Abstract
The Royal Society AT a, meeting of the Royal Society on March 7, 1839, William Hopkins read the third part of his paper “On the phenomena of Precession and Nutation, assuming the Interior of the Earth to be a Heterogeneous Fluid”. The objects of researches of this kind, said the author, were not merely to determine the actual state of the globe, but also to trace its past history through the succession of ages, in which the matter composing it has probably passed gradually through all its stages between a simple elementary state to that in which it has become adapted for the habitation of man. In this point of view the problem was not without value, as demonstrating an important fact in the history of the earth, presuming its solidification to have begun at the surface-namely, the permanence of the inclination of its axis of rotation, from the epoch of the first formation of an exterior crust. This permanence had frequently been insisted on, and was highly important as connected with the author's speculations on the causes of that change of temperature which had probably taken place in the higher latitudes.
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Science News a Century Ago. Nature 143, 388 (1939). https://doi.org/10.1038/143388a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/143388a0