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The dark, cold abysses of the ocean are far less affected by change than any other portion of the surface of the lithosphere. These vast, silent plains of ooze lie far below the reach of storms. They know no succession of summer and winter, or of night and day.
Notwithstanding local and relative upheavals the earth's surface on the whole has drawn nearer and nearer to the center. The portions of the lithosphere which have been carried down the farthest have received the waters of the oceans, while those portions which have been carried down the least have emerged as continents.
And the bleak and frigid barrenness that met his gaze was so implacably hostile to any living thing as to bring a shudder of more than physical cold. No warming sun, as yet, reflected from the rocks. About him was the blackness of a fire-formed lithosphere, whose lighter veining and occasional ashy fields were made ghostly in the earthlight.
Or when his admirers, anxious to improve on this, after distinguishing the atmosphere or air, the hydrosphere or water, the lithosphere or crust, and the centrosphere or interior mass, proceed to add that man is the most active portion of an intermittent biosphere, or living envelope of our planet, I cannot feel that the last word has been said about him.
The rocks are not those of solid granite ledges, continuous portions of the great earth's lithosphere of which the coast is built farther north, at Scituate, Nahant, Rockport and farther on; but it is rock-bound with massed granite boulders, glacier rounded, water-worn, but inexpressibly stern. All Plymouth is made up of the results of pilgrimage.
Deep- sea deposits are absent from the rocks of the land, and we may therefore infer that the deep sea has never held sway where the continents now are, that the continents have ever been, as now, the elevated portions of the lithosphere, and that the deep seas of the present have ever been its most depressed portions.
Water from the hydrosphere is continually rising in vapor into the atmosphere, the air of the atmosphere penetrates the hydrosphere, for its gases are dissolved in all waters, and both air and water enter and work upon the solid earth. By their action upon the lithosphere they have produced a third envelope, the mantle of rock waste.
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