rought at length to coincide with the spheroid of
equilibrium.[742] Sir John Herschel also, in reference to the same
hypothesis, observes, "a centrifugal force would in that case be
generated, whose general tendency would be to urge the water at every
point of the surface to _recede_ from the _axis_. A rotation might
indeed be conceived so swift as to flirt the whole ocean from the
surface, like water from a mop. But this would require a far greater
velocity than what we now speak of. In the case supposed, the _weight_
of the water would still keep it _on_ the earth; and the tendency to
recede from the axis _could_ only be satisfied therefore by the water
leaving the poles, and flowing towards the equator; there heaping itself
up in a ridge, and being retained in opposition to its weight or natural
tendency towards the centre by the pressure thus caused. This, however,
could not take place without laying dry the polar regions, so that
protuberant land would appear at the poles, and a zone of ocean be
disposed around the equator. This would be the first or immediate
effect. Let us now see what would afterwards happen if things were
allowed to take their natural course.

"The sea is constantly beating on the land, grinding it down, and
scattering its worn-off particles and fragments, in the state of sand
and pebbles, over its bed. Geological facts afford abundant proof that
the existing continents have all of them undergone this process even
more than once, and been entirely torn in fragments, or reduced to
powder, and submerged and reconstructed. Land, in this view of the
subject, loses its attribute of fixity. As a mass it might hold together
in opposition to forces which the water freely obeys; but in its state
of successive or simultaneous degradation, when disseminated through the
water, in the state of sand or mud, it is subject to all the impulses of
that fluid. In the lapse of time, then, the protuberant land would be
destroyed, and spread over the bottom of the ocean, filling up the lower
parts, and tending continually to remodel the surface of the solid
nucleus, in correspondence with the _form of equilibrium_. Thus after a
sufficient lapse of time, in the case of an earth in rotation, the polar
protuberances would gradually be cut down and disappear, being
transferred to the equator (as being _then_ the _deepest sea_), till the
earth would assume by degrees the form we observe it to have--that of a
flattened or