AMERICAN GEOLOGY DECADE OF 1850-1859. 



475 



arches intersecting - each other in such a manner as to form equilateral 

 spherical triangles on the earth's surface, each angle or intersection 

 being equidistant from our present north pole.''' The distribution of 

 coal, the metals, and other mineral products he conceived to correspond 

 with the lines marking these spherical triangles. 



The forces which acted in separating the planes above described were 

 supposed to have originated from the internal fluid, materials being 

 thrown into periodical waves by the attraction of the sun and moon, 

 creating thereby electrical disturbances, etc. Indeed, the entire earth 

 he seemed to regard as a gigantic magnet, made so by the heat of 

 the sun. 



Before this separation took' place the layers composing the South 

 American continent he supposed to have rested on the layers of sub- 

 merged Africa, Australia to have been superimposed upon Arabia, and 

 North America over a portion of Europe. 



Owen further called attention to the fact that, if the north pole 

 were elevated '2o±- above the horizon and 

 the globe then revolved the western coast 

 lines of the chief continental masses would 

 be brought successively to the horizon, prov- 

 ing their parallelism; if depressed to a simi- 

 lar extent the parallelism of the eastern 

 coasts would lie similarly proven. In other 

 words, he showed that the coast lines of the 

 continents, as well as of many of the islands. 

 tended to conform to the axis of the ecliptic, 

 and he regarded this angular distance of 

 23^°, which marks the northward extension 

 of the sun in summer, as a natural unit of 

 measure in the structure of the earth. 



The book contained a large amount of 

 utterly irrelevant matter, and the above idea and that relating to the 

 possible tetrahedral form of the earth, previously referred to, are the 

 only ones put forward in the work that are to-day worthy of consider- 

 ation. The book, as a whole, can but impress one as the work of a 

 dreamer, and particularly so when one considers also the amount of 

 irrelevant matter brought forward and the involved character of many 

 of the sentences. Be this as it may, by a peculiar coincidence, at the 

 Montreal meeting of the American Association for the Advancement 

 of Science in August of this same year, Prof. Benjamin Pierce, of the 

 U. S. Coast Survey, brought forward ideas almost identical with Owen's, 

 so far as relates to the parallelism of the coasts, and felt disposed to 

 regard such conditions as evidence that the sun, by influencing in 

 some way the cooling of the crust, had determined the grander outlines. 



Fig. 66.— Richard Owen. 



