Continents, Mountain Chains, Migrations and Civilization, V29 



and various accidents of other masses refuse it further sup- 

 port. 



If an oblong and curved vessel, loaded with a soft solid and 

 having a hard solid partially imbedded in the middle of its 

 surface, be attached to the rim of a wheel and made to rotate 

 with velocity, the tendency above described of the imbedded 

 mass is such as speedily to cause a concavity in the portion 

 of the soft solidwhich is before it, and a convexity in the por- 

 tion which is behind it, — a retrocession and obliquity of the 

 whole mass, — as a very simple experiment will show. 



Now that which is true of a small mass of matter is true of 

 a greater ; and thus the earth's rotation, being the cause of 

 the retrocession and obliquity of its strata, is the cause of its 

 mountain chains, peninsulas and continents. 



The same is evidently the cause of the great equatorial or 

 tropical current of the ocean, by which, especially between 

 the tropics, and to 30 degrees of latitude north and south, its 

 waters are perpetually carried from east to west, in a direction 

 contrary to that of the rotation of the globe; and it is not less 

 the cause of the boreal and austral polar currents, which join 

 the preceding*. 



The same also is evidently the cause of the winds which 

 blow perpetually from the east in the torrid zone, with a 

 movement quite distinct from that of the equatorial current ; 

 and it is not less the cause of the polar winds, which join 

 these f. 



It remains for me only to apply that which now appears to 

 be a general law, to the migrations and the civilization of 

 mankind — to show that these, which we call moral and poli- 

 tical acts, are fundamentally physical ones. 



As to migration, the savage who launches his canoe or 

 spreads his sail, is naturally carried with the current and the 

 wind ; and, generally speaking, this would necessarily be in 

 the direction already described. Hence, in the very earliest 

 ages, no portion of the globe could long remain uncolonized. 



* Malte-Brun has a partial glimpse of this doctrine, limited, however, 

 to these currents ; but even as to [them he misleads himself by a no- 

 tion of a force of inertia retarding the polar currents in their progress to 

 supply equatorial evaporation, — instead of seeing the peculiar manner in 

 which the centrifugal force operates upon the whole mass of the waters, 

 equatorial as well as polar, and that, instead of polar inertia causing equa- 

 torial retardation the whole relative retardation being caused by the 

 globe's rotation, it must be greatest at the equator and least toward the 

 poles— the very reverse of his supposition. 



f Respecting these, Malte-Brun, following others, makes precisely the 

 same error, as described in the preceding note on the waters. 



