Penny Blood: Serial Sensation and Working-Class Entertainment — page 72: what you’re looking at

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

CH. v. | ELEVATIONS AND DEPRESSIONS. 55 Our next step must be to fix upon a value ford +6. This is the depth of the datum level below the surface of an imagi- nary ocean, which is rather less deep than the actual one. Now it is not probable that there is any place where the bottom of the ocean would coincide with the datum level. Never- theless there seems reason to think that this would spprozimately | me be the case m the deeper parts. If this be so, d+ 6 will not differ greatly from the measure of the deepest parts of the ocean, and it is not likely to exceed it by much, because, as already men- tioned, the surface from which it is reckoned is somewhat lower than the actual surface of the ocean. If the deepest parts of the ocean do not coincide with the datum level they must be one of two things. They must be either depressions below it, belonging to the series 2 (B), or else they must be the places where the ocean bottom is least raised above the datum level. That they should be depressions be- neath that level is scarcely possible under our present assump- tion that the earth has cooled as a solid; whence we have concluded that > (B)=0*. But if we take the other alternative, and suppose the ocean-bottom to be raised above the datum level, even where the depths are very great, then we are taking d +6 too small, and our estimate for 2ke will be too small. And this appears by far the more probable case. On the whole, then, we may feel pretty well assured that we are within the mark if we put for d+6 the measure of the more profound parts of the ocean. The mean depth being taken at three miles we shall not be much in excess if we put d+6 as equal to four miles. Our value for 2ke then becomes 2Qhe = 4 — 2:2 miles, = 1°8 miles, | = 9504 (feet about), a, value which is more likely to be too small than too large’. 1 p. 52. 2 Prof. Haughton (‘‘ Proc. Roy. Soc.,” Vol. 26, p. 53, 1877) puts the area of the sea at 145 millions of square miles, and that of the land at 52 millions, and the GONG oOo SS (CO)