Penny Blood: Serial Sensation and Working-Class Entertainment — page 110: what you’re looking at

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

‘al CH. Vill. | FLUID SUBSTRATUM. 93 There is a natural unwillingness among Geologists to involve themselves in speculations concerning the cosmogony. This is due partly to the inherent uncertainty of the subject, and partly to the deeply implanted doctrines of the uniformitarian school, which in effect teaches that there are no grounds for sound reasoning upon any state of things different from what we now see. However, we are obliged to form some theory on this question if we would speculate on the constitution of the depths beneath the cooled surface of the globe. Among those who have written upon the question, Dr Sterry Hunt, of Montreal, has perhaps offered the most plausible ex- planation. Impressed with the necessity of accounting for the presence of water in the volcanic laboratory, and assuming that all the water belonging to this planet must have existed origi- nally as a gaseous envelope surrounding a still incandescent solid ball, he appears to have seen no means of accounting for this subterraneous water, except by supposing it to have been subsequently derived from the atmosphere by precipitation. ‘While admitting with Hopkins and Scrope the existence of a solid nucleus and a solid crust, with an interposed stratum of semi-liquid matter, I consider this last to be, not a portion of the yet unsolidified igneous matter, but a layer of material which was once solid, but is now rendered liquid by the inter- vention of water under the influence of heat and pressure. When, in process of refrigeration the globe had reached the point imagined by Hopkins, when a solid crust was formed over the shallow molten layer which covered the solid nucleus, the farther cooling and contraction of this crust would result in irre- gular movements, breaking it up, and causing the extravasation of the yet liquid portions confined beneath. When at length the reduction of temperature permitted the precipitation of water from the dense primeval atmosphere, the whole cooling and disintegrating mass of broken up crust and poured out igneous rock would become exposed to the action of air and water. In this way the solid nucleus of igneous rock became surrounded with a deep layer of disintegrated and water- impregnated material, the ruins of its former envelope, and the chaotic mass from which, under the influence of heat from GONG oOo SS (CO)