1907.] AND MOUNTAIN FORMATION. 389 



misleading and unjustifiable. For to produce such an effect the 

 settling of the ocean basin would have to be many miles, and we 

 have shown that no such shrinkage has taken place since the crust 

 was formed; on the contrary there is reason to think that the earth 

 is expanding at a rate of from 10 to 100 times that of the contraction 

 due to secular cooling. Moreover we have no more right to assume 

 that the continent is squeezed by the settling of the ocean, than 

 that the ocean is squeezed by the settling of the continent. 



We have, however, recalled these views in order to do justice 

 to the most original of the older American geologists, and also to 

 let the student see where he departs from the true line of thought. 

 Many years ago Rev. O. Fisher showed that shrinkage was wholly 

 inadequate to account for the height of the mountains observed 

 upon the earth, which are hundreds of times higher than the con- 

 traction theory will explain. In the paper on the cause of earth- 

 quakes it is shown that the contraction theory is also emphatically 

 contradicted by the present distribution of mountains. In the present 

 paper and that ** On the Temperature, Secular Cooling and Contrac- 

 tion of the Earth, and on the Theory of Earthquakes held by the 

 Ancients," it appears that at present the earth is not contracting at 

 all; so that we are compelled to abandon the older theories entirely. 



As heretofore developed geology has presented the strange 

 anomaly of offering no theories adequate to account for the uplift 

 of mountains and plateaus or the deposits of fossil beds thousands of 

 feet above the sea. This is the more remarkable, since in the days of 

 Humboldt, Lyell, and Darwin, the bodily elevation of the land was 

 an accepted item of belief. But subsequently Lord Kelvin, Sir 

 George Darwin, and other eminent British physicists, showed, from 

 the investigation of tidal and other phenomena, that the earth as a 

 whole behaves as a solid; and under the influence of this line of 

 thought geologists gave up the doctrine of the bodily elevation of the 

 land, and restricted themselves to the collapse of portions of the crust 

 under gravity. The theory of collapse, however, utterly fails to 

 explain mountains and plateaus and islands, as well as shells and 

 other organic remains at great height above the sea level. But it 

 was felt that the argument of the physicists against the bodily 



