Abstract
FROM Mr. Charles J. J. Fox's letter in NATURE of March 10 it is not wonderful to learn that Prof. Milne emphasises the demand for some theory which shall explain pulsatory movements by which large tracts have been alternately raised and lowered. Prof. Milne has seen too much of seismic phenomena not to do so. But with our limited knowledge of the earth's interior, it is still a matter of pure conjecture in what order the globe solidified from being a mass of heated vapours, and quite open to suppose that after the heaviest took the lowest place, a hollow was formed, and the crust became a cooling shell, with a layer of radium—about the heaviest of metals—underneath to remain a perpetual generator of subterranean heat. This state of things may be taken as the starting point; for it was not until the crust hardened into shape that the problem for which Prof. Milne demands some effort at a solution came into existence, and it is curiously enough propounded by the picture which happens to be on the opposite page of NATURE—“overfolding in Upper Carboniferous limestone” —to account for which there are geologists who would require oscillations between land and sea continued for an indefinable length of time.
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F., A. Earth Structure. Nature 69, 488 (1904). https://doi.org/10.1038/069488a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/069488a0
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