Penny Blood: Serial Sensation and Working-Class Entertainment — page 163: what you’re looking at

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

146 THE REVELATIONS OF THE PLUMB-LINE. (cu. xt. has assumed the spheroidal form, and the absence of any parti- cular preponderance either of land or of water at the equator as compared with the poles, have induced most physicists to sup- pose, either that the interior of the earth is now fluid, or that it was fluid when the mountains took their present forms. This fluidity may be very imperfect, it may be mere viseidity; 1t may even be little more than that degree of yielding which (as is well known to miners) shows itself by changes in the floors of subterraneous chambers at a great depth where their width exceeds 20 or 30 feet, and this yielding may be sufficient for my present explanation.” He then proves that a table-land, say of 100 miles broad and two miles high, could not rest upon the surface of a crust ten miles thick. } “Now I say that this state of things is impossible, the weight of the table-land would break the crust through its - whole depth from the top of the table-land to the surface of the lava” (which is merely used as a generic term for a heavier subjacent non-solid material), “and either the whole or only the middle part would sink into the lava.” To prevent this happen- ing, with the assumed dimensions, it would be necessary that the cohesion of the rock should be sufficient to support a suspended column of the same twenty miles long. “I need not say that there is no such thing in nature. If instead of sup- posing the crust ten miles thick we had supposed it 100 miles thick, the necessary value of the cohesion would have been reduced to 4th of a mile nearly. This value would have been as fatal to the supposition as the other’.” “ Yet the table-land does exist in its elevation, and therefore it ¢s supported from below. What can the nature of its support be? I conceive there can be no other support than that arising from the downward projection of a portion of the earth’s light crust into the dense lava; the horizontal extent of that projection corresponding rudely with the horizontal extent of the table-land, and the depth thus gained is roughly equal to the increase of weight above from the prominence of the table- land’.” 1 Ibid. p. 102. 2 Ibid. p. 103: COMIC OOOKS.EO