THE 

 LONDON, EDINBURGH, and DUBLIN 



PHILOSOPHICAL MAGAZINE 



AND 



JOUKNAL OF SCIENCE. 



♦ 



[FOURTH SERIES.] 



DECEMBER 1872. 



XLIX. On the Phenomena of the Elevation and Subsidence of 

 the Surface of the Earth, By Captain F. W. Hutton, 

 E.G. S.J of the Geological Survey of New Zealand^, 



IT was in 1834 that the late Mr. C. Babbage read to the Geo- 

 logical Society a paper on the Temple of Jupiter Serapis 

 (Proc. Geol. Soc. vol. ii. p. 72), in which he proposed to ac- 

 count for the elevation and subsidence of land by the theory 

 of the change of isothermal surfaces within the earth. Two 

 years later, and without any knowledge of Mr. Babbage^s paper, 

 the late Sir J. Herschel also arrived at very similar conclusions 

 (Proc. Geol. Soc. vol. ii. p. 548); and in a later communication 

 (Proc. Geol. Soc. vol. ii. p. 596) he says that he thinks that 

 Mitscherlich or Laplace had suggested the same theory before ; 

 but from that time until the present no attempt has been made to 

 follow the lead given by these distinguished philosophers, and 

 to work out in detail the theory they started. It has, however, 

 always appeared to me that, of all the various theories put for- 

 ward to account for the elevation of land, the Herschel-Babbage 

 theory is the only one founded upon universally acknowledged 

 facts t from which results can be deduced by means of well- 

 established laws, the accuracy of which results can be tested by 

 observation_, and the theory either proved or disproved by their 



* Communicated by the Author. 



t In his lecture on Volcanoes and Earthquakes, Sir J. Herschel has 

 quite destroyed the plausibility of his theory by saying (Lectures on Sci- 

 entific Subjects, p. 11) that all he wants is a sea of liquid fire below him. 

 He does not want it ; and few geologists would be inclmed to let him 

 have it. 



Phil. Mag. S. 4. Vol. 44. No. 295. Dec. 1872. 2 D 



