Penny Blood: Serial Sensation and Working-Class Entertainment — page 146: what you’re looking at

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

CH. x.] DISTURBED TRACT. 129 tions are the more varied, in that they are not similar on the opposite sides of the same band of clay.” It appears then that instead of producing contortion at the layer which adhered to the caoutchouc band, the compression was there relieved by mere thickening, and that contortion became more and more pronounced at greater distances from this layer. To this uncontorted layer our neutral zone would correspond. As the upper surface of the crust was approached, the contortion would become more marked, simple compression accompanied by upswelling characterising the disturbance of the strata nearer to the neutral zone. On the character of the disturbance below this we cannot safely speculate. But pro- bably, on account of the continually increasing pressure, and the softening of the material by heat, the contortions would, as already explained’, be of a more confused character than above it. It.must not however be concluded that, because Prof. Favre’s experiments so happily illustrate the point in hand, it follows that the theory which he proposed to illustrate by them is the same as the one which 1s now advanced; for the object he had in view was to test the effect of secular cooling alone, in pro- ducing inequalities upon the earth’s surface, without the hypo- thesis of a fluid substratum. We can however easily see, that such a theory would require the entire globe to be covered, like the caoutchouc band, by these corrugations; instead of their being arranged, as they are, in mountain chains, to say nothing of the other objections which have been already stated in oppo- sition to that theory. Prof. Favre’s experiments may also be fairly adduced to show how hopeless it would be to predicate the exact form which contortions would assume. Scarcely any conditions can be con- ceived more favorable to uniformity of result than those which he devised; and yet it is evident at a glance how varied was the result obtained at various points of the longitudinal section. In no respect do the experiments illustrate the case of nature more strikingly than in this apparent complexity of the disturb- 1 p. 124, F, | 9 COMMUC NOO SS (CO)