Penny Blood: Serial Sensation and Working-Class Entertainment — page 111: what you’re looking at

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

94 FLUID SUBSTRATUM. [cH. VIII below and air and water from above, the world of geologic and of human history was to be evolved*.” And further on he explains the relation, which this supposed. reconstituted outer layer holds to his volcanic theory. “Considering the conditions of its formation, water would seem to be necessarily absent from the originally fused globe, in which the older school of Geologists conceive volcanic rocks to have their source. Scheerer supplemented Scrope’s view by showing that the presence of a few hundredths of water, main- tained under pressure at a temperature approaching ignition, would probably suffice to produce a quasi-solution, or an igneo- aqueous fusion of most crystalline rocks; and subsequent, obser- vations of Sorby have demonstrated that the softening and crystallization of many granites and trachytes must have taken place in the presence of water, and at temperatures not above a low red heat. Keeping in view these facts, we can readily understand how the sheet of water-impregnated débris, which as we have endeavoured to show must have formed the envelope to the solid nucleus, assumed in its lower portion a semi-fluid condition, and constituted a plastic bed on which the stratified sediments repose. These sediments which are in part modified portions of the disintegrated primitive crust, and in part of chemical origin, by their irregular distribution over different portions of the earth determine after a lapse of time, in the regions of their greatest accumulations, volcanic and plutonic phenomena. It now remains to show the observed relations of these phenomena both in earlier and later times to great accu- mulations of sediment’.” On these passages the following remarks suggest themselves. The first process towards obtaining “a deep layer of disinte- grated and water-impregnated material, the ruins of the former envelope” of the solid nucleus, is supposed to arise from “the further cooling and contracting of a solid crust formed over a shallow molten layer.” Let us consider this point. The solid crust supposed may 1 Sterry Hunt’s ‘Lecture on Volcanoes and Earthquakes,” p. 6. This short lecture, without date or name of publisher, contains a clear resumé of the writer’s views. 2 Ibid. p. 8. COLA @ NOOKS ACO