Penny Blood: Serial Sensation and Working-Class Entertainment — page 43: what you’re looking at

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

26 CONDITION OF INTERIOR. (cH. 1. It is practically seen that a crust can be formed and sup- ported upon liquid lava by what is known to happen in the crater of Kilauea. This is of an elliptical form, three miles in its longer diameter: consequently the attachment to the cliff- like sides can have little effect in supporting the crust over so large an area. Moreover, this has been observed to rise and sink with variations in the level of the lava, showing that it really rests upon the fluid support. “The floor of the pit is described as usually presenting a crust over a vast pool of lava, which is from time to time broken through by a fresh upboiling of the incandescent mass beneath. It cools*and hardens so rapidly on exposure, that it may be walked upon within a few hours after its coagulating. Sometimes upwards of fifty small cones and craters, more or less in activity, have been counted on the floor of this great pit. They were from fifty to a hun- dred feet high*.”” “It is nine miles in circumference, and its lower area, which not long ago fell about 300 feet, just as ice on a pond falls when the water below it is withdrawn, covers six square miles’*,” The conclusion which we may draw from these premises is that the earth is on the whole extremely rigid, but that from anything which we have as yet referred to, we cannot decide whether it is solid from the surface to the centre, or whether there may be a liquid substratum of fused rock, of no great depth perhaps, intervening between the crust solid from cold, and the nucleus, solid in spite of its high temperature from pressure. ‘That such solidity is the case with the nucleus, appears necessarily to be the result of pressure, without refer- ence to experiments regarding the contraction or expansion - of rocks upon solidifying, for otherwise the proved rigidity of the earth would not be compatible with a high tempera- ture—unless indeed, as suggested by Sir Wm. Thomson, the nucleus be a cool sphere, around which a stratum of meteoric matter has accumulated, heated to the temperature of fusion by its collision with the pre-existing nucleus. This latter 1 Scrope’s ** Volcanos,” p. 477, ed. 1872. ? Miss Bird’s ‘“‘ Hawaiian Archipelago.”’ See ‘‘Nature,’’ Vol. x1. p, 324. COMICOOOLKS @ (CO)