Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 56.djvu/450

436 the former is the original and fundamental kind. These determine earth forms, while the other only modify them; these determine the great features, the other only the lesser features; the former rough-hews the earth features, the latter shapes them. It is the effects of these interior earth forces which are the most important to study. And among these effects the most fundamentally important of all is the formation of those greatest features—the ocean basins and continental arches. The most probable view is that they are formed by unequal radial contraction in the secular cooling of the earth. The earth was certainly at one time an incandescently hot mass, which gradually cooled and contracted to its present temperature and size. Now, if it were perfectly homogeneous both in density and in conductivity in all parts, then, cooling and contracting equally in every part, it would retain its symmetric oblate-spheroid form, though diminishing in size. But if there were any, the least, heterogeneity either in density or especially in conductivity over large areas, then the more conductive areas, contracting more rapidly toward the center radially, would form hollows or basins, and the less conductive areas would stand out as higher arches. Thus were formed the oceanic basin and the continental arches of the lithosphere. The same causes which produced would continue to increase them, and thus the ocean basins would increase in depth and the continents in height.

The hydrosphere is still to be added. In the beginning of this process doubtless the lithosphere was hot enough to maintain all the water in the form of vapor in the atmosphere. But when the surface was cool enough the water would precipitate and partly or wholly cover the earth—whether partly or wholly would depend on the amount of precipitated water and the amount of inequality which had already taken place. The amount of water, as we know, is sufficient, if the inequalities were removed, to cover the whole surface two and a half miles deep. Inasmuch as the forming of the inequalities is progressive and still going on, it seems improbable that the inequalities had become sufficiently great, at the time of precipitation, to hold the waters. If this be so, then the primeval ocean was universal and the future continents existed only as continental banks in the universal ocean.

However this may have been, there seems little doubt that the same cause which produced the inequalities continued to operate to increase them. The ocean basins, so far as these causes are concerned, must have become deeper and deeper, and the continents larger and larger. In spite of many oscillations producing changes mostly on the margins, but sometimes extending over wide areas in the interior of the continent, this, on the whole, seems to be in