of the crust, to which the basins of seas and oceans, and the crumplings of the terrestrial rocks are owing, far more than to any general contraction of the nucleus 1 «The general result obtained from these experiments was, that the solvent power of water was found to be determined by two conditions: 1. Temperature, or molecular vis viva ; and 2. Closeness of the molecules on pressure, which seems to give penetrative power. From these observations it will be seen that, if a body has any solvent action on another and does not act upon it chemically, such solvent action may be indefinitely increased by indefinitely increasing the temperature and pressure of the solvent. In nature the temperature has been at one time higher than we can obtain artificially, and the pressure obtained by a depth of 200 miles from the surface is greater than can be supported by any of the mate- rials from which we can form vessels. It will thus be seen that, whereas in nature almost unlimited solvent power could be obtained, we are not as yet able to reproduce these conditions artificially. Could pressure alone increase solvent power, then much might be done, but pressure only acts by keeping the molecules close together when they have great vis viva; and this latter is only obtained by high temperature.”—Hannay on the Artificial Formation of the Diamond. Paper read at the Royal Society. See “ Nature,” July 15, 1880, COLA @ NOO (CO)