POLAR CLIMATES.

Press, Volume LXV, Issue 13569, 2 November 1909, Page 9

POLAR CLIMATES.

TO Tire EDITOR OF "THE PRK9B." Sir,—Your article of Saturday on "Polar Climates" wa» probably found interesting and instructive by very many of your readers. To mo it was peculiarly so, because that subiect ha 3 long been a favourite study of mine. My opportunities of keeping up with tho march of ideas regarding the climatic vicissitudes of the earth in the past are restricted, and I was much pleased to learn that Professor Schwartz, of Cape Colony, had suggested that the interchanges of polar and temperate or sub-tropical climates that have taken place can 'be explained by tho whole of the crust of the earth creeping over the hot interior, through the action of tides in the earth. Whether this suggestion i£ correct or possible is a question I am not competent to discuss; but it is to be sumed (as lie is quoted) that Professor Schwartz is competent to make it. I have had the idea of crust-oreep in manuscript for years, but it was useless in my hands., because I could not assign a cause for the creep. That there is somo capacity for slip in the orust is evident from the fact the rocks which have been crumpled up into mountain ranges, together with regions of unknown extent on one or both sides of each range, must have slipped or crept over the interior. The European A Ins are said to bo formed of rocks which in their original condition occupied an area 70 odd miles wider than they do to-day. And many miles of the surrounding regions must have crept over the interior in connection with that reduction of area. Professor Rogers, as a result of his study of the Allegbanies, said that their series of parallel ranges "indicated a floating forward of the rocky crust upon the molten interior." The "molten interior" may be dropped, while the "floating forward" may be retained. The existence of coals in high latitudes cannot (pace Professor Gregory) be accounted for by suppositions; of drift wood accumulations, for the descriptions of Arctio coals toll of beds of leaves and twigs lying as they fell from the trees. Moreover, theie are coral limestone* in as high latitudes, and a change of climate is absolutely necessary to account for these. Your article states that there are geological difficulties in the way of the pole-shift theory. I was not aware of any. There seems to be no other explanation that fits the facts, and the pole-shift required to fit them is riot any shift of the axis in its astronomical relations, but a shift of the surface in relation to the axis , . Among the facts to be fitted are some recorded, not in the rocks, but in human traditions. It is well known that mankind existed on the earth prior to the lost glacial period of Europe, and I hare collected a good deal of evidence of various kinds which, I think, much more than merely tends to prove that in the mass of ancient human tradition are to be found reminiscences of' a pole-ehift (if not more than one), and that the nature of the shift indicated is a sliding of the crust. There are also among the name sources hints of a subsequent and lesser creep of the crust, probably affecting the whole earth, though possibly not.—Yours, etc., J. HARDCASTLE. Timarn, October 80.