Sinaia + Soe Me See eee Se Oh, eee ae f 
f J OF Of the earth. _ 121 
oot to 12. Whatever may be the nature of the forces, or the astro- 
pomical apneg which have anciently of 
continents, and produced that general dislocation and overturn- 
ing which, the crust of the earth exhibits, we may easily imagine 
that all the parts of this crust floating ona fluid mass, and infi- 
nitely subdivided by stratification, and above all by the innume- 
rable c ne sas. ae which cooling has produced in each i may 
have been dislocated and overturned as we actually se Aare 2 
the case. These effects are inexplicable on the ion! ouppons 
tion of the Biiaras. strata of the penile having been last 
solidated, and the globe being solid to its e. 
n considering the probable fluidity of the central mass, 
the phenoniens of earthquakes, the trifling thickness of the con- 
solidated crust,* and, above all, the innumerable solutions of con- 
tinuity which divide ‘the crust of the earth, and which result ei- 
ther from stratification, or from the contraction which takes place 
during progressive cooling, or from the overturnings which the 
veloped the elements of this singular property: but that memoir 
had the misfortune to be presented at a moment when the public 
‘mind was not sufficiently prepared to attend to these kinds of 
on. This ibility becomes now more probable than 
e may D now conceive moreover. , in consequence of the 
of the central mass on which this crust reposes, how ibe 
dexititiey may be affected without our being sensible of it. 
fact, to bring about a change of figure in the spheroid mio 
of elevating the equator one metre, it would be sufficient in re- 
lation to the plane of the equator that each of the innumerable 
solutions of continuity which intersect transversely the solid 
erust, and which I shall suppose to be five metres separated from 
a 
“14. The shane ‘tevibility of the crust of the earth is ac- 
tually confirmed by two principal causes: the one general and 
continual; the other local andtransitory. This last cause, con- 
sidered during the last thirty centuries which have elapsed, 
spared no region of the earth. Sometimes it has shaken 
-at the same moment the twentieth part of the continents; or else 
it has produced an undulation in ean equal to the sixth or 
seventh part of a meridian. I allude to earthquakes. ‘Since 
About the one-one-hundredth part of the a of the globe, as- 
oe the primitive to be forty miles deep.— 
t. &V.—WNo. 1. 16 
