JOHN MURRAY 81 



land barriers. The tropics extend polewards as we go down 

 in the geological formations till just before the Chalk there 

 was a universally warm sea — from equator to poles and from 

 top to bottom— say 80° F. Coral reefs once flourished at the 

 poles. These have now been driven to equatorial regions 

 where the temperature has remained nearly the above. The 

 animals which in the universal warm sea came to live in the 

 mud at a little depth, remained behind when cooling of the 

 poles commenced. These animals without pelagic free- 

 swimming larvae also descended to the deep sea as the waters 

 cooled. When the sea was all 70° or 80° F. the deep sea was 

 not inhabited. Polar animals and deep-sea animals have all 

 a direct development (so also fresh-water animals, also 

 derived from the deeper part of the shore estuarine universal 

 fauna). 



" It is nonsense to suppose that while the earth was devel- 

 oping the sun has always been the same as now. It has been 

 contracting. In Chalk times it had a diameter seen from the 

 earth equal to an angle of 10° in the heavens. This would 

 give all the heat and light that is necessary for a great Car- 

 boniferous forest at the poles. 



" You can tell me how much of this is d d nonsense. 



" Yours sincerely, John Murray. 



'' Fresh water fauna is much more archaic than deep-sea." 



The following, from his little book The Ocean (p. 226), is 

 a good example of Murray's bold speculations : " We look 

 back on a past when the crust of the earth was in a molten 

 condition with a temperature of 400° F., when what is now 

 the water of the ocean existed as water vapour in the atmo- 

 sphere. We can imagine a future when the waters of the 

 ocean will, because of the low temperature, have become 

 solid rock, and over this will roll an ocean of liquid air about 

 forty feet in depth." 



One of the theories which he supported, and which is not 

 now generally accepted, although he believed he had much 



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