CHARLES B. WARRING. 261 
found nothing to oppose, but everything to sustain the 
consensus of present geologists that the elevation of the 
land occurred at an exceedingly remote period. It came 
in the wide interval which separated the period at which 
the nebular hypothesis ends, from that at which geol- 
ogy begins. The former brings us to a globe of molten 
lava; the latter starts out with a world possessing a 
solid crust, covered with an ocean beneath whose sur- 
face lay the land hidden by a few hundred feet of water. 
‘In the first part of this interval the continents were 
formed. The earth from pole to pole was an unbroken 
sea of lava exceeding in temperature and consequent 
fluidity, the lavas now glowing in the most intense ac- 
tion of present volcanoes. It was ina state of violent 
agitation’, there were not only convective currerts in 
its own mass, but it was acted upon by an atmosphere 
probably thousands of times heavier than that which 
we breathe, since it contained all the waters now on or 
in the globe, all the carbonic acid now in the rocks as 
carbonates, or whose carbon is now found in the various 
forms of coal, Hgnite, or hydro-carbons, as well as all 
else that was vaporizable at such high temperature. 
This ocean of fire was a mixture of all the elements, 
substances differing enormously in fusibility, and in 
specific gravity. It is highly probable that a very large 
proportion was iron—for our. earth possesses magnetic 
properties, and in that resembles iron. Asa whole it 
is very much heavier than the continental masses. If 
two-thirds of the globe were iron, it would have about 
its present specific gravity. In the igneous rocks, Prof. 
- Dana says, there isa high per cent. of iron oxyde, and 
he says, too, that the greatest iron ore beds of the world 
are found in the oldest rocks, the Archeean. 
AS gases are vacua to each other, so in a less degree 
are liquids, and it must be admitted that there wasa 
more or less general permeation of substance through 
145 
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