Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 20.djvu/135

Rh the continued existence of our earth as a place fitted for the habitation of living beings, and they must be credited with the total amount of benefit implied by the existence and preservation of the life of the globe in all its forms and gradations. We quote enough of the argument of Professor Judd, in his elaborate chapter upon this subject, to substantiate the view here taken:

We have had frequent occasion in the preceding pages to refer to the work—slow hut sure, silent but effective—wrought by the action of the denuding forces ever operating upon the surface of our globe. The waters condensing from the atmosphere and, falling upon the land in the form of rain, snow, or hail, are charged with small quantities of dissolved gases, and these waters, penetrating among the rock-masses of which the earth's crust is composed, give rise to various chemical actions of which we have already noticed such remarkable illustrations in studying the ancient volcanic products of our globe. By this action the hardest and most solid rock masses are reduced to a state of complete disintegration, certain of their ingredients undergoing decomposition, and the cementing materials which hold their particles together being removed in a state of solution. In the higher regions of the atmosphere this work of rock-disintegration proceeds with the greatest rapidity; for there the chemical action is reënforced by the powerful mechanical action of freezing water. On high mountain-peaks the work of breaking up rock-masses goes on at the most rapid rate, and every craggy pinnacle is swathed by the heaps of fragments which have fallen from it. The Alpine traveler justly dreads the continual fusillade of falling rock-fragments which is kept up by the ever-active power of the frost in these higher regions of the atmosphere; and fears lest the vibrations of his footsteps should loosen, from their position of precarious rest, the rapidly accumulating piles of detritus. No mountain-peak attains to any very great elevation above the earth's surface, for the higher we rise in the atmosphere the greater is the range of temperature and the more destructive are the effects of the atmospheric water. The moon, which is a much smaller planet than our earth, has mountains of far greater elevation; but the moon possesses neither an atmosphere nor moisture on its surface, to produce those leveling effects which we see everywhere going on around us upon the earth.

The disintegrated materials, produce 1 by chemical and mechanical actions of the atmospheric waters upon rock-masses, are by floods, rivers, and glaciers, gradually transported from higher to lower levels; and sooner or later every fragment, when it has once been separated from a mountain-top, must reach the ocean, where these materials are accumulated and arranged to form new rocks. Over every part of the earth's surface these three grand operations of the disintegration of old rock-masses, the transport of the materials so produced to lower levels, and the accumulation of these materials to form new rocks, are continually going on. It is by the varied action of these denuding agents upon rocks of unequal hardness, occupying different positions in relation to one another, that all the external features of hills, and plains, and mountains owe then-origin.

It is a fact, which is capable of mathematical demonstration, that by the action of these denuding forces the surface of all the lands of the globe is being gradually but surely lowered; and this takes place at such a rate that in a few millions of years the whole of the existing continents must be washed away and their materials distributed over the beds of the oceans.

It is evident that there exists some agency by which this leveling action of the denuding forces of the globe is compensated; and a little consideration will show that such compensating agency is found in the subterranean forces ever at work within the earth's crust. The effects of these subterranean forces which most powerfully arrest our attention are volcanic outbursts and earthquake shocks, but a careful study of the subject proves that these are by no means the most important of the results of the action of such forces. Exact observation has proved that almost every part of the earth's surface is either rising or falling, and the striking and destructive phenomena of volcanoes and earthquakes probably bear only the same relation to those grand and useful actions of the subterranean forces which floods do to the system of circulating waters and hurricanes to the system of moving air-currents. . ..

We establish the fact of the movement of portions of the earth's crust by noticing the changing positions of parts of the earth's surface in relation to the constant level of the ocean. When this is done we find abundant proof that, while some parts of the earth's crust are rising, others are as undoubtedly undergoing depression.

We shall be able to form some idea of the vastness of the effects produced by the