Penny Blood: Serial Sensation and Working-Class Entertainment — page 51: what you’re looking at

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

CHAPTER IV. LATERAL PRESSURE, ITS AMOUNT, Generally received views regarding the contortion of rocks by lateral pressure— Calculation of the possible amount of such pressure at the surface—Attempt to estimate the same within the earth—Mountain chains elevated by lateral pressure—The Himalayas. THE well-known fact that great lateral compression has affected the stratified rocks of the earth’s crust, not once, but again and again from the earliest to the latest of the extended periods of Geological time, is now generally explained by the supposition that the globe has contracted through secular cool- ing*, Without enquiring whether the whole globe did or did not become solid at the same time, we may admit that when the outer crust became solid it must have assumed very nearly the temperature of the atmosphere, owing to its heat being radiated away into space. It is thought that as the cooling proceeded, the interior shrunk away from the crust, and the latter became wrinkled; and that it was by this means that the crumpling and contortions of the rocks were produced. The simile some- times made use of in Geological text-books is that of the skin of a shrivelled apple. Where these wrinkles have not yet been 1 The earliest publication of this theory appears to have been in a foot-note fo & memoir on the mountains of L’Oisans (‘‘ Mémoires de la Société d’ Histoire Naturelle,” t. v. 1829) by M. Elie de Beaumont. The passage is quoted by Prof. A. de Lapparent, in a paper entitled ‘‘ L’origine des inequalities de la surface du globe,” in the “ Revue des Questions Scientific,” Juillet, 1880. Prof. Sedgwick proposed the same theory two years later, in his paper on — the structure of the Cumbrian mountains, “Trans. Geol. Soc.,’”’ Jan. 5, 1831. It occurred also to the Author, as he believes independently, about 1841, and was suggested to him by the wrinkles formed on old ice, when the surface of the water had sunk away from it. He has however been led to change his opinion concerning the cause of contraction, as will appear further on. COMIC OOOKS.EO