HYPOGEIC WORK. 



395 



the northern hemisphere, was crowded westward on to Europe and Africa, 

 leaving Australia to the eastward. 



Daubree, in 1880, explained the same characteristics of the sphere by 

 reference to torsion in the crust during its contraction, and referred to 

 the facts as according with his experiments described in his Experimental 

 Geology. 



W. Prinz published a paper in the Annuaire de V Observatoire Royal de 

 Bruxelles for 1891, in which he points out the resemblances between the 

 great continental torsion courses of the earth, and the lines that have been 

 observed on some of the planets. The western outline of North and South 

 America shows well the obliquity of one of the greater torsion courses and 

 movements. On the following diagram. Fig. 347, it is the outline to the 

 left. Parallel with this, as Prinz explains, and about 90° to the eastward, 



347. 



Oblique courses in the earth's grander outlines. Prinz. 



there is another, that of the western coast of Africa, continued northwest- 

 ward to Greenland ; and 90° farther eastward, there is a third, following the 

 course of the western side of Asia, from the Urals and Spitzbergen to western 

 Sumatra and Australia. A fourth is also supposed by him to be indicated in 

 the middle of the Pacific, nearly 90° more to the eastward, where the great 

 central chain of islands in the ocean bends northward, and crosses the equa- 

 tor in the Marshall Islands. Prinz shows further from published maps that 

 similar oblique lines have been observed on Mars (Fig. 348), and less dis- 

 tinctly on Venus and Jupiter. Finally, he states that M. Duner, by means 

 of the spectroscope, has been able to determine that in the sun the 75th 



