Earth is round

“ Astronomers have never agreed amongst themselves about a rotating Moon revolving round a rotating and revolving Earth—this Earth, Moon, planets and their satellites all, at the same time dashing through space, around the rotating and revolving Sun, towards the constellation Hercules, at the rate of four millions of miles a day! And they never will: agreement is impossible! With the Earth a plane and without motion, the whole thing is clear. And if a straw will show which way the wind blows, this may be taken as a pretty strong proof that the Earth is not a globe. ”

“ The Earth’s Axis makes an angle of 231⁄2 degrees with the Axis of it’s Orbit; and keeps always the same oblique direction; inclining towards the same fixed Stars [12] throughout it’s annual course; which causes the returns of spring, summer, autumn, and winter; as will be explained at large in the tenth Chapter.
A proof of it’s being round. 49. The Earth is round like a globe; as appears, 1. from it’s shadow in Eclipses of the Moon; which shadow is always bounded by a circular line § 314. ”

“ The earth is not round, so the distance which the body falls in one second differs slightly at different places. At the pole the radius of the earth is shorter than at the equator, and accordingly the attraction of the earth at the pole is greater than at the equator. ”

“ The courses of the great rivers, which are in general navigable to a considerable extent, prove that the curvature of the land differs but little from that of the ocean; and as the heights of the mountains and continents are, at any rate, quite inconsiderable when compared with the magnitude of the earth, its figure is understood to be determined by a surface at every point perpendicular to the direction of gravity, or of the plumbline, and is the same which the sea would have if it were continued all round the earth beneath the continents. ”

“ Which is it more likely—that the earth, like a grain of sand at the centre of a mighty globe, should turn round once in twenty-four hours, or that the whole of that vast globe should complete a rotation in the opposite direction in the same time? ”

“ Some sceptical and obstinate individuals may doubt that the Earth’s motion is visible, but I say from personal observation its a positive fact. I don’t care about latitude or longitude, or a vibratory pendulum revolving round the sine of a tangent on a spherical surface, nor axes, nor apsides, nor anything of the sort. ”

“ It is sufficient here to say that the attraction of gravitation, tending to make the top fall, but really causing the peg to turn round and round, resembles, in its effect, the attraction of the sun and the moon upon the equatorial 59protuberance of the earth, which makes the earth's axis turn round in space. ”

“ Write on the centre belt, ‘Equatorial Calms;’ on the upper, ‘Calms of Cancer;’ on the lower, ‘Calms of Capricorn.’ The circle represents the globe; the ends of a line drawn at right angles to the belts where it reaches the circle, mark the poles. The globe moves from west to east. Now, suppose a mass of air sent off from the north pole towards the equator in a straight line, it not partaking of the diurnal motion of the earth would appear as if it came from the north-east. ”

“ This is exactly what the earth does, and Newton calculated the bulging of it as fourteen miles all round the equator. Make an elastic globe revolve round a fixed centre outside itself, and it gets pulled into a prolate or lemon shape; the simplest illustrative experiment is to attach a string to an elastic bag or football full of water, and whirl it round and round. ”

“ By methods, the history and description of which we have not here sufficient space to give, it has been proved that the earth is, in form, a globe, or more strictly an ellipsoid, slightly drawn in at the poles and swollen round the equator. The polar diameter is 7899 miles, and the equatorial diameter 7926 miles, the difference amounting to only 27 miles. Thus, for ordinary purposes, we may regard the earth as being a true sphere. ”

“ It has been shown that an easterly or a westerly motion is necessarily a circular course round the central North. The only north point or centre of motion of the heavenly bodies known to man is that formed by the North Star, which is over the central portion of the outstretched Earth. When, therefore, astronomers tell us of [15] a planet taking a westerly course round the Sun, the thing is as meaningless to them as it is to us, unless they make the Sun the northern centre of the motion, which they cannot do! ”

“ The flints in general form round or oval masses, but of irregular shape with many projections, and the masses lie in regular bands parallel to the stratification. The tremendous earth movement which has bent the strata into a great curve has compressed the vertical portion into about half its original thickness, and has made the chalk of our downs extremely hard. ”

“ Think, on the other hand, of a sphere extending through space to so vast a distance that every star in the Milky Way will be contained within its compass. Then the number of those corpuscles which would be required to fill that sphere is still far too small to represent the hugeness of the improbability that all the five hundred planetary bodies should revolve in the same direction, if chance, and chance alone, had guided the direction which each planet was to pursue in moving round its orbit. ”

“ 'You are all misleading one another, and are yourselves deceived. The sun does not go round the earth, but the earth goes round the sun, revolving as it goes, and turning towards the sun in the course of each twenty-four hours, not only Japan, and the Philippines, and Sumatra where we now are, but Africa, and Europe, and America, and many lands besides. The sun does not shine for some one mountain, or for some one island, or for some one sea, nor even for one earth alone, but for other planets as well as our earth. ”

“ It is admitted by William of Newburgh that his followers bewailed him bitterly as a martyr. Miracles were wrought with the chain that hanged him. The gibbet was carried off as a relic, and the very earth where it stood scooped away. Crowds were attracted to the scene of his death, and the primate had to station on the spot an armed guard to disperse them. ”

“ The moon is not kept in her orbit round the earth, nor the earth in her orbit round the sun, by a force that varies merely in the inverse ratio of the squares of the distances. ”

