Penny Blood: Serial Sensation and Working-Class Entertainment — page 94: what you’re looking at

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

cu. vu.] HYPOTHESIS OF SOLIDITY FAILS. 77 state commenced at the surface, the amount of radial contrac- tion in the solid parts beneath the surface of the mountain- region has been less than in the parts beneath the sea-bed. In fact it is this unequal contraction which appears to have caused the hollows in the external surface, which have become the basins into which the waters have flowed to form the ocean.” Latterly, however, he attributed the formation of mountainous regions to horizontal compression’. Mr Mallet, in his paper on Volcanic Energy, takes a similar view. He thinks that the land- and sea-boundaries were shaped out by radial contraction during the first great stage of the operation of refrigeration, while the crust was thin and flexible, owing to the rapid contraction of its viscous portion, which must then have been much thicker than the solid sheet above it”, | Mr Hopkins appears to have been opposed to these views which suppose a difference of radial contraction; and to have held that lateral compression was the cause of the formation of the greater inequalities as well as of the lesser ones, for we find him in discussing M. Elie de Beaumont’s theories to have used these words: “The physical cause to which our author refers the phenomena of elevation—the shrinking of the earth’s crust—is that which appears to me most unlikely to produce that paroxysmal action which his theory so essentially requires ; and most likely to produce those slow and gradual movements which it scarcely recognizes. The actual depressions of the great oceanic basins, and generally the more widely extended geological depressions of the present or former periods, may, I think, be referred with great probability to this cause®.” The theories respecting the formation of the larger features of the earth’s surface have been discussed by Professor LeConte 1 In the third edition of the “ Figure of the Earth’ no mention was made of horizontal compression, but mountains were attributed to vertical expansion. In the fourth, p. 203, note, the author’s estimate of the horizontal force of compression is referred to. 2 + Trans, Royal Soc.’ 1873, § 52 and § 60. 3 Presidential Address to the Geol. Soc. 1858, ‘‘Geol. Journ.,”’ Vol. rx, p. lxxxix, | CONNEC OOO @ (CO)