146 Pleading fov a Geological Idea. [March, 
and rising liquefying interstratum, has slided, and slides 
partly and together, most slowly over a nucleus. 
Does not stone turned on stone, by wind or water, produce 
heat and do work ? Have not those ice sheets about which we 
hear so much and know so little slided and grinded, solids 
over solids, heating and melting below them by weight, and 
by height and velocity of descent, and by interception of 
heat, radiated from the inferior solid ? What difference is 
there in all this between ice and azoic rock but the degree of 
heat required for melting either ? 
The ring developed into a globular envelope moves at con- 
ta< 5 t round the planet. It forms with it a vast kind of a 
compound — not yet of a simple — molecule of not accidental 
proportions and characteristics. 
Every geologist speaks of folds of every thickness and 
extent — feet, miles, mountains. The continents are the 
folds of an envelope over an earth limited in the mass by 
the revolution of a plane curve. It is impossible to form 
folds over such a body without that every molecule com- 
posing them slides away from that radius in whose pro- 
longation it was situated. When every molecule must slide, 
the folds, the continents, the envelope must slide, it is tan- 
gentially pushed and drawn. 
The pushing and drawing, and the resistance to either, 
vary in direction and periods for any and all of the strata. 
Folds form, unfold, and reform, like waves ; new shapes and 
directions arise within and under, forming and transforming 
sediments and denudations. 
What I show. 
I show in which manner the folding and sliding has pro- 
ceeded and proceeds. The theory that a shell, formed over 
an intensely hot fluid, broke and drifted like floes of ice on a 
pond moved by wind, and again baked to a sea-bottom, and 
piled up to continents helter-skelter, is a sham. The earth 
is not a rotten cringed apple ; and even an apple does not 
rot and wrinkle without an order in the causes of disinte- 
gration. 
I show that our continents amidst our seas have been 
formed gradually and regularly, according to physical laws, 
by orderly working forces, and that this order has produced 
a symmetry of arrangement which may be made visible and 
intelligible to every educated mind not blind and deaf by 
professional pride or envy, or in the heart’s heart disposed to 
prey with plagiatory instincts on the fragments of a work 
incomprehended in its fulness. 
