Ann: Do volcanoes and earthquakes proceed from the same cause?
Isabel: Yes; and often accompany each other.
Ellinora: Please tell me whence and how they come. Now, dear Isabel, do not disappoint me by telling me of some half dozen conflicting theories. Give me the opinion of some geologist whose ipse dixit I can regard as an authority.
Isabel: I can give you Professor Silliman’s views. I found them in the American edition of Bakewell’s Geology. He says, “The act of creating energy, admitted alike by reason and philosophy, necessarily implies the production of all the elements of which our physical universe is composed.” He does not mean, you know, the five elements of the ancients, but the half a hundred of modern science. “If we suppose that the first condition of the created elements of our planet was a state of freedom, the globe being a mass of uncombined combustibles and metals, and that the waters, the atmosphere, and chlorine, and iodine, and perhaps hydrogen, were suddenly added; it will be obvious from what we know of the properties of these elements that the reaction, awakening energies before dormant, would produce a general and intense ignition, and a combustion of the whole surface of the planet.”
Ellinora: Do stop, dear Isabel, while I look out the definition of ignition. Well for me that I had the precaution to attach Worcester; and well for us, Bertha, that we read chemistry. Under other circumstances, these technicalities would have rendered this interesting subject nearly unintelligible.
The Knife Grinder, or Principle of Glittering, Kazimir Malevich, 1912-13. Yale University Art Gallery, gift of Collection Société Anonyme.
Isabel: Yes; some knowledge of chemistry is an indispensable prerequisite to the study of geology. Silliman adds, “Potassium, sodium, and phosphorus would first blaze, and would immediately communicate the heat necessary to bring on the action between the other metals and combustibles, in relation to oxygen and chlorine, and in relation to each other. Thus a general conflagration would be the first step in chemical action. In this manner might be formed the fixed alkalies, the earths, and stones, and rocks—the metallic oxides properly so called—carburet of iron—the acids, including the muriatic—and ultimately, the salts, and chlorides, alkaline, earthy and metallic, and many other compounds. In such circumstances, there would also be great commotion; steam, vapors, and gases would be suddenly evolved in vast quantities, with explosive violence; the imponderable agents, heat, light, electricity, and magnetism, and attraction in various forms, would be active in an inconceivable degree, and the recently oxidized crust of the earth would be torn with violence, producing fissures and caverns, dislocations and contortions, and obliquity of strata; and it would everywhere bear marks of an energy then general, but now only local and occasional.”
Ellinora: Oh, how delightful! So this earth was one vast magazine, one grand voltaic battery, producing in its operations results as far above those effected by chemists in their laboratories, in energy and magnificence, as this world is superior to their most tiny apparatus in size! But how does Professor Silliman know that the convulsions whose traces we now meet occasionally in torn mountains and ledges—how does he know that they were once general? How does he know that green fields and sparkling streams are not now as they came from the hand of the Creator?
Isabel: You forget those signals of change found in the organic remains of the secondary rocks, in the vast deposits of vegetables of ancient times, which make our beds of coal—supplies, says Metcalf, which will last a thousand years after all the fuel on the surface of our continent shall have been consumed. The process is still going on at the mouths and on the banks of our rivers, for the supply of future continents.
Bertha: Future continents, dear Isabel?
Isabel: Yes. Metcalf says that earthquakes are upheaving the earth from the bed of the sea, forming new islands, destined to become the nuclei of future continents; that the present bed of the ocean is composed of the pulverized and dissolved fragments of ten thousand hills, mountains, and plains; that the time has been when our mountains did not exist—and the time is coming when they will cease to exist; that through all past time, as far as we can trace it, the land and sea have been perpetually changing places; that the great sandy deserts are but the comminuted fragments of ancient mountains; that the more level portions of the Atlantic states are only the ruins of the southeastern slope of the Alleghenies, disintegrated and worked down in the progress of ages into the sea; that the deep channel of the mighty Hudson has been gradually formed, during the progress of revolving ages, by the congregated rills and streams that drain the highlands; that the Kentucky, Cumberland, and Tennessee Rivers have furrowed out deep beds through solid limestone; and that the gorge through which Cedar Creek runs was produced in the same way—except that the upper portion of the great limestone bed was very hard in one place, and resisted the action of the water, which dissolved and carried away the inferior portions, thus forming that beautiful arch, the Natural Bridge. By their action on their rocky bed, the Niagara Falls have receded fifty yards within the past forty years.
Ellinora: You frighten me, Isabel! If this excavation continues at this rate, the time is not very far distant when it will reach Lake Erie, and then only a tame, monotonous river will “drag its slow length along,” from Erie to Ontario.
Alice: And unlike most wonders of the world, Niagara can leave no tokens of its having been. ’Tis something to wander:
amidst ruins, there to track
Fallen statues and buried greatness o’er a land
Which was the mightiest in its old command,
And is the loveliest.
Ellinora: Dear Alice, let us start for Niagara tomorrow.
From “Geology and Mineralogy.” Later, Anna says, “It was not strange that Herculaneum and Pompeii should pass away, with Vesuvius so near. But it is not easy to believe that this continent, that these United States, separated as they are from all destroying energies, will ever cease to exist.” Cate was born in New Hampshire and worked at cotton mills in her home state and in Massachusetts, contributing essays and advice columns to The Lowell Offering, a journal of writing by women working in the mills.
Back to Issue
