We may be told that there is a tendency in nature towards dissolution, and that this, of itself, may be regarded as evidence of the final destruction of all things. But where is the proof of such a tendency?[1] The idea is a mere invention to support a doctrine which we shall presently see Revelation has denied. It is true that matter is continually
- ↑ Dr. Cumming, in a lecture at Manchester, asserted that "Hitchcock said experiments had been made in thousands of places, and it had been found that the heat of the earth increased rapidly as they descended below that point in the earth's crust to which the sun's heat extended. The mean rate of increase had been stated by the British Association to be one degree of Fahrenheit's thermometer for every forty-five feet they bored. At this rate of increase, at sixty miles below the surface of the earth, rocks would melt. The earth was 8000 miles in diameter, and its circumference nearly 24,000 miles. About sixty miles down—the crust being very small in comparison with the 7,940 miles that remained—everything which was in the earth was liquid fire. The earth was literally a hugh bombshell; the surface upon which they lived was somewhere about sixty miles thick, and all below was one vast surging ocean of liquid fire."
These views are mere imaginations. How do they agree with the "orthodox" interpretation of the first chapter of Genesis? Surely that must be abandoned. It does not seem to have occurred to the writer to ask how an "ocean of liquid fire," 7800 miles in diameter, could exist, shut out from air by a crust of earth sixty miles in thickness.
Supposing the earth to have cooled as is here conjectured, why should it burst at a later rather than at an earlier stage of that process? Substances are diminished in bulk by cooling; that process must be still going on; there need therefore be no fear of danger from that source. "Bombshells" do not happen to contain any fire, and hence there is no analogy between what is supposed of the contents of the earth, and what is known of such shells. The experiments of Cordier, related in the New Edinburgh Philosophic Journal, with numerous details with regard to the temperature of springs and mines, go to support the idea, not of a central heat, but of a source of heat independent of that derived from the sun, situated in the crust of the earth.—Arctic Geology. Narrative of Discovery, etc., in the Polar Seas." By Sir John Leslie and others. Fourth edition.
