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Well, I do not know that any one is prepared to maintain that, even making all needful allowances, the stratified rocks may not have been formed, on the average, at the rate of 1/83 of an inch per annum. I suppose that if such could be shown to be the limit of world-growth, we could put up with the allowance without feeling that our speculations had undergone any revolution.
The New Astronomy contemplates a period when each of the planets was a germinal nucleus of matter around which other matter was precipitated, thus producing a kind of world-growth or accretion. Thus, for instance, our earth may be considered at a time when its entire mass would not, according to our measurement, have weighed a hundred pounds!
Well, I do not know that any one is prepared to maintain that, even making all needful allowances, the stratified rocks may not have been formed, on the average, at the rate of 1/83 of an inch per annum. I suppose that if such could be shown to be the limit of world-growth, we could put up with the allowance without feeling that our speculations had undergone any revolution.
At last the surface was formed, and in time that surface was sufficiently cooled to allow the vapors around it to condense into seas and oceans and rivers. There were ages of superficial softness vast epochs of mud in which the living beings that had now appeared wallowed and sprawled. We cannot trace the world-growth through all its stages but can only indicate them as it were in a sketch.
More particularly, the hypothesis is that the worlds of our planetary system grew into their present state through a series of stages and slow developments extending over æons of time. This is the notion of world-growth substituted for that of world-production en masse by the action of centrifugal force and discharge from the solar equator.
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