Copy 1, Volume 1

The dynamical theory of the formation of the earth / By Archibald Tucker Ritchie.

  • Ritchie, Archibald Tucker
Date:
1850
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The dynamical theory of the formation of the earth / By Archibald Tucker Ritchie. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    briny seas, which are now so easily excited and lashed into foam by the ambient atmosphere, were once a dark, unruffled, and atmosphereless mass of turgid waters, charged to repletion with the mineral elements of those stony concretions which now engirdle the terraqueous globe, and which have been thrown up as barriers to restrain the very waters from whence they themselves were deposited. Nor is it a less arduous undertaking to convince those who delight in the invigorating influences of the health-giving atmosphere; that, for ages, this sphere existed without so indispensable a means of sustaining voluntary motion—and that myriads of apulmonic creatures, “more numerous than the sands on the sea shore for multitudes,” were all the while employed as the humble and submissive agents of the Creator, in producing one of its component elements; in elaborating that, without which no being, endowed with the faculty of loco- motion, could either have breathed, moved, or lived. All these, nevertheless, are truths: truths of the utmost importance. Of this, the perusal of the following treatise can hardly fail to convince every unbiased mind, even although our relative position towards the world’s inhabitants involves the alternative, either that we are in a trance; have been for so many years enjoying the most soul-satisfying dream, whereby the records of revelation have appeared to be at one with the discoveries of science, and to have kept pace with these wherever they have been made, where every closed lock seems to undo, and every barred door to fly open at our approach, and on the announcement, that there once was a period when the earth had no rotation; or mankind, ont he contrary, have been in a profound slumber, as regards this important fact, for nearly six thousand years! This is our true relation to each other at the present moment. But it is full time that the spell should be broken, and the rightful position of each be justly determined. With this intention, responsible as it is to stand against the arrayed opinions of a whole world, we have resolved to be the first to break this long-continued silence, and endeavour to convince all mankind, that we have all the while been enter- taining no day dream; but that what we assert is a reality, and B2
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