THIS LOP-SIDED OLD EARTH.

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 261, 3 November 1928, Page 5 (Supplement)

THIS LOP-SIDED OLD EARTH.

WOBBLING ON ITS AXIS. That the earth is lop-sided, flat on both ends, wobbling very uncertainly on an undetermined axis, with her poles away offside and her "middle bulging most ungracefully like an eccentric tomato." was the recently-expressed opinion of Captain George W. Littlehales, bydrographic engineer for the United States Navy, as he started for Japan to enlist the aid of foreign nations in a United States plan to map the twothirds of the earth which lies under the sea. That the earth may prove to be a tetrahedron or triangular pyramid, with four faces and four corners or coigns, with the seas occupying the depressions and forming the faces of the pyramid, and the continents situated around the coigns and reaching out alone tho edges, is a theory which, advanced by W. Lowthian Green. English geologist, in 157.", and disregarded, has lately been revived by Theophile Moretix, French scientist, as one at least worthy of more discussion. As a matter of fact, no scientist today would call the earth a "sphere," writes Edna Kenton in "Popular Science J Monthly." With the invention of invar, an alloy of nickel and steel whic his practically non-elastic in anv temperature, and which made possible a measurement of the earth's surface more exactly than ever before, the scientists have found that the .meridians and parallels—even the equator—are not circles at all. And to-day they call the earth neither a sphere nor an oblate spheroid; thev call it a geoid. What is a geoid? An "earth-shaped body." What is an "earth-shaped body?" A geoid. It is a circle of question and answer that swallows itself, and leaves no one the wiser. But it does leave plenty of room for new theories and for reconsiderations of many old ones. The earth was originally conceived as a great flatland of infinite depth, which supported the heavens. Later, when men beean to round the capes in ships, they imagined tht- earth as floating in a universal ocean of unknown extent, and from this it was but a short step to the conception of the earth as bounded by a circle, with roots reaching downward. Of the earth as a triangular pyramid, Moretix says that this supposition "gives a more satisfactory explanation than any rival theory of certain facts of astronomy which are inconsistent with the earth's being a true elopsoid of revolution."