A Comparative Estimate of the Mineral and Mosaical Geologies (1822)
by Granville Penn (9780217424752)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IV. It will be instructive and important, to PART I. trace with some minuteness the opposition of doctrine, between the philosophies of Newton and of the mineral geology, respecting a. chaotic state of this globe; and to observe, how deeply the foundation of that opposition is laid. When Newton had remarked, that the planets presented to the view figures of obtuse spheroids, and not of perfect spheres; when he had reflected upon the nature of that peculiar figure, and had contemplated those orbs as subjected, in their revolutions, to the adverse actions of gravity and centrifugal force; his penetrating mind at length discovered, that the rule of harmony and equilibrium between those two contending powers was only to be found in the figure of an obtuse spheroid. To make this fact plain to the understanding of others, he imagined this hypothetical illustration.?" If" said he, "the " earth were formed of an uniformly yielding " substance, and if it were to become deprived PART I. CHAP. IV. " of its motion," ? si terra comtaret ? ex uni- " formi materia, motuque omni privaretur 1;" the law of gravity acting equally, and without resistance, from all points of its surface towards its centre, would cause that yielding substance to settle into the figure of a perfect sphere. But, if it were then to receive a transverse impulse, which should cause it to revolve upon its axis, the new transverse force would counteract the former force of gravity, by urging the particles composing the yielding substance, from their centre, towards their circumference; and would thus produce an alteration in the figure of that sphere. For, the new force would tend to elevate the surface, and would have most power at the equator, and least at the poles; whereas the opposite force of grav...

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