Page:Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London, vol. 25.djvu/67

 certain how much of that retardation is due to tidal friction,— how much to meteors, — how much to possible excess of melting over accumulation of polar ice during the period covered by observation, which amounts, at the outside, to not more than 2600 years. 3. The effect of a different distribution of land and water in modifying the retardation caused by tidal friction, and of reducing it, under some circumstances, to a minimum, does not appear to be taken into account.

4. During the Miocene epoch the polar ice was certainly many feet thinner than it has been during or since the Glacial epoch. Sir W. Thomson tells us that the accumulation of something more than a foot of ice around the poles (which implies the withdrawal of, say, an inch of water from the general surface of the sea) will cause the earth to rotate quicker by one-tenth of a second per annum. It would appear, therefore, that the earth may have been rotating, throughout the whole period which has elapsed from the commencement of the Glacial epoch down to the present time, one, or more, seconds per annum quicker than it rotated during the Miocene epoch.

But, according to Sir W. Thomson's calculation, tidal retardation win only account for a retardation of 22" in a century, or 22/100 (say 1/5) of a second per annum.

Thus, assuming that the accumulation of polar ice since the Miocene epoch has only been sufficient to produce ten times the effect of a coat of ice one foot thick, we shall have an accelerating cause which covers all the loss from tidal action, and leaves a balance of 4/5 of a second per annum in the way of acceleration.

If tidal retardation can be thus checked and overthrown by other temporary conditions, what becomes of the confident assertion, based upon the assumed uniformity of tidal retardation, that ten thousand million years ago the earth must have been rotating more than twice as fast as at present, and, therefore, that we geologists are " in direct opposition to the principles of Natural Philosophy" if we spread geological history over that time ?

II. The second argument is thus stated by Sir W. Thomson : — " An article, by myself, published in ' Macmillan's Magazine ' for March 1862, on the age of the sun's heat, explains results of investigation into various questions as to possibilities regarding the amount of heat that the sun could have, dealing with it as you would with a stone, or a piece of matter, only taking into account the sun's dimensions, which showed it to be possible that the sun may have already illuminated the earth for as many as one hundred million years, but at the same time rendered it almost certain that he had not illuminated the earth for five hundred millions of years. The estimates here are necessarily very vague ; but yet, vague as they are, I do not know that it is possible, upon any reasonable estimate founded on known properties of matter, to say that we can believe the sun has really illuminated the earth for five hundred million years." (l. c. p. 20.)

I do not wish to "Hansardize" Sir William Thomson by laying much stress on the fact that, only fifteen years ago, he entertained a totally different view of the origin of the sun's heat, and believed that the