that, though we may know
at present no remains of the first dry land, we are not ignorant of
its general distribution; for the present continents show, in the
arrangement of their formations and mountain chains, evidence that
they are parts of a plan sketched out from the beginning. It has often
been remarked by physical geographers that the great lines of coast
and mountain ranges are generally in directions approaching to
northeast and southwest, or northwest and southeast, and that where
they run in other directions, as in the case of the south of Europe
and Asia, they are much broken by salient and re-entering angles,
formed by lines having these directions. Professor R. Owen, of
Tennessee, and Professor Pierce, of Harvard College, were, I believe,
the first to point out that these lines are in reality parts of great
circles tangent to the polar circles, and the latter to suggest a
theory of their origin, based on the action of solar heat and the
seasons on a cooling earth. This has been more fully stated by Mr. W.
Lowthian Green in his curious book, "Vestiges of the Molten
Globe."[85] It would appear that the great circles in question are in
reality at right angles to the line of direction of the attraction of
the sun and moon at the period of either solstice, and when they
happen to be in conjunction or opposition at these periods; and that
such circles would be the lines on which the thin crust of a cooling
globe would be most likely to be ruptured by its internal tidal-wave.
Whatever the cause of the phenomenon, it is evident that in the
formation of its surface inequalities the earth has cracked--so to
speak--along two series of great circles tangent to the polar circles;
and that these, with certain subordinate lines of fracture running
north and south and east and west, have determined the forms of the
continents from their origin.

M. Elie de Beaumont, and after him most other geologists, have
attributed the elevation of the continents and the upheaval and
plication of mountain chains to the secular refrigeration of the
earth, causing its outer shell to become too capacious for its
contracting interior mass, and thus to break or bend, and to settle
toward the centre. This view would well accord with the terms in which
the elevation of the land is mentioned throughout the Bible, and
especially with the general progress of the work as we have gleaned
it from the Mosaic narrative; since from the period of the