THE GEOLOGICAL EVIDENCES. 57 



as implied above, geological evidences seem to show that stresses do accu- 

 mulate to certain large magnitudes before sensible deformations take place. 

 Meanwhile surface transfers by wind and water action are in progress. 

 The protuberant equatorial belt postulated must ever have been shedding 

 material northward and southward, mechanically and by solution, thus 

 building up sedimentary series in the flanking sea-borders. As the pro- 

 tuberant tendency was ever renewed by slackening rotation, this should 

 have become a perpetual process and, as we have seen, should have been 

 a pronounced factor, if not the dominant one, in the earth's deformation, 

 if the reduction in rotation was as great as the hypothesis of earth-moon 

 fission requires. It appears, therefore, that an annular latitudinal dis- 

 tribution of the sediments and of the lands derived from the sediments 

 should have arisen, and this should have cooperated with the tendency of 

 the waters to polar accumulation in giving a distinctive configuration to the 

 distribution of land and water. Yet, as a matter of fact, the surface con- 

 figuration is singularly free from latitudinal zones. There is a very rough 

 tendency toward a meridional arrangement, but the essential fact is that 

 the arrangement is irregular. The protuberances and depressions consist 

 of an unsymmetrical interspersion of independent triangular, quadrangular, 

 oval, and scarcely definable areas. 



Going more into detail, and in this insisting only on the obvious general 

 proposition that the water-level in the equatorial zone should have tended 

 to a low position relative to the land and to a high position in the polar 

 regions, we may note that the Greenland Archean embossment not only 

 stands high above the water-level to-day but is singularly free from evi- 

 dences of submergence in the past. At various periods from the Cambrian 

 onwards, the water-level has stood low about its base and has risen above 

 and fallen below the present shore-line. Much the same may be said of 

 the great Archean tract of Labrador and of the region west of Hudson's 

 Bay, as also of that of Scandinavia and Finland. It is a remarkable fact, 

 in the light of the matter in hand, that the old lands which are now best 

 exposed, the lands that seem to have been longest out of water, and that 

 have been most persistently above sea-level, are more largelj'' the lands of 

 high latitude than of low latitude. 



A candid and critical survey of the relations of land and water in high 

 and low latitudes alike, and in all longitudes, especially in the northern 

 hemisphere where best known, and where the protuberant lands furnish 

 the best record, seems to me to reveal a singular constancy of relations, 

 subject only to oscillations measured by a few thousands of feet at most, 

 an order of magnitude quite out of harmony with any hypothesis which, 

 to cite a very conservative example, requires that the equatorial tract 

 should have been 8 miles higher than at present when the rotation-period 

 of 14 hours prevailed. 



If the moon were once much nearer the earth than now the tides should 

 have been much stronger and the littoral deposits of the early ages should 

 show not only greater coarseness but greater vertical range. Geologists 

 have not been generally convinced that the earlier sediments are different 

 in any such systematic way from those of later times. 



