WORLD TIPPING OVER

Greymouth Evening Star, 23 June 1928, Page 12

WORLD TIPPING OVER

AN AMAZING THEORY

The earth tips over. It tilts and topples; it creeps and crawls. We live on an uneasy sphere which may at any moment buckle under us. precipitate our whole continent to rhe bottom of the sc.i. or split into a yawning chasm near our feet.

Amid shifting things, earth has become a symbol of stability; yet it is full of noises "too loud for us to hear” and motions too vast for us to comprehend, an unstable planet which was able to tear the moon out of the heart of the Pacific Ocean and hurl it into the sky. The very ground on which our houses are built, may be doing a slow lint inevitable slither into the

sea. These are. the amaing conclusions of Mr Chase Salmon Osborne, who can put several LL.D.’s after his name, but prefers to be known as the former Governor of Michigan, a newspaper man, a. hunter, and a statesman. Incidentally, he is a millionaire mine owner (says Beatrice Blackmar, in the New York "World”). He is proud of the fact that in his sixty odd years he had travelled in every civilised land, and in many that are not so civilised. His book, “The Earth Upsets,” maintains that “if the earth is a drunken, staggering thing that falls over and down, and climbs up and is the greatest acrobat we know anything about.” the information should not be the exclusive property of college professors, but should be related in a simple way for the benefit, of the average man whose little spot of landed security may ne the next sacrifice to a yawning ocean and a tottering earth. Every globe made for the study of the earth, Mr Osborne points out, is tilted, as it appears to the eastward of north. And it is his belief that this tilting goes on at. the rate of a mile a year. Every violent, fit of the earth, every spasm, every quake which shatters or sinks a continent, may be attributed to this turning over, of the sphere and to the sudden, fearful compensating gravital effects. This is Mr Osborne's theory. These isolated, shocking upheavals are. known to science, he points out, but they tire still studied as isolated facts, and no attempt is made to bind them together into one universal study of the earth’s movement. “The tipping over of the earth explains it all, ami nothing else does. The conclusion has been hazarded that the Pacific Ocean was formed by the centrifugal expulsion of the moon. The diameter of the moon conforms roughly to the depth of the Pacific Ocean. There are deeps in the Pacific Ocean of more than six miles. I have always wondered why the greatest of these was not. named the Luna Deep.” “Darwin merely says centrifugal force may have, and probably did, throw off the moon from the earth. And he declares that the force would have been greater than it is to-day. He does not take into consideration, the throws of the earth at times when its centrifugal power is much greater than at others or when at normal. There can be no doubt of these throws during which fractures occur. They are proven by huge ocean waves that arc only accountable in this manner.” The theory that in early times there was one great continent, and one great ocean, and that the American continent was rent asunder to form the continents of to-day, is taken up by Mr Osborne, quoting from Professor Reginald A. Daly, of Harvard. “The strongest point in favour of the theory, from the standpoint of the layman, is" that, th? east coast of South America seems to fit the west coast of Africa almost as perfectly as two parts of a torn sheet of paper. Another point is that the west coast of North and South America, which forms

the front of the moving land masses, uro crumpled up into mountain ranges, as if from the resistance, which they encountered in their slide, while the eastern coasts, which formed the rear of the movement, thus meeting no re-

sistance, are chiefly flat.” Whole lost lovely continents have sunk under the sea, and Mr Osborne calls them to memory to prove his theory of the earth's constant movement. “In the rack and wreck of the earth which goes on all the time, this huge arc was caught and sunk, to make way for an ocean. The stories to be told of this and other major earth tragedies make imagination puerile.” The question arises as to what becomes of life on the earth if it turns entirely over. “If one takes a globe and turns it not as upon an axis, but as if axis ami all were turning over, it will be seen that there is a region that is constantly temperate, both north and south of the always changing Equator and poles. It is in this belt that such life as is not destroyed by the cataclysms of readjustment and compensation persists and supplies the seeds, both animal and vegetable, for replenishment, and then, too, if you do not. like this idea, please remember that, all the elements of primordial life exist all the time, and though perhaps disarranged are never destroyed. “All that is required, then, in order to restore any form of life that has passed, will be to have the conditions as they first were in the dawn of creation, and things will spring forth from the God that is All. as they did then."