HINT CONCERNING TIDES. 137 



tive focus, still continues in subjection t6 the force of the 

 general ethereal mass which is positive over it ; and therefore, 

 keeping the same side always to the earth, it rotates only with 

 the rotation of the general mass. 



If our hypothesis is correct, then not only ought the sides 

 of the moon turned to and from the earth, to be in opposite 

 polar relations, but there should be a slight elongation of the 

 moon in the same direction, presenting, in fact, the dwindled 

 and miniature form of the original nebulous or present 

 ethereal spheroid. On the same principle there must, have 

 been a tendency to elongation in the form of the earth, while 

 the particles which compose it were in process of aggregation. 

 This tendency, however, so far as the solid, or less mobile ma- 

 terials of the earth are concerned, was corrected by its ro- 

 tation on its axis, by the perpetual action of which, during 

 the period in which the earth passed from a fluid to a super- 

 ficially solid state, the surface of the earth was rolled into 

 general rotundity. But the mobility of the watery portions 

 of the earth's surface, was such as to preserve, in a degree, 

 their freedom to observe the original tendency to ellipticity, 

 which tendency is now manifested in the form of tides. For 

 tides are only elongations of the mobile portions of the earth's 

 substance, in what we have supposed to be the direction of 

 the longer axis of the ethereal spheroid, which axis would 

 necessarily be in the direction of the earth and moon, admit- 

 ting these bodies, as points of condensation in the general 

 body, to occupy generally the two foci of the latter. There 

 are, doubtless, for the same reasons, atmospheric tides which 

 are greater than the oceanic tides in proportion to the greater 

 mobility of the atmospheric particles ; and had not the earth 

 assumed a rotatory motion (from causes identical with those 

 which produced a similar motion in other bodies, and which 



