PLACE OF ORIGIN OF THE MOON 33 
in fact, one is needed of continental proportions. Whether these 
deposits are sufficiently ancient to be explained by the lunar hypoth- 
esis the writer is not prepared to say. 
There are several coincidences relating to the position of the 
central point of the Pacific which may or may not be accidental. 
The close coincidence with the very deep area above noted is the 
first of these. The second relates to its latitude, -25°. This is 
within a degree and a half of the tropic of Capricorn. ‘The tropics 
are the lines on a uniform sphere where the direct solar tidal pull 
acts for the greatest length of time on any particular area of rock. 
Here also the leverage of the tidal pull on the Earth’s crust would 
be greatest in displacing a protuberant equatorial ring. If the Moon 
were generated from the Earth by centrifugal force, liberated by 
the tides, we should expect the central point to coincide with one of 
the tropics of that time. The coincidence with the present tropic 
would indicate that the axis of the Earth can have changed very 
little in the meantime. The third and fourth coincidences are more 
likely to be accidental. The third is that the central point coincides 
in longitude with Bering Strait, where the two continents are supposed 
to have slipped past one another. The fourth is that the strait is 
almost exactly go°, more accurately g1°, in latitude from the central 
point. 
If the greater continents were split apart, we should by the same 
analogy conclude that Antarctica and Australia were drawn from 
the Indian Ocean; the former from the vicinity of the Cape of Good 
Hope, the latter farther east. 
If it is true, as here suggested, that we owe our continents to 
the Moon, then the human race owes far more to that body than we 
have ever before placed to its credit. If the Moon had not been 
formed, or if it had carried away the whole of the terrestrial crust, 
our Earth would have been completely enveloped by its oceans, as is 
presumably the case with Venus at present, and our race could 
hardly have advanced much beyond the intelligence of the present 
deep sea fish. If the Moon had been of but half its present bulk or 
had been slightly larger than it is at present, our continents would 
have been greatly diminished in area, and our numbers decimated, 
or our lands overpopulated. 
