if these
central parts were water, inclosed by an irregularly-spherical shell of
land. Nor would the result be affected, if we considered certain
portions of the interior of this solid shell to be in a state of fusion,
as no doubt is the case.

May not the uncertainty of the mass of the moon, be owing to the fact
that this shell is not so rigidly compacted but that it may yield a
little to external force, and thus also account for the tides in the
Pacific groups, rather obeying the centrifugal force due to the orbit
velocity of the earth, than the attraction of the moon?

Since the days of Hipparchus the sidereal day has not diminished by the
hundredth part of a second; and, consequently, seeing that the
contraction of the mass must be limited by the time of rotation, it is
inferred that the earth has not lost 1/508th of one degree of heat since
that time. This conclusion, sound as it is, is scarcely credible, when
we reflect on the constant radiation into a space 60d below zero. Admit
that the globe is a globe of water, whose average temperature is the
temperature it receives from the sun, and the difficulty vanishes at
once. Its diameter will be invariable, and the only effect of the
cooling of the solid parts will be to immerse them deeper in the water,
to change the _relative_ level of the sea without changing its volume.
This is no puerile argument when rightly considered; but there is
another phenomenon which, if fairly weighed, will also conduct us to the
same views.

It is now a fact uncontroverted, that the sea does actually change its
level, or rather, that the elevation of continents is not only apparent
but real. The whole coast of Sweden and Finland is rising at the present
day at the rate of four feet in a century, while on the south a contrary
effect is produced. Various hypotheses have been formed concerning this
interesting fact. Yet from the indications of geology, it must have been
an universal phenomenon in the early ages of the world, in order to
account for the emersion of sedimentary deposits from the fluid which
deposited them. May not internal fires be yet spreading, and the
continents expanding instead of contracting? And may there not be an
inequality in this process, so as necessarily to immerse in one
direction nearly as much as to elevate in another? One fact is certain,
the elements are scattering the materials of the land along its Oceanic
coasts, which of itself must produce a very m