the Displacement of Shore-lines. 411 



mountains of the West have not been produced by horizontal 

 compression, but by some unknown forces beneath which 

 have pushed them up"'^. 



It is not my intention to maintain that refrigeration has 

 not at all contributed to give the surface of the earth the form 

 which it now possesses. But I think that an auxiliary theory 

 is required, which, while it will not entirely supersede the old 

 theoiy, may yet serve to explain things which the old theory 

 cannot render comprehensible. 



Henry H. Howorth has written two memoirs, namely, 

 " Recent Elevations of the Earth^s Surface in the Northern 

 Circuinpolar Regions'" (Journ. Roy. Geogr. Soc. vol. xliii. 

 1873, p. 240) and " Recent Changes in the Southern Circum- 

 polar Regions" (op. cit. vol. xliv. 1874, p. 252), in which he 

 has brought together what was at that time known as to the 

 displacement of shore-lines in the last section of geological 

 time, and the principal result of his investigations is summed 

 up in the following w^ords : — ^' The South Pole, as well as the 1 

 North, is a focus of protrusion, the land around it is being , 

 gradually elevated." In the last section of geological time, ■ 

 i. e. in the Postglacial period, the laud has, in general, sunk 1 

 under lower and risen under higher latitudes. ' 



Suess arrives at a similar result in his above-cited memoir 

 {Verh. K. K. Geol. Reichs. 1880, pp. 174-175). He has 

 likewise studied the displacement of coast-lines over the w'hole 

 earth during the periocl nearest to the present time, and sums 

 up the result as follows : — " Terraced land \i. e. land which 

 has recently risen in relation to the sea] appears everywhere 

 in the high northern latitudes, so far as man has hitherto 

 penetrated into these solitudes. It also extends far, although 

 not everywhere equally far, dow^n into the temperate latitudes, 

 but generally decreasing in height. In other words, around the 

 North Pole and far down the sum of the negative [i. e. descend- 

 ing] movements of the coast-lines is greater than the positive ; 

 towards the south, however, these two sums approximate more 

 and more. In tropAcal seas, in the regions of the coral forma- 



* Ite cun-ent doctrines with regard to refrigeration and compression 

 are discussed by Peirce in a discourse before tlie American Academy on 

 the 11th May, 1869 (see Proc. Anier. Acad. Arts and Sci. vol. yiii. 1873, 

 p. 106), as also by O. Fisher (Physics of the Earth's Crust, 1881) and 

 Button (" A criticism upon the Contractional Hypothesis," in Amer. 

 Journ. Sci. ser. 3, vol. yiii. 1874, pp. 113 et seqq.). They all consider 

 that contraction is not sufficient to explain the known phenomena; nay, 

 the last-named even thinks that the phenomena are opposed to this. 

 A. de Lapparent, on the other hand, in his memoir " Contraction et 

 refroidissement du globe " {Bull. Soc. Geol. France, ser. 3, vol. xv. 1887, 

 pp. 383 et seqq.) seeks to prove that the}' are quite sufficient. 