“ Heaven is not reached at a single bound;
But we build the ladder by which we rise
From the lowly earth, to the vaulted skies,
And we mount to its summit round by round. ”

“ If therefore we conceive that there is no shift in all this great system of strata, we in reality are enabled, by means of it, to see no less than 61 miles into the interior of the earth, nearly a 65th part of the radius of the globe. ”

“ Substances of the greatest specific gravity are susceptible of the greatest projectile force; and hence we find that mountains are composed of heavy masses of rock, mineral substances, and heavy earths; hills, or the next highest eminences, of earth of the next specific gravity; and plains, or level lands, of lighter substances. Had the earth originally been composed of one uniform substance, sand, for example, of equal fineness and weight, the whole surface of the globe would have presented one uniform level or unbroken plain. ”

“ The deviation from a perfectly spherical shape is so inconsiderable that in an artificial globe of eighteen inches diameter it would hardly amount to the thickness of a sheet of paper; still, small as this is represented on a miniature scale, it has, doubtless, great importance on the great scale of a world like this, both in affecting somewhat the perturbation of other heavenly bodies which depend on the earth, as well as the perturbations in the earth’s own motion. ”

“ It is therefore natural to enquire how far gravitation will render an account of the phenomenon of precession; and to put the matter in its simplest form, let us consider the effect which a [Pg 496] distant attracting body can have upon the rotation of the earth.
To answer this question, it becomes necessary to define precisely what we mean by the earth; and as for most purposes of astronomy we regard the earth as a spherical globe, we shall commence with this assumption. It seems also certain that the interior of the earth is, on the whole, heavier than the outer portions. ”

“ Thus we draw the important inference that if, the oceans having been removed, we were then to remove from the earth’s surface a rind two miles thick—a thickness which, it is to be observed, is only the two-thousandth part of the earth’s radius—we should transform the earth into a globe which, while it still retained appreciably the same size, would have such a temperature that even the coolest spot would be as hot as boiling water. ”

“ But astronomy gives a different and more comfortable solution of the problem. The influence of the moon alone, it would appear, acting upon our planet, requires a thickness of crust of at least one thousand miles, to prevent the fabric of the globe from being severed into fragments. The earth, considered in connection with its own planetary system, has three distinct motions in space, a fact in science usually illustrated by the movements of the common spinning-top. ”

“ The level of its surface, however, is varied by hills and mountains, which, though insignificant in comparison with the size of the whole earth, are enormous when compared with the structures of human hands. ”

“ Now, the thing which is called a “proof” of the Earth’s roundness, and which is presented to children at school, is, that if we stand on [12] the sea-shore we may see the ships, as they approach us, absolutely “coming up,” and that, as we are able to see the highest parts of these ships first, it is because the lower parts are “behind the earth’s curve.” ”

“ Still, again, let us conceive of a sphere, but this time with a radius—not of ten millions of years of light’s flight, which would contain as many earths as drops in 1300 quintillions of such oceans, a number equalling more than half the drops in an ocean that contained 45 millions of cubic miles—but we will take less than ten minutes of light’s flight with a radius of 100 millions of miles, which is a little more than the distance from the earth to the sun. We find that this sphere would contain 15 trillions of earths ”

“ You know full well that the condition of the outer sphere is, as I have described it, a bleak, turbulent surface, the roof of the earth on which man exists, as a creeping parasite does on a rind of fruit, exposed to the fury of the ever-present earth storms.
"The central circle, or medial sphere, the shell, or layer of gravitation, lies conformably to the outer configuration of the globe, about seven hundred miles towards its center. It stretches beneath the outer circle (sphere) as a transparent sheet, a shell of energy, the center of gravitation. ”

“ Here again it is well to remember the small size of the planet, from which we may infer that it has progressed through its physical evolution at a rate more rapid than would be possible with a larger globe like the earth. The sea is constantly wearing down the land, but by upheavals arising from the intensely heated condition of the interior of our globe the land is still able to maintain itself above water. ”

“ The material crust of the earth rests on this placid sphere of vigor, excepting in a few places, where, as in the crevice we have entered, gaps, or crevices, in matter exist, beginning from near the outer surface and extending diagonally through the medial and inner spheres into the intra-earth space beyond. This medial sphere is a form of pure force, a disturbance of motion, and although without weight it induces, or conserves, gravity. It is invisible to mortal eyes, and is frictionless, but really is the bone of the earth. ”

“ If a stone you can pick up is heavy, how much heavier is a great boulder that it takes a four-horse team to haul. What tremendous weight there is in all the boulders scattered on a hillside! The hill itself could not be made level without digging away thousands of tons of earth. The earth's outer crust, with its miles in depth of mountains and level ground, is a crushing weight lying on the heated under-substance. Every foot of depth adds greatly to the pressure exerted upon the mass, for the attraction of gravitation increases amazingly as the centre of the earth is approached. ”

“ Yet the height of the highest range, in comparison with the diameter of the earth, is insignificant, only about 1⁄1700, and the combined mass of mountains are of no more account in comparing them with the entire mass of the globe, than the roughnesses on the rind of an apple, or perhaps more exactly still, than those on the shell of an egg. The combined mountain systems in the world would not suffice, if transferred to the North and South Pole, to fill out the earth to such an extent that the polar and equatorial diameters would be equal. ”

“ This is because, in great convulsions of nature, at three different times, masses of the earth—whole ranges of mountains, probably—have flown off into space, thus lessening the diameter of the earth, and changing the exact locality of its centre by a point or two. ”