green's hypothesis 65 



A great line of fire, starting with the early homes of culture in the 

 Mediterranean, belts the earth, and, branching grandly in the East and 

 West Indies, cordons the Pacific like the line of signal fires that flashed 

 the tidings of the fall of Troy across the iEgean to Agamemnon in 

 Mycenae. 



It is the relation of this fire-bordered zone of intercontinental seas to 

 the triangular continents which it bisects that I desire to consider this 

 evening. 



Part I. The Tetrahedral Earth 



IN GENERAL 



While fresh from the volcanoes of Italy, Japan, and the Sandwich 

 islands, I met in Honolulu the friends and relatives of that fine Eng- 

 lish merchant and original thinker, William Lothian Green. I procured 

 a copy of his rare work, " Vestiges of the Molten Globe,"* thought out 

 on this distant volcano, apart from large libraries and scientific asso- 

 ciates. After reading and re-reading the book during the long voyage 

 across the Pacific, the theory of the tendency of the globe to assume in 

 some degree the tetrahedral shape has had great attraction for me. The 

 hypothesis, while mentioned by Dana, who met the author in the Sand- 

 wich islands, has received little favor except in France, where de Lap- 

 parent and Michel-Levy have long advocated it. Kecently it was made 

 the subject of a lecture before the Royal Geographical Society by Doctor 

 J. W. Gregory .f 



GREEN'S HYPOTHESIS OF THE TETRAHEDRAL EARTH 



General statement of the hypothesis. — Attracted by the old Baconian 

 problem of the three triangular continents projecting south, the three 

 triangular^ oceans projecting north, the Arctic sea and the Antarctic land, 

 Green chose the apparently unpromising tetrahedron as the form toward 

 which the earth has imperfectly tended. 



The hypothesis considers the earth to possess a somewhat rigid crust 

 resting on a liquid interior which is shrinking from loss of heat. The 

 law of least action demands that this crust shall keep in contact with 

 the lessening interior with the least possible readjustment of its surface. 

 The sphere, of all solids, contains the greatest volume under a given 

 surface, the tetrahedron the least volume under the same surface. The 



* Vestiges of the Molten Globe, as exhibited in the figure of the earth's volcanic action and 

 physiography, by William Lathan Green, Minister of Foreign Affairs to the King of the Sand- 

 wich Islands. Part I, London, 1875 ; part II, Honolulu, 1887. 



fThe Plan of the Earth, and its Causes : The Geographical Journal, vol. xiii, 1899, p. 225. Ab- 

 stract in Nature, vol. lix, p. 350. 



