The Hollow Earth

by F. T. Ives

Now this visible, and natural process, has been going on for ages, and the effect of this incessant work and stupendous result is to be seen far as the eye can reach for hundred of miles.

Here follow the proofs of this long and diligent labor. In all directions you see hills, or immense mounds of land, like inverted deep pans, with flat bottoms, of all sizes, so that their flat tops would include from one acre to hundreds. These mounds all have quite precipitous sides, subject to the wash of every rainy season. As you study the character of these high mounds you will soon be convinced they are not upheavals, as their tops in all directions seem to have a common level. Among these mounds will be occasional ones that have been washed away to a point, and here and there one reduced to half its original height. These hill-tops, if they may be so called, were beyond doubt, at some very remote time in the past, the common level of the country for hundreds of miles, and as they will average 100 feet high or more, it is beyond the power of conjecture to estimate the time required to wash all the vast area away that once existed to make up the level of this valley.

Another similar exhibition is at and near River Falls, in Wisconsin, a town on the east bank of the Mississippi, some thirty miles east of St. Paul. Here the same occurrence seems to have taken place, of a washing away of the greatest bulk of the land, and leaving similar mounds with their flat tops, on many of which are quite extensive farms, approached by very precipitous roads at some favorable point on their sides. These mounds seem to have different strata of soft rock, on which they stand, the lowest and thickest of gray sandstone, quite soft, and must, with the others, be gradually wasting away by frosts, and other agencies to disintegrate. Only one yellowish stratum is strong enough to be used for some building purposes.

While there are hundreds of these mounds that must have once been the level of the whole country, that which is now left is a very level and fertile soil, producing some of the finest wheat, and best quality of potatoes in the State.

These instances are only two out of thousands of a similar nature in this country and all over the world.

The tendency of this drift is mostly as the streams of water run toward the Equator or center of greatest motion.

The vast deserts and other accumulations of sand on the Earth are only the deposits of ancient rivers into then existing seas, which by later surface upheavals, by interior hydraulic forces, have been transferred to other beds, and the deserts like Sahara, Atacama, Mojave, and the Steppes of Asiatic Tartary, remain as evidences.

By these enormous changes of soil it seems rational to believe the uniform and unvarying revolution of the Earth could hardly be possible, and that more or less change during great length of years must be made in form as well as time of revolving. Have not both occurred? Riding down the Quinnipiac Valley to New Haven, Conn., a man is likely to inquire in his mind where those sand plains came from. Some think the Connecticut once flowed there, some the Niagara or St. Lawrence; if so, where did they bring the sand from?

Think of the change bound to come in the future, when the Falls of Niagara cut their way back to Lake Erie, thus letting out its waters, enough to construct it into a large river.

Some channel has evidently been lowered to settle the surface of Lake Michigan, as can be plainly seen in leaving Chicago by boat, that the waters on the western banks were once twenty or more feet above present level. Either the lake has settled or the land has risen. As deserts are nearly all below the ocean surface, is it not presumable that this enormous accumulation of sand has had the effect of such depression, while the transference from other localities has thinned Earth’s crust enough to make easy the internal water pressure to lift up the hills and mountains, through which the great water courses of the Earth are supplied? Think of the transportation of soil to the deltas of the Mississippi, Amazon, Ganges and other rivers amounting to millions and millions of tons every year, and imagine when the time will come when the Earth approaches the form of a wheel, or ring, nearer than a globe, and become a small imitation of Saturn.